Word: cubism
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...Classicism 1910-1930," only hints at the size of the field it covers. Its broad subject is the classical revival that spread through South European art -- mainly French, Italian and Spanish -- in the wake of World War I and formed a kind of counterweight to the fragmentation of cubism and feverish alienation of dada, expressionism and surrealism...
...Cubism has never gone soft; it remains, after 80 years, mysterious, challenging and resistant. Neither Picasso nor Braque said much to explain what they believed they were doing. Their Cubist work contains no ideological positions, dramatic subject matter or easy anecdotes. It disdains narrative and sentiment -- a severe test for Picasso, whose Blue and Rose periods had been full of both. (On the other hand, both men's paintings and collages were seeded with puns, sly allusions and In jokes: when the fragmentary writing on one of Picasso's paintings from 1912 declares that "Notre Avenir est dans...
...Cubism was a response to a changed world -- a France that was no longer describable in the semirural idyll of Impressionism, a place whose emergent reality had more to do with inventive technology, mass media and the density of the great capital, Paris. Cubism is the urban art par excellence. It celebrates the rapid stream of half-completed impressions, the overlay and stutter of images and ideas, enforced by the tempo of city life: it is the art of cultural compression and flux. With its materials, subjects and techniques, it lighted up the commonness of the modern world...
...gets us nowhere to think that Cubism was meant as a form of realism. That * is what art historians like Douglas Cooper thought -- Cubism aimed for "the solid tangible reality of things" by representing them from several angles. But "solid tangible reality" is hardly detectable in this show. You get an overwhelming sense of plastic energy from Picasso's drawing of volume, but that is a different matter. Neither he nor Braque was out to propose a systematic alternative to one-point perspective as the key to making things look real. There was no system to Cubist shuttling and lapping...
...Picasso and Braque created Cubism...