Word: cubism
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Born in Kiev in 1878, Malevich invented himself with astonishing speed. Between 1905, the year he moved to Moscow, and 1915, he ran through the gamut of early modernist styles, from pointillism to cubism. Early works like Floor Polishers, 1911-12, show his assimilative powers: this gripping image of hard labor, where every line reinforces the muscular twist of bodies and the thrust of the feet with their waxing pads on the floor, ultimately derives from Matisse's Dance. Troglodytic, pious and massive, Malevich's figures of peasants from the '20s both assert modernity and deny...
...great artist been more cavalierly treated by American museums than Georges Braque? Here is one of the great pioneers of modern painting: the man who, with Picasso, invented cubism; who then painted some of the most exquisitely felt and wrought pictures of our century; in whom the classicist, Cartesian strain in French painting came to a peak. Yet the last proper American survey of Braque (1882-1963) was almost 40 years ago. Since then there have been shows, very beautiful ones (how could they not be?), of this or that aspect of Braque. But the whole elephant? Never...
Braque's relation to Picasso in the making of cubism after 1910 -- "roped together like mountaineers," in that famous phrase of Braque's -- was of course the legendary partnership of 20th century art. Like most legends, this one is ill understood. Who was the dominant and who the submissive partner? Neither, but Braque's cubist paintings, and even more his papiers colles of 1912-14, show a continuity of inspiration quite unlike the more darting, prehensile mental habits of Picasso...
...Braque's cubism, the subject matter of Chardin -- a violin, a table, a pipe, a bottle, a printed page -- was born again into the fragmented world of the modern city, its silvery-brown light intact. The speckles in his cubist paintings became a fine-tuned vibrato, unlike the more assertive planes of his partner. This made coherent form melt more readily toward abstraction, which Braque did not want. Rather, as he put it, he wanted to "take the object and raise it high, very high...
Georges Braque, master of cubism and collage, may be the century' s most neglected great painter. A new exhibition fills in a few gaps...