Word: cubist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hofmann who made her look at cubism, "the key to my stability ... Positive and negative. A block of space for light. A block of space for shadow. Light and shade are in the universe, but the cube transcends and translates nature into a structure." On seeing her first cubist Picassos, Nevelson recalls, "I understood it at once. I felt related, as if I had done them. So was I going to leave that...
Even today, many decades after they were unveiled before an uncomprehending world, the early works of the modernists retain the power to startle. Picasso's cubist women stare out from the canvas with the faces of monsters in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye belongs more to tomorrow than today, as it has for the past half-century. Jackson Pollock is still a puzzle to many people, who appreciate only the fancy prices his paintings now fetch. That lack of understanding is what makes this eight-part BBC series on 20th century...
What makes the program interesting, however, is not Hughes' manner but his arresting ideas. He brings a fresh eye to familiar scenes. Placing two cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque side by side, for example, he shows that they are almost indistinguishable. At that point in their careers, the two men were so alike that "they could have been Siamese twins." The medium of television allows him to juxtapose paintings and the real-life images from which they were so clearly derived - automobiles, planes, locomotives, almost anything that meant speed and modernity. Old films and current interviews also...
...cubism and futurism -were able to digest and develop them with tremendous speed and urgency, leaping beyond their prototypes like pole vaulters. To see this at work, one need only look at the development of Vladimir Tallin's sculpture after his first contact with Picasso's tin cubist Guitar, 1912, in Paris, or at the conviction with which Kasimir Malevich moved from cubism to a purely abstract painting...
Part of the achievement of her work lies in the way in which she adapted the rationale of cubist composition to more mysterious ends. "Cubism gives you a block of space for light, a block of space for shadow," Nevelson has said. "Light and shade are in the universe, but the cube structure." transcends In and sum, the translates nature encompassing into ambition of Nevelson's work is to make a continuous surface so full, so engrossing and so minutely articulated with variety of detail that it can work as an abstract metaphor of nature itself...