THE ADVANCE OF BEAUTY
by Donald Kuspit


It’s hard to speak of Thomas Chimes and Lynda Benglis in the same breath, apart from the fact that they both had overlapping exhibitions at the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, among the choice venues of contemporary art in the United States. It is even harder to think of their works as beautiful -- eloquent examples of modern beauty at its most dialectically extreme. But they would be lost without the wonder of their strange beauty. They would become epitomizing homages to a modernism -- Symbolism in the case of Chimes, Abstract Expressionism in the case of Benglis -- that seems far in the historical past, even if they showed that the past can still be inspiring.

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