Word: cubism
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These were the conditions under which Matisse began to produce pictures based on what he called the "methods of modern construction." Struggling to mount a personal response to the challenge of Cubism, he approached the very edge of abstraction. Things and people were reduced to concise signs of themselves, but in the end Matisse always remained attached to the visible world. Just look at Goldfish and Palette, from 1914, in which light and shadow, form and space, are distilled into ambiguous stage flats. Is that black strip down the center of the painting a wall or a shadow? Actually...
...even as he struggled to gain a wider public, Matisse was losing his position as leader of the Parisian avant-garde to Picasso, 12 years his junior. Young artists were fascinated by the militant astringency of Cubism and its systematic means of exploding form and space. Compared with the bristling brown surfaces in Picasso and Braque, even Matisse's fiercest pictures, with their dizzying color, could look a bit "decorative" - a dismissive word thrown at him all the time. (See some artists from the 2010 Whitney Biennial...
...fact that it's a field of marks on a flat surface. In a mature Cézanne, every brushstroke leads a double life, as part of a painterly illusion and as a thing in itself, a patch of pigment on a canvas. This opened the way to everything from Cubism to abstraction. And as the Philadelphia show makes clear, it was a discovery that continues to reverberate more than a century later in the work of living artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns and Brice Marden...
Almost everybody learned from Cézanne. Braque pored over the great still lifes--all those apples and bunched tablecloths--and took from them ideas about distorted forms and tilted planes that he and Picasso would carry into the profound thickets of Cubism. The serene heft of Cézanne's many views of Mont Sainte-Victoire inform the muscular Maine landscapes of the American painter Marsden Hartley. The enduring reach of Cézanne can even be felt in Ellsworth Kelly's Lake II, a color-field wall panel from 2002 that distills and abstracts the visual experience of water, just...
...once the classiest way to go between the two cities. Nearby are modernistic silver serving pieces and other shipboard relics. A striking 1934 photomontage advertising the Normandie shows it sailing through Times Square past the Art Deco Paramount Building. Art Deco - that decorative fusion of Art Nouveau, Constructivism, Cubism, Modernism and Futurism - made its debut at Paris' 1925 International Exposition. In a New York minute, the style took Manhattan and was replicated in interiors, fabrics, typefaces and that local speciality, the skyscraper...