Word: quasiabstract
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...transformed into high art, that is Architect Gottfried Semper's theater. His first opera house opened in 1841, burned down in 1869; his second design, an elaboration of the first, was supervised by his son Manfred and dedicated in 1878. A whimsical intermingling of neo-Renaissance Italian design and quasiabstract German folk-art motifs, it looks like an improbable combination of the Pitti Palace and a Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse. Inside, its bright colors (whites, golds and reds) and intimate dimensions (only 1,300 seats) give it a light, cozy ambience. Trompe l'oeil reigns: columns that appear to be marble...
...show marks both a departure and a continuation. Diebenkorn's recent drawings (all are paintings on paper, in a restricted color range keyed to blue) develop, with some diffidence, out of the quasiabstract Ocean Parks. Those works, which have occupied him from 1967 to the present, are arguably the most refined images of the abstract bones of landscape (in the best sense of refinement, which excludes prettiness and weakness) done by an American artist of his generation. Pale blue Pacific air, cuts and slices of gable, white posts by the sea, sudden drop-offs of hill or throughway-these...