Powerful -- majestic -- mysterious. To describe the work of Calvin Albert and record its effect, does not add to it. To trade in comparisons and place him at the very too of his contemporaries (though pleasant to do) reduces art to competition, to a game. It is significant that he has found the most difficult, and yet the most meaningful, course possible for an artist today.
He moves with apparent ease between abstraction and representation -- a figure leaning in the wind, a figure reclining, each more alive than the other, each more real. In times of great uncertainty in art (as outside it) the safe and profitable stance is a fixed position, anchorage upon a presumed opposite. Abstraction or realism. Good against evil. Them versus us. But has one actually made a choice?
The young artist, rejecting the extremes and their simplification, may decide that the good thing, the future and success is a return to the great men of our early century: Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Giacometti, to walk with nimble mind and feet this dangerous abstraction -- realism road.
But in art one cannot calculate.
You have or you don't have the vision and the necessity, like Calvin Albert, to face the complexities, the dangers and the never satisfying rewards of life against death.
Balcomb Greene 1979
-29-
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information:
Book title: Twenty-Five Artists.
Contributors: Arlene Bujese - Editor.
Publisher: University Publications of America.
Place of publication: Frederick, MD.
Publication year: 1982.
Page number: 29.
This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.
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