Word: picasso
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...Fleurus was a salon through which the best artists and writers in France passed each Saturday. Throughout their ten years together at Rue deFleurus, Leo and Gertrude kept buying. One of their first major purchases was Young Girl with Basket of Flowers, a big blue-period Picasso nude for which they paid 150 francs ($29). Soon Gertrude owned more early Picassos than anybody else in France. Picasso dashed off a small Homage to Gertrude, 1909, a parody of Baroque ceiling painting, complete with curtain, clouds and trumpeting angels, which she tacked to the ceiling above her bed. As time wore...
...Picasso's early pictures of harlequins, whores and melancholy absinthe drinkers had never been painted, the history of modern art would show a slight gap-but its structure would be the same. It was only with the invention of Cubism that Picasso emerged as a daemon of history; in eight years, between 1906 and 1914, Picasso and Georges Braque changed the look and function of painted surfaces radically and forever. Ever since, modern art has tended to define itself in terms of Cubism, either by what later artists developed out of the movement, or by their struggle to find...
...show in Los Angeles was organized by Art Historian Douglas Cooper, a major collector and close friend of Picasso, Braque and Leger. The movement, he argues, aimed to restore reality to art, to discover a way of representing "the solid tangible reality" of things. This sense of reality and tangibility, says Cooper, had been lost to French painting in the late 19th century, amid the theorizing of the Symbolists and the opalescent shimmers of Impressionism. In classical art the aim is to represent a real world: but in this trompe-l'oeil reality, the thing which is not real...
Buckled Planes. Thus, with incredible bravado, Picasso and Braque (neither had yet turned 30) set out to displace a history of visual representation that had lasted more than 500 years. Every element of art had to be rethought in terms of a new function-line, color, light, volume, space. Thus the solidity of the rocks, lighthouse and boats in Braque's Harbor in Normandy, 1909, is not achieved through light-and-shade modeling, still less by perspective; instead, each form begins to buckle into planes and projections, and every shape is evenly compressed against the eye. Even space, which...
Although Cubism had an immense latter-day effect on abstract painting, it was not abstraction, nor did it want to be. Even in Picasso's Still Life, 1912, which must have struck its first viewers as an incomprehensible assemblage of planes and lines, the viewer's eye is drawn deep into reality-captured first by the fragments of newsprint, then finding the stem and bowl of a glass, the-edge of a table, the curve of a pipe...