Dark Abstraction

Dark Abstraction, 1924. Oil on canvas, 25 x 21 in.

It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form of the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.

-Georgia O'Keeffe

Modern Madonna

Mother and Child by Picasso 1922

This modern Madonna, painted on a tinted gray background and very lightly colored, was signed by Picasso in 1922. It belongs in Picasso's period of great simplicity and classical feeling. It is an eloquent sample of his authority as a draftsman and one of the most tender of his monumental figure pieces. (Andre Maurois - from a 1927 Vanity Fair magazine article)

Op Art

Current, Bridget Riley, 1964. Synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 58 x 58". MOMA, New York.

An abbreviation of 'optical art', a form of abstract art which developed in the early 1960s and aimed at stimulation of the eye through a radical use of space and color. This was achieved by the employment of hard-edged, flatly painted shapes in black and white or in complementary colors of full intensity. The term 'Op art' was first used in Time magazine in 1964 and had become a household phrase by the following year when the defining exhibition The Responsive Eye was held at the MOMA, NYC. Two of the most prominent Op artists were Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. Op art exerted a considerable influence on women's fashion in the mid-1960s. (Michael Clarke)

**sorry about the fuzzy photograph!**