Word: wights
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California's Frederick Wight has nothing against abstract art, except when it is used to express abstract ideas. Abstractions of abstractions, he believes, can only lead to pictures like Malevich's notorious White on White at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. That canvas a white patch on a white patch, might be said to express the idea of purity except that it is too thin and bare to carry the weight of the idea; most people think it must be a joke. Wight's own paintings on show this week at the Pasadena Art Museum...
...mind. Yet whether his pictures are sufficiently rich in color, firm in drawing and subtle in composition to live beyond the grave is another question. Masterpieces generally are constructed either with the utmost care and polish or else with what Transcendentalist Emerson himself called "nerve and dagger." Wight is too self-conscious to be really bold, too rushed to polish much...
...spent more than half of his life in Germany, his painting owes little to German expressionism. Its technique is borrowed from Paris cubism; its architectonic spirit relates to Gothic churches and Bach fugues; its cool severity seems a personal reflection of modern engineering. Says U.C.L.A. Art Gallery Director Frederick Wight: Feininger "unlearned the last century's concept of [space as] a three-dimensional void. Instead, he gradually makes a clearing around the object through a series of projections. Feininger's object-with which he begins-grows outward; it grows as a crystal grows, organizing space according...
...seems more interested in communicating something than in displaying a developing erudition, or in proving "maturity" by affecting a depression which is obviously not too deeply felt. Unfortunately, the abstract-term-so-that-they'll-know-I'm-intellectual school is heavily represented in this issue by Ernest Wight's "catatonic crocodile--bogged deep in mud" and Robert Johnson's two poems. One of Johnson's poems, "The Subway Beggars," might have been very effective, but at the end he attempts to express the commuters' horrow at the ugliness of life through a reference to Praxitcles, which seems ludicrous appearing...
...became a standard feature at Cowes. With more than 2.000 Fox-designed yachts afloat throughout the world (but few in the U.S.), Uffa has no trouble keeping up his credit at the pubs of Gowes. When the weather prohibits sailing, he rides Frantic, his mare, around the Isle of Wight. Last year he fell off, broke an ankle. He promptly ordered up a sedan chair and set out daily to tour the pubs like a Roman emperor, borne by two sturdy porters and accompanied by an umbrella-toting neighbor. Uffa's friends and professional competitors tend to agree with...