Word: cubist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...find my pictures excessively cold," the cubist painter Juan Gris complained to his dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, in 1915. "Oh, how I wish I had the freedom and the charm of the unfinished! Well, it can't be helped. One must after all paint as one is oneself. My mind is too precise to go dirtying a blue or twisting a straight line...
Living in the hatchery of cubism, the expatriates' studio in Paris' Rue Ravignan, known as the Bateau Lavoir, Gris was not in at the beginning. He started as a cartoonist and illustrator, and did not even start to paint until 1910. His first cubist pictures belong to 1912, five years (a long time in the avantgarde) after Picasso painted his seminal and outrageous Demoiselles d'Avignon, the five women bathers with bodies of planes and angles. Gris' importance to modern art rests on about ten years of productivity. His work weakened into phlegmatic...
Picasso never painted an abstract picture in his life. His instinct for the real world was so strong that he probably would have produced something woman-shaped every time he took brush in hand. Nevertheless, some of his cubist still lifes of 1911 run close to total abstraction. 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 of multiple relationships was the core of cubism...
...prodigy to turn pro. The 112-page result contains three dozen "tricks" for solving the cube (using logic rather than math), as well as a chapter on "Cube Maintenance" (to loosen a stiff cube, "put a blob of Vaseline on the mechanism"). With 250,000 copies of the cubist's book in print, a Penguin executive marvels: "It's the biggest, runaway, immediate success we have had since we published Lady Chatterley's Lover in paperback...
...exact the recognition of his merit." Paris took young De Chirico, as it took young Chagall, and turned him from a naive provincial fabulist into a major painter. His "metaphysical" constructions, such as The Jewish Angel, 1916, certainly influenced Max Ernst. Just as certainly, they came out of the cubist sculpture De Chirico saw all over the Paris studios after 1912. De Chirico is often said to have used Renaissance space in his pictures, but, as Rubin points out, this is a myth. Chirican perspective was not meant to set the viewer in a secure, measurable space...