Word: cubist
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...emerged in Halle and Berlin and used elements of Cubism and Expressionism. Sitte's construction worker sits cross-legged on a steel beam reading a book with a meditative expression. "Here you can see how he was intensely working through Picasso," says März, pointing to the typical Cubist angular forms and distortions. A few years later, Sitte denounced this style and swore allegiance to the party line. He enjoyed a successful career as East Germany's top artist and president of the Artists' Federation of the G.D.R. (He also worked with the Stasi secret police to denounce colleagues...
...Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Villa Médicis. His wealthy Parisian thread-manufacturing family lived in a grand bourgeois neighborhood near the Europe Bridge, famously painted by Gustave Caillebotte. The teenage Cartier-Bresson worked in the studio of society painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, and later studied with Cubist painter André Lhote, honing his geometrically precise eye for composition at the Louvre. By the 1920s, he was hanging out in Montmartre cafés with André Breton and the Surrealists. Breton, he says, "intimidated me. I was very much younger, and he was the Pope...
...critic Andre Salmon summed it up in 1910. "There are lovers of art capable of admiring both Picasso and Matisse," he wrote. "These are happy folks whom we must pity." We all know the terms of their face-off. Matisse the color-infatuated voluptuary, Picasso the spiky engineer of Cubist space. Matisse the consoler, Picasso the bomb thrower. Matisse the man who once called for "an art of balance, of purity and serenity," Picasso the one who said, "In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions...
...would be too much to call these understandings false. There were times, especially in the Cubist years, when Picasso did rush in to places where Matisse feared to tread. And when it comes to color, Picasso, so given to dull greens and nougat browns, is no match for Matisse's vermilions and aquamarines. But the great lesson of the Matisse exhibitions of the past decade or so--the lesson this show carries forward--is that Matisse was every bit as much the trailblazer...
...these is Goldfish and Palette, 1914. That Cubist-inspired trestle of black strokes on the right is Matisse, holding a white palette through which his phallic white thumb protrudes. But the real importance of this work and others from about this time lies in the sweeping "background" that occupies most of the canvas. In this one, broad areas of blue, white and black dissolve deep space into allover optical force fields, a gesture that opened the way to the color-field abstraction of a half-century later. Picasso replied with Harlequin, a self-portrait as clown, painted in a moment...