Word: constructivist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...another world, was one of the favorite devices of surrealism, used incessantly from Max Ernst in the '20s to Joseph Cornell in the '40s. Nevelson gave it a unique density and gravity. She took the box's power as theater and subjected it to a constructivist rigor of formal layout. The past life of the wood pieces was still apparent: the nicks and flaws, the signs of use and disuse, all preserved and yet held at an emotional distance by the pall of black. But her instinct for placement, for what shapes to repeat and where...
...edge by Cornell's rigor as a formal artist. The essence of the box is to contain, and within a rectangular grid, at that. Cornell enhanced this with a spare, strict sense of proportion in his divisions and compartments; not without reason did he call himself a "constructivist." What one sees in the boxes is not just memory, but the exact disposition of memory, an entrancingly just division of one's gaze between thought and material...
...tribal bracelet, but with more sculptural presence. On the other, one of the best pieces in the show is Alvin Loving's wall hanging of sewed, dyed canvas, Shades of '73: Composition for 1980, whose variegated strips are like a moody, floral version of a constructivist motif and seem to make no perceptible reference to Africa...