Word: cubism
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Born in 1872, Mondrian spent the early part of his career painting Dutch landscapes. He discovered cubism in the second decade of the 20th century, but tried to bring his work beyond...
...mind: to do so was a sign of authentic judgment. He was still in his 20s when he began writing art criticism, and his first reaction to "radical" Modernism, which hit him in the 1913 Armory Show, was one of utter horror--Cezanne and Van Gogh were "unbalanced fanatics," Cubism "simply ridiculous," Matisse "insanely, repulsively depraved...
...justification for relativism says more about the way the world was already tending than about Einstein. His stature gave an underpinning to ideas that had nothing to do with his science or personal inclinations. The entire thrust of modern art, whether it took the form of Expressionism, Cubism, Fauvism or fantasy, was a conscious effort to rejigger the shapes of observable reality in the same spirit of liberation and experimentation that Einstein brought to science...
...World War I begins. Its mindless slaughter heightens and validates the modernist vision. Picasso, watching the military vehicles rumble through Paris, sees in their camouflage painting a kind of Cubism, therefore a kind of modernist triumph. That same year James Joyce begins Ulysses, overturning our traditional expectations for action, plot, drama and the direct impact of one character on another in the novel. "Like Proust," Edmund Wilson writes, "he is symphonic rather than narrative...musical rather than dramatic...
Maybe it's not such a surprise. The standard version of modern art history--the story that moves through the Impressionists and Cezanne to Cubism, and from there through ever greater reaches of stylization, psychic turmoil and abstraction--has been under pressure for years to admit developments that can't be legitimized under that model. The creamy maidens of Victorian genre painting, "outsider art" by the mentally ill, hard-to-categorize painters like Jacob Lawrence and Florine Stettheimer--all of them have been tried out on museum walls. It was only a matter of time before attention turned back...