About the artist

An excellent example of the Ameri- can artist´s most recent cycle of work is "Painted Assemblage". What are we beholding? And what does it signify?

The German translation, "Bemalte Ansammlung", would be slightly off the mark, akin to an historical adul- teration of the well-established term "assemblage". The latter differs from a montage, collage, ready-made or object trouvé just as conspicuously as its protagonists: Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp. Surrealists, Dadaists who, quite intentionally, eschewed any academic statements and tore down the barriers betweeen real life and art.

The urinal, scraps of newspaper and the washboard came into their own, and then in 1961 American, post-industrial, throw-away society's mighty junk gloriously scaled the heights of New York's Museum of Modern Art with the landmark exhibition "The Art of Assemblage". Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Richard Stankiewicz, John Camberlain, Mark di Suvero and other Warhol precursors took art by the scruff of the neck and gave it street cred, paving the way for its "environment", "happening" adn "performance" ancillaries.

It was in this climate, in the New York of the Fifties and Sixties, theat Arline Basescu's art blossomed. There is no denying the influence of her two major mentors, the great art historian Meyer-Shapiro and Theordoros Stamos, romantic outrigger of the New York School's painters.

Dr. Richard Freitag