Word: cubism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...attempts to draw, but his teachers at the local Ecole des Beaux Arts wondered why. A slow, deliberate student, Braque accomplished nothing much until 1909, the year he teamed up with Picasso. The two became inseparable and for a while their work was almost indistinguishable. Together they invented "cubism"*-painting the visible world as if it were built of tiny blocks, and tumbling the blocks about at will...
...Reciprocal Curve. It was not Nadelman's academic skill that started all the talk. Right alongside of his classic nudes he was showing other figures geometrically distorted in a way that foreshadowed cubism. Describing them in his Journal, Novelist André Gide wrote that "Nadelman draws with a compass and sculpts by assembling rhomboids. He has discovered that every curve of the human body is accompanied by a reciprocal curve which opposes it and corresponds to it. The harmony which results from these balancings smacks of the theorem." Gide had put his finger on one undeniable weakness of Nadelman...
Picasso & Co. had already invented cubism (painting guitars and fruits as if they had been smashed and reassembled in jagged geometrical patterns) and they found that cutting and pasting scraps of newspaper, wallpaper, wine labels and calling cards was a short-order way of cooking up cubist effects. Also it was an easy way to shock the fuddy-duddies...
...Paris, he was enchanted by the "Blue Period" paintings of another alien, Picasso, 18 years older than Berman. By that time, restless "Papa" Picasso was gaining notoriety as a cubist; but Berman, along with his brother Léonid, and his friends Tchelitchew and Bérard, thought cubism something to keep clear of. Their idea was to go on from where Picasso's Blue Period left off-to paint, in a traditional way, the cracked shells of European civilization. They were the "Neo-Romantics...
Picasso found a traditional basis for cubism in primitive African sculpture: the tradition Matisse chose to explore had never quite disappeared from Europe. It still existed in playing cards, tattooing and music-hall posters. They created no illusion of space or of sculptural form, though understanding some of them meant reading form and space into their flat designs. They delighted the eye through an interplay of only two elements: color and line. Matisse set out to do the same...