Word: abstraction
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...gambling house de Witt, hunting "the Great Unknown," is distracted by the sight of an extraordinary woman, the Countess Tolst. He leaves the card table to walk to the couch on which she reposes. In two minutes Lang gives us her soul. We see no shallow temptress, no abstract sentimental heroine. The countess is sophisticated and very intelligent; she has come to watch the colorful characters of the casino because polite society no longer interests her. Yet her sophistication and present boredom do not preclude intense love. We feel the truth of this character in the complex intelligence that pervades...
...abstract imagery of geometric shapes and drips of paint in most of the works at the museum frees the art from connotations of material aspects of culture. The monumental size of the paintings gives them inescapable presence. Once in the room, the viewer cannot change the channel-he must look. The power of an undiluted red surface with stripes of white on each end by Barnett Newman stretches beyond the viewer's field of vision if he stands close. To see the whole he must stand back. By their sheer size the paintings scream for recognition, protesting the decreasing space...
...into a three dimensional space, like a tomb. These boxes seem to be the only attempt to frame three dimensional space in the context of the flat vision of the new American painting, but even this sort of ? D picture is lifeless compared to the original space of the abstract works...
...TIME the viewer wends his way through rooms of colorists, the confrontation with Pop Art jolts his senses. Though from the same environment as the abstract artists, pop artists attack different questions concerning the nature of art. Like masters of still life, they select subjects from the material world around them. By boldly painting things from Commercial America, they attempt to smash the aesthetic values of European traditional art. In spite of flashes of popular success, the movement has failed to undermine standards, and to move beyond its initial inventions...
There are so few images of people beyond the vulgar shapes of Pop that every figure you come across prints its plaintive face on your mind. Hollowness emanating like artificial sunlight from the doll-like people-the works of Hopper stand out from among the abstract pieces with haunting truthfulness. The only lyrical references to humanity emerge from the brush strokes of De Kooning and Kline-figures of paint both suggested and dissolved by a network of strokes. But the viewer of the vast rooms of abstraction feels the constant stares of the paintings reaching beyond their frames, asking...