Word: cubism
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...history of advanced sculpture, from Cubism to the welded-steel structures of David Smith and Anthony Caro, became, in effect, the history of construction. Of late, this has stiffened into dogma; almost any work can be made to seem regressive simply because it is a monolith (hence the decline of interest in Henry Moore). Still, the greatest single piece of recent American sculpture, Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, is as monolithic as sculpture can get; and there are other signs of the rehabilitation of solid form. Among the most promising is the work of Clement Meadmore, most recently...
...Fleurus where Gertrude and her brother Leo lived, but at 58 rue Madame where their older brother Michael lived with his wife Sarah. MOMA has succeeded in opening the Stein houses, yet we only get glimpses of Gertrude-we overhear only fragments of her remarks about Picasso, Cubism, Picasso, Picasso-we see Leo exclaiming, "Cezanne... Picasso's Blue Period... Matisse!" And Michael and Sarah are lost somewhere in their house that Le Corbusier built at Garches. We feel more like we're at a cocktail party, filling in what our hosts and hostesses are saying, than at a Saturday evening...
GERTRUDE'S interest in Cubism is one of the strongest points illustrated by an effective use of context. We can see fascinating studies of early Cubism in the Picassos from 1907 to 1914. And a Cezanne apple contrasted with the Picasso apple next to it evokes Gertrude Stein's imagery: the apple turns round and round, unlimited in space. Studies for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and for Nude with Drapery show how Picasso was beginning to juxtapose dark and light without shadowing or shading-the result, a differentiation in spatial positions: a new technique, a new space...
...Picasso's early pictures of harlequins, whores and melancholy absinthe drinkers had never been painted, the history of modern art would show a slight gap-but its structure would be the same. It was only with the invention of Cubism that Picasso emerged as a daemon of history; in eight years, between 1906 and 1914, Picasso and Georges Braque changed the look and function of painted surfaces radically and forever. Ever since, modern art has tended to define itself in terms of Cubism, either by what later artists developed out of the movement, or by their struggle to find...
...Although Cubism had an immense latter-day effect on abstract painting, it was not abstraction, nor did it want to be. Even in Picasso's Still Life, 1912, which must have struck its first viewers as an incomprehensible assemblage of planes and lines, the viewer's eye is drawn deep into reality-captured first by the fragments of newsprint, then finding the stem and bowl of a glass, the-edge of a table, the curve of a pipe...