Wayne Thiebaud.CALIFORNIA PALACE OF THE LEGION OF HONOR Legion of Honor: see decorations, civil and military. How come a Norman Rockwell retrospective occasions gasps and sneers, but the upcoming Wayne Thiebaud survey (eighty works from the '50s on) provokes nary a hiccup hic·cough (h  k  p)n. ? You say Norm's an "illustrator." Thiebaud isn't? You say Rockwell's work is sentimental Americana. Well, take another gander Gander, town (1991 pop. 10,339), NE Newfoundland, N.L., Canada. Gander's airport, an important base in World War II, is a hub for international flights; it also attracts many refugees. It was the site of a Dec., 1985, plane crash that killed 256 passengers, 248 of them U.S. soldiers returning from the Middle East. at Thiebaud's pies, sundaes, and high-school football stars. You say Rockwell painted thin in antique-shop pales, while Thiebaud lays it on thick, creamy, and bright. Hmmm. And, you say, Thiebaud's timing was counterintuitively impeccable: After all, he did create his cuddly version of academic realism in the teeth of Warhol's acid Pop and Judd's airless Minimalism minimalism, schools of contemporary art and music, with their origins in the 1960s, that have emphasized simplicity and objectivity.
Minimalism in the Visual ArtsReacting against the formal excesses and raw emotionalism of abstract expressionism, the practitioners of minimal art (also sometimes called ABC art) strove to focus attention on the object as an object, reducing its historical and expressive content to the bare minimum.. OK, now you're talkin'! June 10-Sept. 3; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. |
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