Word: cubism
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Sometimes it doesn't pay to be too popular. By the time of his death in 1985, at age 97, Marc Chagall was suburbia's favorite genius. He offered modernism without tears, without the headaches of Cubism or the thin air of abstraction. For middle-class Jews, he was also the chronicler of the world of their fathers, the poet of that lost, enchanted universe. By the mid-1960s, when Fiddler on the Roof took its title from one of Chagall's best-known motifs, his popular reputation was at its peak. But in the eyes of an art world...
...contrast to Rudolph's work, but also because they defied the Communist Party's diktat against abstraction. Arbeitspause (Break from Work), from 1959, an early painting by the controversial Willi Sitte, typifies the work of a group of artists that emerged in Halle and Berlin and used elements of Cubism and Expressionism. Sitte's construction worker sits cross-legged on a steel beam reading a book with a meditative expression. "Here you can see how he was intensely working through Picasso," says März, pointing to the typical Cubist angular forms and distortions. A few years later, Sitte denounced...
...sole justification for our existence as artists," he once wrote, "superfluous and egotistic as we are, is to confront people with the image of their destiny." But first, where to find a visual language commensurate with the horrors seen and the ones to come? Even before the war, the Cubism of Picasso and Braque had been of little interest to him. But by 1914 Beckmann was a medical orderly in the trenches of Flanders. The Belgian front, where he suffered a severe nervous breakdown, would show him fractured form with a vengeance. Especially after the raw meat and blasted earth...
...recondite mazes of Cubism, so open, so impregnable, are what followed. Very soon, with the ferocity and radical distortions of a single canvas, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso would turn every other artist into cannon fodder and take from Matisse the leadership role within the avant-garde. Georges Braque and Andre Derain, onetime Fauvists, defected to Picasso's camp. In time Picasso would even usurp Matisse's position in the affections--and worse, in the collection--of Matisse's once devoted patron Gertrude Stein...
Matisse and Picasso played a game of diagonal leapfrog, each using the other's work as a springboard to a new direction. So it was partly the young Picasso's confrontation with Matisse's Fauve canvases that pushed him toward Cubism. Matisse looked over Picasso's explosive venture, recoiled, then replied with pictures that exploded old notions of space without violating his profound compliance with the ideal of beauty...