Word: cubist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gradually this jutting, sculptural quality dissolved in ever more complicated faceting, "cubifying"?though there are no real cubes in cubism?through the landscapes he painted at Horta de Ebro in 1909. By 1910 the cubist surface was reached, with a sort of gray-brown plasma, the color of fiddle backs, zinc bars and smokers' fingers. Objects were sunk in a twinkling field of vectors and shadows, solid lapping into transparency, things penetrating and turning away, leaving behind the merest signs for themselves?a letter or two, the bowl of a pipe, the sound hole of a guitar. This sense...
...many references to African tribal art, but they tend to be formal and oblique. What one does not see is the same kind of quotation that artists, generally white, have taken from Africa (or their idea of Africa) since Picasso started using Bakota grave figures in his pre-cubist paintings. Picasso treated African art as raw material and cared nothing about its tribal contexts or religious meanings. As far as he, Matisse and Braque were concerned, it was made by savages: the masks and carvings were emblems of ferocity, a thrilling rupture in the smooth herd of French metaphor painting...
Right from the start, Dali was a glacial opportunist with weak powers of formal invention. He was also precocious and adroit, and so, as one might expect, his early work is an anthology of secondhand manners. He begins as a late-Picasso cubist, turning out bland art deco still lifes that contain a few premonitions of his later imagery; the lank, droopy fish in Moonlit Still Life, 1927, for example, predicts the flaccidity that was to appear in his soft watches and piano lids. But he did not find a style until he came to Paris and met the surrealists...