Word: bateau
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Living in the hatchery of cubism, the expatriates' studio in Paris' Rue Ravignan, known as the Bateau Lavoir, Gris was not in at the beginning. He started as a cartoonist and illustrator, and did not even start to paint until 1910. His first cubist pictures belong to 1912, five years (a long time in the avantgarde) after Picasso painted his seminal and outrageous Demoiselles d'Avignon, the five women bathers with bodies of planes and angles. Gris' importance to modern art rests on about ten years of productivity. His work weakened into phlegmatic...
...World War I. It left behind a residue, however: his virtuosity. Around 1918 he found his first public, a small enough group compared with the worldwide fame he would be juggling by 1939, but much larger and more influential than the poets and painters around the studios of the Bateau-Lavoir. It was a public of admiring consumers, the cultivated gratin of Europe, people who needed a modern Rubens. Moreover, there had been a general recoil from extreme avant-garde art, on principle, after 1918. What seemed necessary was reconstruction, not more iconoclasm, or, in the words of Jean Cocteau...