Word: picasso
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...children of MOMA; most are under 40. There are many references to African tribal art, but they tend to be formal and oblique. What one does not see is the same kind of quotation that artists, generally white, have taken from Africa (or their idea of Africa) since Picasso started using Bakota grave figures in his pre-cubist paintings. Picasso treated African art as raw material and cared nothing about its tribal contexts or religious meanings. As far as he, Matisse and Braque were concerned, it was made by savages: the masks and carvings were emblems of ferocity, a thrilling...
Right from the start, Dali was a glacial opportunist with weak powers of formal invention. He was also precocious and adroit, and so, as one might expect, his early work is an anthology of secondhand manners. He begins as a late-Picasso cubist, turning out bland art deco still lifes that contain a few premonitions of his later imagery; the lank, droopy fish in Moonlit Still Life, 1927, for example, predicts the flaccidity that was to appear in his soft watches and piano lids. But he did not find a style until he came to Paris and met the surrealists...
...list of artists redeems the show. From Picasso to Giacommetti to Klee to Miro, the assortment is a Whitman's Sampler of the finest art of the century, worth seeing no matter how it is exhibited...
...HUMAN form--manipulated, distorted fractured, parodied--recurs throughout the show. In Picasso's "Woman in an Armchair" a schematic body is cut into two-dimensional sections as if from plywood. A later work with the same name shares the hideous distortions of the figures in his "Guernica" mural. Inhuman cones and spirals combine in odd juxtapositions of anatomy...
...inadvertently demolishes with one mighty chord. An actress in Greenwich Village cajoles him into playing by standing on her head, "exposing her bare secrets"; she turns out to be Tallulah Bankhead. In an audience with Mussolini, he feeds il Duce a line for a speech. He sits for Picasso, who sees him 24 different ways. Round the world he goes, bumping over the Alps in a cargo plane, hopping a banana boat in Panama, crossing Siberia on a dingy train. Wherever he stops, he is taken up by the wealthy and titled, and he embraces their patronage uncritically: he recalls...