Word: artes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Braque is not a sexy painter. Americans prefer their artists to be overreachers in the short run, romantic heroes or doomed saints in the long. Braque was neither. Apart from youthful enthusiasms for boxing and fast cars, his life was completely taken up by his marriage and his art; German shrapnel in his head in World War I must have given him the respect for mortality that few artists get until middle age. Braque was a tortoise, not a hare, and his art had none of Picasso's impetuous virtuosity...
Braque's relation to Picasso in the making of cubism after 1910 -- "roped together like mountaineers," in that famous phrase of Braque's -- was of course the legendary partnership of 20th century art. Like most legends, this one is ill understood. Who was the dominant and who the submissive partner? Neither, but Braque's cubist paintings, and even more his papiers colles of 1912-14, show a continuity of inspiration quite unlike the more darting, prehensile mental habits of Picasso...
...avert this problem he resorted to collage: scraps of newsprint or wallpaper pasted into the picture. This technique, so fundamental to modern art, seems to have been Braque's invention and not Picasso's. He made the first papier colle in 1912, Picasso following a week later. Moreover, Braque had been a house painter's apprentice and thoroughly understood the techniques of wood graining and false-finishing. He could reproduce a "real" fragment of a room, a table, a still life at will, whenever the image needed to be brought back to flatness and density out of the jumble...
...midafternoon, Kumin calls the class together for a demonstration. The table before him looks more like one found in an art class than a restaurant. To make a chocolate figure of a geisha for the top of a cake, Kumin begins with an egg-shaped chunk of chocolate for the torso, then adds arms and legs and makes a dress from a sheet of modeling chocolate. "Men and women both make the same mistake when making a lady," Kumin says with an embarrassed smile. "They put her breasts up under her chin. Remember, the breasts go halfway between shoulders...
...art of simulation has come a long way in the 60 years since Edwin Link, the father of the technology, first used organ bellows and a suspended box to approximate the motion of an airplane in flight. The box has evolved into an instrument-crammed capsule equipped with color video and stereo sound. The bellows has been replaced by electronically controlled hydraulic actuators. And the illusion of motion has become so powerful that it is indistinguishable from the real thing. Moreover, with a few minor changes, the same technology has been used to simulate everything from spaceships to submarines, from...