Introduction – Seyoung

Hello everyone, I am Seyoung. Nice to meet you guys. I am from Seoul, a capital city of Korea. My major is painting and drawing in Fine Arts. I’ve been in here for half of a year. I am interested in drawing human figures. Actually, Military experience was my main theme of works. I did serve in front line, called DMZ, on east side for 2 years. Now, I release from there around 3 years ago and am here. I am happy to finish it. During break time, I usually listen to some music or TV show to relax myself. If the weather is nice, I like to take a walk. Anyway, I will do my best improving my English ability in this program. Thank you.

Inventing Abstraction

MacDonald-Wright.  Conception Synchromy, 1914

Saltz on Inventing Abstraction 

This review by Jerry Saltz of the "Inventing Abstraction" show at the MOMA is right on.  He gives a frolicking run through the developments that led to abstraction in Western art from 1910-1925.  His main criticism of the show is that abstraction was not "invented" in 1910:

"Yet even with much to love, there’s something demented, even dangerous about this show... Abstraction wasn’t invented in the West in those years...[It] is there in the caves."

I saw the show this week and was bowled over by so many amazing works of art, but similar to Saltz, I felt that the language framing the show was oversimplified and gave too much credence to White men.  I'm sure these artists were exposed to abstract art that was made in other non-Western cultures.  For example, Picasso owed a great debt to African masks and basic abstracted human forms in African art in general.  The show is definitely worth seeing, but take the history with a grain of Saltz.

Check out this amazing interactive graphic of the artist network:
Inventing Abstraction at MOMA

New words:
demented; synonymous with mad, crazy, insane, lunatic, daft
to take something with a grain of salt; to view something skeptically, to not take something literally