Word: constructivist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When David Smith was killed in a car accident near Bennington, Vt., in 1965, America lost the best sculptor it had ever produced. In a quarter-century of work, Smith had taken the constructivist tradition of sculpture-images built up from rigid planes-from where Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzalez had left it in the '30s, and given it an extraordinary richness and amplitude. Indeed, his work in three dimensions was so magisterial that it blotted out the rest of his output. For Smith was not only a sculptor, but a draftsman, and his drawings, thousands in number, were...
...85th birthday now. It is doubtful whether any other English artist has had a comparable effect on the development of abstract art. For several decades, his muted, delicately cut reliefs and abstracted images of still life and landscape formed the main link between English art and the cubist-constructivist tradition in Europe. Nicholson was born too late, and in the wrong country, to be one of the inventors of this tradition. Instead he became one of its most gifted, sensitive and celebrated propagators...
...from the inside to the outside. There are no external decorations or diversionary doodads. The façade equals the living space. At night, with the lights on in the building, you can see the spatial organization-you're reading the building as a negative." Yet this constructivist approach can coexist with vestiges of a low-pitched Spanish mission roof, as in Gwathmey's recent Long Island house...
...imagery in art. The New York painters were very selective about the modernist enterprise. They had lived through the Depression and arrived on the edge of a world war. They were not apt to believe in art-induced utopias-the rationalization of mankind through ideal form. So the Bauhaus-constructivist line meant little to them. Surrealism, however, was more congenial. To begin with, it was an art of subject matter; and although platoons of later critics would discuss abstract expressionism in purely formalist terms, the painters themselves were obsessed by content. "We assert," said Mark Rothko, "that the subject...
...general title "Trends of the '20s." They focused on German Dada, on the Bauhaus and its circle, and on international constructivism. "Paris-Berlin" overlaps the earlier shows in those areas; many of the "classics" of the '20s, like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's light-space modulators and constructivist paintings, or the ferocious social satires of George Grosz and Otto Dix, or the Dada visions of mechanized man by Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch, are on view again in Paris. But the new show deepens the argument by paying more attention to the social and political aims...