Word: avignon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...because of the city's history as a forcing bed of abstract art. No single artist "invented" abstraction, but Malevich was certainly one of the first to set forth its claims as a visual language. It was Malevich who did for abstract painting what Picasso, in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, did for the figure. His emblematic work (for Americans) was White Square on White, 1918 -- that unreproducible, fierce, magical white square, canted on a slightly warmer white ground, which has been in the Museum of Modern Art since the '30s and has become a central icon of the reductive impulse...
...brings Picasso from childhood through the Blue and Rose periods, stopping in 1907 just as the 25-year-old artist was souping himself up (under the influence of El Greco) to produce what would turn out to be the emblematic radical painting of the century, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Richardson is a born storyteller, with a vivid sense of detail and character that enables him to deal with the large cast of players entangled in Picasso's early life, from obscure Catalan artists, shady French art dealers and questing Russian collectors to writers like Alfred Jarry, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire...
...Oedipus. In fact, the house of inspiration is much larger than avant-gardist rhetoric has ever allowed. The great transformers of art history, like Picasso or Matisse, were also its great conservators. The idea that one tradition was killed stone-dead in 1907, when Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and that another was born from the act, is nonsense. Perhaps there is no such thing as a deep or genuinely important art based solely on innovation...