Word: constructivist
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...Chilean pavilion has a 60-ton iceberg in an indoor pond. But it's the well-conceived, meticulously wrought Norwegian pavilion that triumphs in the ice-water category. In fact, Norway's building, a witty, sublime little Constructivist jewel box designed by Oslo architect Pal Henry Engh, is among the best at Expo...
...color. Sometimes, as in Gaudi Cup, 1972, the intensity of the glazes seems to have literally broken down the form of the ceramic into tiny glowing shards. This sense of color as a veneer on a flat surface gets turned into a form of Cubism, rather as the Dutch Constructivist Gerrit Rietveld in the 1920s abstracted the shape of a chair into a penitential parody of itself. Not only Cubism gets its share of parody, but other styles as well -- Frank Stella's paintings or, in a tiny architectural piece with a tower and a tilted ramp called De Chirico...
Then there is the international preoccupation with a benign Utopia -- Europe's reaction against the horror of war -- whose "spiritual" symbol was glass architecture. Besides the familiar Constructivist icons, such as the sculptor Vladimir Tatlin's wooden model for a giant tower that was to commemorate the Third Communist International, there are fantasies by much- lesser-known artists -- the outstanding one being a German, Wenzel Hablik, whose radiant glass towers and many-colored domes resemble designs for the New Jerusalem...
...their opposition to it. Abstract art comes out of the virtual disappearance of the recognizable nude or still life from Braque's and Picasso's work in the autumn of 1911. Pop art is born in the letters, headlines and brand names they stenciled and glued onto their surfaces. Constructivist sculpture descends from Braque's paper constructions and Picasso's tin guitar. Abstract Expressionism gets its originality from its struggle to "escape the Cubist grid" -- which was never a grid anyway. Cubism, from this simplified and patristic standpoint, becomes the tree in the primal garden of modernism, and Picasso...
...paintings all descend from constructivism, and one soon realizes that they mark the end of its tradition with a barrage of fireworks: there is something funereal as well as celebratory about the sight. It seems improbable that anyone (other, perhaps, than Stella) will manage to wring more from the constructivist impulse. If you want to see the common ancestor of these frenetic and space- grabbing objects, it is upstairs at MOMA, a little thing of rusty tin: Picasso's 1912 Guitar. Thinking about Picasso, Stella had come to realize that "it's not the presence of a recognizable figure...