Word: artful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ART OF THE WESTERN WORLD (PBS, debuting Oct. 2, 9 p.m. on most stations). British historian Michael Wood is host for this coffee-table survey of the great works, with a stress on their cultural and historical context...
Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism," which goes on view this week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, is by far the most demanding show MOMA has ever done. Whatever one's stamina for comparing nuances of pictorial meaning, it will be taxed by this long sequence of more than 350 mostly small, mostly brown works of art that fill two floors of the museum through Jan. 16. This will be the array of Cubist evidence at which future scholars will look back. Curator William Rubin, director emeritus of MOMA's department of painting and sculpture...
Cubism is the archetype of 20th century cultural movements. Indeed, it is the reason so many people have come to think of modern art as a sequence of movements, group activities. Neither Pablo Picasso nor Georges Braque could have created it on his own: it was a truly cooperative process in which Picasso (for a short time) was relieved of the psychic burden of egoistic creation -- the loneliness of the virtuoso -- and the more cautious and measured Braque was spurred into radical experiment. It marks, more clearly than any other, the point at which modern art broke away from commonsense...
...American museum industry has long argued that practically all later styles of 20th century painting and sculpture can be defined through either their origins in Cubism or their opposition to it. Abstract art comes out of the virtual disappearance of the recognizable nude or still life from Braque's and Picasso's work in the autumn of 1911. Pop art is born in the letters, headlines and brand names they stenciled and glued onto their surfaces. Constructivist sculpture descends from Braque's paper constructions and Picasso's tin guitar. Abstract Expressionism gets its originality from its struggle to "escape...
...this material for the general public (a hopeless task), Rubin has taken a biographical approach, focusing entirely on the give-and-take between the two men, their bonds and differences, their mutual way of working through what he rightly calls "the most passionate adventure in our century's art...