Word: cubism
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...plainly see from the 140-odd paintings, drawings, prints and reliefs that make up the exhilarating Delaunay retrospective organized by French Art Historian Michel Hoog at the Orangerie in Paris this summer, the man belonged to no movement. His rainbow-hued paintings shared very little with cubism. "But they're painting with cobwebs!" was his reaction to the sober, niggling brown-and-gray facets of the first cubist pictures he saw. The tenor of Delaunay's imagination was different: coarser, more exuberant. In a crucial sense, it was more modern as well...
Archaeology of Newness. To understand Delaunay's modernity one has to realize how old-fashioned the subject matter of cubism was. Picasso or Braque's still lifes, with their tilted cafe tables, guitars, fruit and playing cards, were scarcely different as subjects from those of Caravaggio or Chardin. Despite a few contemporary intrusions (newspaper headlines, printed tickets, linoleum), the subjects of cubism were classical, traditional. They ignored the technology, whose scale, speed, ingenuity and arrogant newness so captivated poets like Guillaume Apollinaire, Filippo Marinetti and Blaise Cendrars, or painters like Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia -and Delaunay...
What's in a name? Not much, the historian of art is bound to answer. Cubism was not about cubes, nor Fauvism about wild beasts. When in 1905 an affable critic looked round the Paris Salon d'Automne, which contained an Italianate bust surrounded by the paintings of Henri Matisse and his disciples, he made a wisecrack about "Donatella chez les fauves" (Donatello among the wild beasts), thus giving a short-lived movement a very durable and misleading label. Fauvism was worked out by a small group of artists over a span of three years; it was dead...
Soon the swollen contours and lush col ors of paintings like Braque's Still Life with Pitchers, 1906, would give way to the austerities of cubism. The demands of more legible structure and more com plicated feeling drew Matisse away from the style he had largely invented. As Elderfield notes in the catalogue, "Matisse's ideal voluptuous world only fully emerged when Fauvism had ended, and could only be created by renouncing that part of it he felt to be excessive...
...Jacques Villon retrospective his week), which one could almost subtitle "The Adventures of Marcel Duchamp's Smarter Brother." Whatever their relative merits, Villon was one of the 20th century's greatest artists. He was not a revolutionary like his brother, but continued to refine his chosen visual style--Cubism--throughout a long career. His color sense and sophistication produced work that Issboth elegang and exciting. See the show for a study break, if nothing else. Boston City Hall, Government Center, Boston: An Arab celebration of costumes, artifacts, photographs, mosque designs, Islamic prints, plus an exhibition of Massachusetts quilts. You make...