Word: cubism
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...Cubism, Picasso's next creation in collaboration with Georges Braque, now seems less like an explosion in a shingle factory than a rigorous analysis of reality in terms of planes rather than lines. In such works as Girl with Mandolin, where the figure and background have been broken into sharp-edged, sculptural planes, with the mandolin and model's breast distorted to carry the viewer's eye around the bend, there is today a kind of elegance and even a sensual formalism...
Picasso's cubism radically affected the course of modern art, but it is now clear that it failed to establish itself as the Grand Manner of the 20th century. As an apparatus to carry the full weight of modern man's deepened and often troubled sensibility, it has proved inadequate. Picasso himself, no man to cultivate the hinterland after exploring a new area's boundaries, pushed on, leaving a generation of less gifted painters to work laboriously through its implications...
BEFORE World War II, abstract art was dominated by the geometrical and almost architectural paintings that grew out of cubism and culminated in Piet Mondrian's austere compositions in primary red, white and blue. But in the past decade has come a new experiment with intense, expressive forms that use flowing, linear rhythms as a kind of "handwriting" or "gesture-painting," linking Western art and the ancient Oriental art of calligraphy...
...styled "Renaissance Man" and professional dissenter, Lewis launched a lifelong guerrilla warfare on convention in 1914 with Blast, a magazine (co-edited with Poet-Pundit Ezra Pound) which ferociously lit into the popular romanticism ("chaos of Enoch Ardens, laughing Jennys, ladies with pains, good-for-nothing Guineveres"). He introduced cubism to Britain, then characteristically turned on it fiercely when cubism became popular. In a series of novels written in prose as rough-edged as a raw nerve (Tarr, The Apes of God, Rotting Hill), he mocked and mauled socialists, his fellow intellectuals, the middle class ("dry-rotted yes-people...
...color, but his composition is not well integrated. There is, nevertheless, a sense of discipline that never allows the picture to fail completely. Le Corbusier's canvases are two-dimensional. Along with Ozenfant, he was responsible for the creed of Purism promulgated about 1920 in an effort to preserve Cubism from the decorative tendency that was threatening to engulf it. The original impulse aimed at removing the literary art of Picasso and Braque to a more democratic level. Their concept was to dignify humble subject matter, objects like bottles and pipes that men everywhere knew, instead of bringing the uneducated...