Word: picasso
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hence whole pyramids and stupas of doctoral paper have been raised over its site. No short period in the lives of two artists -- about seven years from Picasso's completion of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 to Braque's enlistment in the French army in 1914 -- has been more analyzed by more hands. Rather than try to boil down all this material for the general public (a hopeless task), Rubin has taken a biographical approach, focusing entirely on the give-and-take between the two men, their bonds and differences, their mutual way of working through what he rightly...
Cubism has never gone soft; it remains, after 80 years, mysterious, challenging and resistant. Neither Picasso nor Braque said much to explain what they believed they were doing. Their Cubist work contains no ideological positions, dramatic subject matter or easy anecdotes. It disdains narrative and sentiment -- a severe test for Picasso, whose Blue and Rose periods had been full of both. (On the other hand, both men's paintings and collages were seeded with puns, sly allusions and In jokes: when the fragmentary writing on one of Picasso's paintings from 1912 declares that "Notre Avenir est dans...
Nowhere is its delight in the ironic life of overlaid signs made clearer than in the use of collage, which Picasso invented and Braque rapturously extended. The caning in Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, is mechanically printed oilcloth, and its presence in the tiny painting -- worked over with that fierce slanting clutter of painted images, newspaper, glass, cut lemon and so forth -- is a double play with signs, not the insertion of something real into a fiction...
...meant as a form of realism. That * is what art historians like Douglas Cooper thought -- Cubism aimed for "the solid tangible reality of things" by representing them from several angles. But "solid tangible reality" is hardly detectable in this show. You get an overwhelming sense of plastic energy from Picasso's drawing of volume, but that is a different matter. Neither he nor Braque was out to propose a systematic alternative to one-point perspective as the key to making things look real. There was no system to Cubist shuttling and lapping. Which does not mean it was anarchic...
...Picasso and Braque created Cubism...