Word: woodenness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...surprisingly, playful frames are most often found around the work of newer artists, the ones most likely to resist received tradition (and to follow fashion). A deliberately cartoonish image by Kenny Scharf sports edges decked with plastic dinosaurs and rockets. Larger-than-life wooden silhouettes - two birds, for instance, or a garland of branches - shoot up around the landscapes of Alan Herman. More established figures are also working in the same vein. Howard Hodgkin, whose canny strokes of pigment hint at enclosed views, sweeps paint across the frame to twit its pretensions as the final proscenium...
...collections. Most paintings come to museums framed by dealers or patrons, not by the artists, and curators have often felt free to update. Two years ago, the National Museum of American Art, in Washington, took the reverse route, restoring ornate frames to paintings it had earlier reset in plain wooden strips. Says Chief Curator Elizabeth Broun: "We thought it was more historically correct...
...animal world. Strange creatures and people from the corners of a growing empire drew crowds when they were put on show in rented London rooms; photography had not made all things familiar. The wonders of Africa, America and the Pacific glared peevishly back at the Georgian dilettanti from their wooden dens and dirty straw. "Just arrived from Botany-Bay," ran a newspaper advertisement in 1789, "three new live animals for the amusement of the public, with that 3 singular animal the African Savage, a noble Lion and Lioness, a pair of 3 beautiful Leopards, a Lynx, a Sangwin, the Arabian...
...toboggan doing gymnastics, is a sheet of birch plywood bent 110° in the middle and rolled at each end. It is a perfect conceit of a chair, at once lean and voluptuous. It is also reasonably accommodating to human beings: the scrolls are functional flourishes, each a great wooden spring. In this, more than in any other piece, Aalto's devotion to wood is its saving grace, for even lacquered red, the birch makes the chair seem domestic and familiar. A Paimio Loungechair executed in metal would have been gorgeous but mean, dangerous looking...
...Aalto let his fondness for nature run riot. Vases were a specialty. The free-form circumferences, blobby and bulbous like doodles by Arp or Mird, suggest lakes or amoebas or arboreal cross sections. Even the casting process | was ripped from nature. On display at the MOMA show is a wooden mold used to make Aalto's 1936 Savoy vase: the length of dugout tree trunk is equipment that a Hobbit industrialist would use. But Aalto was no whole-earth nostalgist. His 1947 snack tray, molded of thick white plastic with troughs for food, is sci-fi urban, and surely...