Word: cubism
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...unwobbling and straightforward. He wanted clear configurations, in theory as in art. His career was almost as long as modernism itself. As a 19-year-old tyro from Philadelphia, he exhibited in the Armory Show in 1913; and he outlived Jackson Pollock by eight years. His early model was cubism-though he did not visit Paris until 1928-and the sight of Davis grappling with the diction of Picasso and Gris, working his way through the lessons with the persistence of a man taking a correspondence course, remains very moving. For a whole year, he painted and repainted an eggbeater...
...richness of her patterning. The objects are disciplined by a vertical-horizontal grid, or held like parts of a collage in shallow framing boxes; those formal devices, along with the shapes themselves (the jig-sawed edge of a plank recalling the side of a Braque guitar) allude to cubism. But Nevelson's work, although grounded in a cubist syntax, has very different aims. It is addressed, above all, to mystery. Unified by the black paint, the thousands of objects that make up Mrs. N's Palace shed their identity. They do not become sinister -this is no mere...
...appreciation was once a gut course-a simple matter of getting to know the styles and spellings of old masters. Modernism changed all that. Surrealism, Dada, cubism and, later, abstract expressionism, Pop, Op, minimalism and Happenings were too complex for simple appreciation. Edward Lucie-Smith, an English critic, attempts to pave a smooth, orderly path through this jungle of schools, styles, waves and blips. In Art Now (Morrow; 504 pages; $29.95) he efficiently gets the reader from abstract expressionism to superrealism. Like a package-tour guide, he hits the peaks and some of the troughs. The visual impact...
Dumas was not alone in his fury. The French political journals, center and right, ravaged Courbet for years, and beside their vilifications the attacks on impressionism and cubism were mere Ping Pong. Such vehemence only rises from the conviction that art changes life: that painting has a public role...
...heroic materialism, Courbet was one of the ancestors of cubism. But his sense of reality extended beyond material, to social organization; hence the storm over A Burial at Ornans. In that black frieze punctuated by village faces, all held under the chalk bluffs of the distant landscape as beneath a sarcophagus lid, Courbet realized a whole rural society: not "noble peasants" mourning in a generalized Arcadia, but real people. The painting revealed, in country life, the same kind of bourgeois complexity that existed in the city. This contradicted the Parisians' idea of rural harmony and was, for that reason...