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| | The Abstract Impressionist |
 | | I have always marveled at the way in which Abstract Expressionism was able to transform a disparate group of painters, none of whom had shown any particular promise of artistic greatness, into figures of stunning originality. |
 | | The Abstract Expressionist canvas had become what Robert Motherwell characterized as "plastic, mysterious, and sublime." There was even a new style of talking--impulsive, confessional, oracular and grandiose--in which artists attempted to re-enact, on the verbal level, what was taking place on the surface of their canvases. |
 | | It would be difficult to imagine a more shocking juxtaposition than setting that soulful young woman, in her nuanced pink blouse, in a roomful of the raucous cartoons through which Guston shocked the sensibilities of the art world in 1970. |
| www.thenation.com /doc/20031229/danto (1481 words) |
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