Word: 20th
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...easy to sum up 100 years of fashion, but if we dared to, we might say that 20th century women's wear amounted to a war over the waist. It was constrained in the late 19th century, but designers loosened it in the teens and '20s; cinched it again in the '30s, '40s and '50s; and symbolically set it free once more in the '60s. From that point on, formality disappeared from daily dress. In the end, freedom conquered constriction...
...pell-mell 20th century wasted no time in sounding its characteristic theme in the arts. That theme was--what else?--change. Radical, rapid, sweeping change. And more of it than had ever been seen before...
Here's another first for the 20th century: it's the first in which performing artists at the end of the century have been able to see and hear their predecessors from the century's beginning. It used to be that only the plastic arts could be preserved--in print, paint or objects. The performing arts were evanescent. A dancer's line, a comedian's schtick, a singer's coloratura vanished as soon as the performer walked into the wings, and could only be remembered, described, perhaps glimpsed in a third- or fourth-hand imitation. Now recordings, film and videotape...
...that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. The total public for Titian in the 16th century or Velazquez in the 17th was probably no more than a few thousand people--though that included most of the crowned heads, nobility and intelligentsia of Europe. Picasso's audience--meaning people who had heard of him and seen his work...
Moreover, he was the artist with whom virtually every other artist had to reckon, and there was scarcely a 20th century movement that he didn't inspire, contribute to or--in the case of Cubism, which, in one of art history's great collaborations, he co-invented with Georges Braque--beget. The exception, since Picasso never painted an abstract picture in his life, was abstract art; but even there his handprints lay everywhere--one obvious example being his effect on the early work of American Abstract Expressionist painters, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, among others...