Word: cubism
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...become historic. Space was carved out in simple planes as if it had been hacked away with an ax. Two figures on the right presented faces as grotesque as African masks. It was the first cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d' Avignon. Almost half a century later, cubism, although short-lived, ranks as one of the most influential movements in art history. To salute its achievements, the Venice Biennale this summer is exhibiting 29 paintings by the purest cubist of them all, Picasso's friend and countryman, Juan Gris...
Unlike the other cubist greats - Picasso, Braque, and the late Fernand Leger - who had to unlearn their earlier styles, young Juan Gris (pronounced Greece) had had only a rudimentary training in Madrid when he moved into the Rue Ravignan in 1906, to be near Picasso. In on cubism from its birth, Gris developed his own style naturally on cubist tenets...
...Horse Mackerel, by Karl Knaths, 64, was given by Department Storeman Morton D. May to the City Art Museum of St. Louis. Assistant Museum Director William Eisendrath calls it "an example of an American artist who is a genius, and who has come under the influence of cubism and expressionism. It is one of the best examples of its type." Says Benefactor May, who paid $1,200 for the canvas in the late '40s; "He [Knaths] abstracts nature, but it is still recognizable. Horse Mackerel is an abstraction of a giant tuna. One who looks carefully will...
After a brief skirmish with cubism, Vlaminck in 1924 began striking out against the current trend, retired to Normandy and started painting the dozens of landscapes, golden wheat fields and chilly, windswept winter scenes (opposite) that earned him the title, "poet of stormy skies." Vlaminck today has nothing but contempt for most modern art, calls Picasso "the gravedigger of French art." Says he: "I still look at things with the eyes of my childhood; I am still moved by the same old sights: a forest path, a long country road flanked by poplars, the banks of a river...
...pioneers of American painting crave appreciation. When it is not forthcoming, some of them sulk and some shrug. But none of them seems to laugh. "To refashion the fashioned, lest it stiffen into iron, means an endless vital activity," they argue with Goethe. They solemnly reiterate that since impressionism, cubism and abstractionism have proved meaningful over the years, abstract expressionism will, too. And curiously enough, this wishful argument-by-analogy does cow some critics and win over others...