Word: artful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...remembers that the two men liked to wear mechanics' clothes and compare themselves to the Wright brothers, who had given flying shows in Paris in 1908, and that Picasso's nickname for Braque was "Wilbourg" -- Wilbur.) It is difficult, subtle, cerebral and on the whole quite unspectacular art, brimming with an inventiveness that, simply because it has become so embedded in our very conception of modernity, can sometimes be quite difficult to see in its true quality...
...Cubism was a response to a changed world -- a France that was no longer describable in the semirural idyll of Impressionism, a place whose emergent reality had more to do with inventive technology, mass media and the density of the great capital, Paris. Cubism is the urban art par excellence. It celebrates the rapid stream of half-completed impressions, the overlay and stutter of images and ideas, enforced by the tempo of city life: it is the art of cultural compression and flux. With its materials, subjects and techniques, it lighted up the commonness of the modern world...
...gets us nowhere to think that Cubism was 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...
...ART: How Picasso and Braque created Cubism...
...landmark show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art traces the collaboration that, says curator William Rubin, was "the most passionate adventure in our century's art...