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Art: The Tyranny of the Abstract

1 minute read
TIME

In art stores and schools all over New York City last week, a manifesto turned up calling for a DEMONSTRATION. It was signed by two relatively unknown representational painters who were fed up with what seemed to them to be the Museum of Modern Art’s lopsided patronage of the abstract, the sensational, and even the absurd. The museum, said the document, “has developed the public image of the painter as a madly inspired child, rather than an adult human being.”

The DEMONSTRATION turned out to be some 30 angry young pickets, who showed up briefly Sunday afternoon to do their stuff in front of the museum. But they were not as alone as they seemed. Coincidentally, 22 of the nation’s top artists, including Edward Hopper. Henry Varnum Poor and Jack Levine, fired off a protest to Manhattan’s Whitney Museum of American Art. There were, said the artists, 145 paintings in the last Whitney Annual, and of these. “102 were nonobjective, 17 abstract, and 17 semiabstract, leaving only nine paintings in which the image had not receded or disappeared.” The question the painters wanted answered: Are the museums being fair?

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