Word: cubism
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...before, during and immediately after the 1917 Revolution, is meant to be received with extreme piety. These artists, all dead, now have a world audience they could only have dreamed of fitfully when they were alive. We gaze at their frail icons with reverence -- the replays of French Cubism with sturgeons, Cyrillic letters and Tolstoyan beards playing hide-and-seek among their facets; the posters exhorting us to "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge"; the constructions of workers' materials like tin and rope and painted wood; the disembodied black and red squares of now cracking paint. French gallerygoers...
...conflict, Matisse rhyming with peace; Picasso the bohemian Spaniard, Matisse the detached French bourgeois. There is something to these oppositions, but the closer you look at them the more tenuous they get. Matisse was just as challengingly inventive in his Fauve paintings in 1905 as Picasso became, with Cubism, around 1912; and you can't really argue that the sweet portraits and huge lethargic women of Picasso's classical period, after 1917, have some radical quality missing from Matisse...
...point of public provocation, inserting themselves into politics, issuing pretentious manifestos. Not so their Belgian cousins; "the subversive act," said one, the writer Paul Nouge, "must be discreet." Magritte's style, as it evolved, was studiously neutral. His early work, in the 1920s, was mainly exercises in late Cubism -- the "tubist," streamlined, geometrical forms of Fernand Leger and Amedee Ozenfant, shapes that might have been made from metal. The artist who clearly had the biggest impact on Magritte, turning him toward fantasy and irrational images, was Giorgio de Chirico. And even then Magritte couldn't find...
...growing mastery of color. Sometimes, as in Gaudi Cup, 1972, the intensity of the glazes seems to have literally broken down the form of the ceramic into tiny glowing shards. This sense of color as a veneer on a flat surface gets turned into a form of Cubism, rather as the Dutch Constructivist Gerrit Rietveld in the 1920s abstracted the shape of a chair into a penitential parody of itself. Not only Cubism gets its share of parody, but other styles as well -- Frank Stella's paintings or, in a tiny architectural piece with a tower and a tilted ramp...
...artists were even born. The classic one is Odol, 1924, in which the bent- neck bottle of a mouth disinfectant is presented, plain and planar -- name brand, slogan and all -- as its own icon, the ancestor of Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes. But Davis' work was grounded in Cubism, as that of the later artists was not; the Cubist scheme of fragments of media culture and packaging (newspaper headlines, labels and so on), absorbed into a painterly matrix, gave Davis his way of handling the American cityscape. It was brasher than Cubism but far more attached to deliberate aesthetic construction...