Word: cubism
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...manages to be both precise and ungraspable, for its distortions of face and limb bear little relationship to anything that painters have done to the human body since Cezanne. Forms are governed by slippage: they smear sideways, rotating, not like the succession of displayed facts and transparent planes in cubism, but as though they had endured some terminal rearrangement by massage. Their shape retains an obstinate integrity, the precise result of a sudden movement. And by the early to mid-'60s, the time of the great triptychs, when Bacon decisively abandoned the "spectral," scumbled evocations of the face used...
...American artists remains abstract, whether "decorative" (Alan Shields, Valerie Jaudon or the exuberant Judy Pfaff, whose manic, space-consuming constructions are hybrids of painting and sculpture) or more ostensibly rigorous in its aims, like that of Gary Stephan, 42. His paintings are like massive and vivid reflections on late cubism, especially the utopian "cubifying" abstraction of the 1920s, as practiced by such artists as Moholy-Nagy, Lissitzky and Prampolini. They have the visionary character of ideal forms -- ovals, cones, circles, cubes -- moving in deep space, its depth contradicted by puzzling abutment and reflections that block the view, break the recession...
...reason, Rubin argues, was that modernism used primitivism when it needed to, and not before. A Fang mask or a Kota funerary effigy would have been useless to an impressionist, whose ambition was to render perceptual reality as faithfully as possible. But the drift of fauvism and especially cubism was toward the conceptual: and here the idea of representing, say, a face as a flat plane with knoblike eyes and a cylindrical funnel of a mouth was infinitely suggestive. Certainly it was convenient for Picasso to rejig the human face in terms of bladelike noses and scarification lines...
...less "radical" than Pollock, were grounded in classical prototype and practice: if his paintings of the decade 1945-55 looked a mile forward, they also looked two miles back. Their inherent structure had nothing to do with German or any other kind of modernist expressionism. It was closer to cubism, but with the turning and flickering of cubist shape given a jostling density, almost literally made flesh: a shallow grid torn and reconstituted by the wristy, virile, probing action of de Kooning's line. His two near monochrome abstractions at the end of the decade, Attic, 1949, and Excavation...
...Gris the classicist who prevails. Not in his decorative form: Gris' compositional habits turn the corner from cubism into art deco and prepare the decorative style of the '20s, but that is secondary. Rather, what one admires is the stringent purity of his vision and the economy with which he deployed it. Conservative radical, or radical conservative? Both, at different times. If he had recovered from his slump in the '20s and lived an other 30 years, he might have turned out to be the equal of Mondrian...