Word: constructivist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...their opposition to it. Abstract art comes out of the virtual disappearance of the recognizable nude or still life from Braque's and Picasso's work in the autumn of 1911. Pop art is born in the letters, headlines and brand names they stenciled and glued onto their surfaces. Constructivist sculpture descends from Braque's paper constructions and Picasso's tin guitar. Abstract Expressionism gets its originality from its struggle to "escape the Cubist grid" -- which was never a grid anyway. Cubism, from this simplified and patristic standpoint, becomes the tree in the primal garden of modernism, and Picasso...
...goes nuts in the tropics, battles with spotted fluorescent snakes but does find El Dorado, opens with a group of eccentrically geometrical wall reliefs done in 1971-73. They were inspired by photos of the wooden architecture of Polish village synagogues obliterated in World War II. They were essentially constructivist, based on the relation of parts rather than (as in his earlier work) the repetition of units. They looked complex, clean and rather dull, and one could not have deduced from them the stylistic convulsion Stella was readying...
...paintings all descend from constructivism, and one soon realizes that they mark the end of its tradition with a barrage of fireworks: there is something funereal as well as celebratory about the sight. It seems improbable that anyone (other, perhaps, than Stella) will manage to wring more from the constructivist impulse. If you want to see the common ancestor of these frenetic and space- grabbing objects, it is upstairs at MOMA, a little thing of rusty tin: Picasso's 1912 Guitar. Thinking about Picasso, Stella had come to realize that "it's not the presence of a recognizable figure...
...American sculptor who tried to make metaphors of technology, not even Calder, came up with an object as striking as Walter Teague's "Bluebird" radio, 1937-40, whose integration of a spartan constructivist design ethic into an American sense of technology as spectacle -- the big blue glass disk suggesting the ether from which broadcast signals were gathered -- shows how little truth there is in the idea that design is condemned to lag behind "high" art in expressive clarity. We certainly need more shows as thorough and intelligent as this one, to counteract the vulgar mania for "art stars" and remind...
Gehry, 57, has lived in Southern California almost continuously since he was a teenager, and his buildings are Californian -- brash, unpretentious, ad hoc, construction-worker constructivist. For him, imperfect construction details and urban sprawl are now American givens: the challenge is to make buildings that are compelling in spite of off-the-rack materials and confused, banal surroundings...