Word: cubism
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...childhood and adolescence in Mexico, studying art at the Mexican National Academy where his early work showed the soft imitative convention. Like most young artists he looked first to the Old World. He lived a dozen years in Paris, married a Russian. His restless, probing intellect carried him into Cubism, for a while, but he traveled to Italy and saw the Primitives, compared their simple legends with the confusion of the Paris theorists...
While he was bored by free verse and cubism, he thought rather well of Dreiser, Cabell, and so much of Proust as he had rather laboriously mastered. He played golf reasonably well, and did not often talk about his scores. He liked fishing in Ontario, but never made himself believe that he preferred hemlock bows to a mattress. He was common sense apotheosized...
George Braques, who with Picasso was an exponent of Cubism before 1914, is represented by a "Still Life". Here the predominating tones are black, green and red. The composition, geometric in character, reveals the profitable influence of Cubistic training without being dominated by this school. The artist achieves here a powerful effect by the use of strong outlines which emphasize the objects...
Black Sadie is a common cornfield nigger raised to trusted though untrustworthy house servant, and by chance transported to "Easter Orange," N. J. There a wealthy, ridiculous patroness of the new art "discovers" her; it seems that Sadie's angular primitive skull is "the focus of the geometry." Cubism is at its height; the Negro fad starts its blatant vogue with a nude of Black Sadie. From popular artists' model, Sadie proceeds to nightclub fame ending abruptly with a row, murder, discreet fadeaway. On the whole she is glad to be shet of no 'count white folks...
Composed entirely of accepted modernist leaders, the exhibition proved that the freakishness of cubism, vorticism, other truculent cults, is quite defunct. There was little that was crude, nothing that was incoherent. Gaugin's bizarre self-portrait seemed to link his face with his own favorite Tahitian fruits; the sardonic humor of the piece was queer but clear. He displayed also a serene Breton landscape, a lovely canvas which could cause no retching among the most conservative. Forain's aphrodisiac The Charleston showed two vibrant white dancers, several paunchy satyr-spectators, was a triumph of contemporary comment. Picasso's The Mother...