Word: avignon
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Petrarch's rant against the papal court at Avignon in the 14th century sounds like a hyperbolic inventory of life in certain neighborhoods of the late 20th century: "This is a sewer to which all the filths of the universe come to be reunited. Here people despise God, they adore money, they trample underfoot both human laws and divine law. Everything here breathes falsehood: the air, the earth, the houses, and above all, the bedrooms...
...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...
Hence whole pyramids and stupas of doctoral paper have been raised over its site. No short period in the lives of two artists -- about seven years from Picasso's completion of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 to Braque's enlistment in the French army in 1914 -- has been more analyzed by more hands. Rather than try to boil down all 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...