Word: surrealists
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Although no finished Gorky paintings are in the show, his drawings and preliminary studies for other compositions are examples of the mature Gorky--the abstract expressionist whom Gorky eventually discovered in himself with the help of the Chileam surrealist Matta, after years of imitating the work of his contemporaries and past masters. The study for "Calendars", recently donated to the Fogg, is a very strong work which shows Gorky in one of his finer moments...
...very strict dichotomy, as Szarkowski himself stresses. The typical photo in this show, mirror or window, is cool, low in narrative content, linguistically sophisticated, beautifully made and, by the conventions of photojournalism, not very arresting. Its pleasures have to do with formal wit, mild irony and surrealist incongruity. One sees a thing nailed down with a decisive tap, as when Lee Friedlander, a deceptively casual imagemaker, positions his eyeline on an ordinary suburban street to get a flowering shrub directly behind a lamppost, so that the street light seems to be emitting great sprays of blossom in broad daylight...
...Francisco through the spring of 1979, attests to that. For a small but steadfast audience, Westermann's imagination has for years been one of the most original and disturbing in American art. During the '60s, he was widely condescended to as a minor figure, a Yankee post-surrealist constructing his dark whimsies-the haunted houses and shark-besieged boats in glass cases -at a distance from the "mainstream." But now that irony, memory, autobiography, humor and outright obsession have asserted their claims in art once more, Westermann's importance cannot be shrugged...
...lithographs of Miro's, mainly from the last ten years, are on exhibit. These works, despite their optimistically bright colors, their fantasy and their wit, despite the simplicity of the cut-out shapes that compose many of the pictures, express many of the original ideas that animated the Surrealist movement. There is a delight in the absurd and the childish here but, at the same time, you feel almost as if the artist was playing a rather bizarre joke on his audience. He presents shapes and figures that are not the abstractions they appear to be, but symbols. And what...
...Rebelle" depicts an abstract concept--rebellion. One black arm reaches high over the head of a figure not recognizably human. The other arm seems atrophied, dwarf-size. There is one red eye in the center of the face: a favorite Surrealist technical device symolizing both inner and outer vision. "La Fronde" harks back to the theories of Sigmund Freud, one of the great heroes of the founder of the Surrealist movement. A person with a tiny head and huge, bloated body curls around in an endless, crazy, frightened somersault--a Freudian might see it as a picture of someone...