Word: cubism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...viewer in a secure, measurable space. It was a means of distorting the view and disquieting the eye. Instead of one vanishing-point in his architectonic masterpiece, The Melancholy of Departure, 1914, there are six, none "correct." This cloning of viewpoints acts in a way analogous to cubism. It jams the sense of illusionary depth and delivers the surface to the rule of the flat shape, which was the quintessential modernist strategy. In color, in tonal structure, and in its contradictory lighting, Rubin argues, De Chirico's style up to 1918 "was as alien to its supposed classical, 15th...
...JANSON's History of Art, it is written that turn-of-the century painters saw in cubism "a special affinity with the geometric precision of engineering that made it uniquely attuned to the dynamism of modern life." Substitute "jumble" for "dynamism" and grasp the essence of Rubik's Cubism, a style now immortalized in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection...
...Cubism is a fad with many facets. American frivolity in the fine tradition of hula hoops and skateboards. Sillier than a corporate executive on a pogo stick, it could lighten the national blue period. But perhaps because the Museum of Modern Art has found the cube aesthetically comparable to Mondrian and Picasso, the trend has assumed and unbecoming air of profundity...
Turning to another pattern, cubism brings together the American fascinations with the trivia and the inventive Cleverly designed, the cube appeals to a nation that is home to electric can openers, touch-tone phones, and canned hot shaving cream. Americans love garish toys tinged with plastic high tech and the ubiquitous "New, Improved!" label--skateboards with polyurethane wheels, very square exotica from a Hungarian mathematician...
...sluiced back into France as mere curiosities by the currents of imperial trade at the turn of the century. To compare such objects with their European responses, at this late date, is to enter a strange chamber of mirrors: we now tend to see African art in terms of cubism; one musical instrument in a glass case at the Met, a Zaire harp, is quite simply a cubist guitar plucked out of Picasso's paint of 1915 and materialized in three dimensions. Primitivism owes its prestige, in the West, to modernism...