Word: cubistic
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...MOMA has ever done. Whatever one's stamina for comparing nuances of pictorial meaning, it will be taxed by this long sequence of more than 350 mostly small, mostly brown works of art that fill two floors of the museum through Jan. 16. This will be the array of Cubist evidence at which future scholars will look back. Curator William Rubin, director emeritus of MOMA's department of painting and sculpture, has called in all his markers. "Picasso and Braque" is his retirement aria, the climax of a great career in modernist scholarship...
Each day a long queue of the curious would form. Inside the packed gallery, people would argue and gesticulate in front of abstract paintings -- a red square on a white ground, a fragmented cubist portrait -- done a generation before their birth...
From his art-student days (if one is to believe The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, his charmingly mythomanic autobiography), he struck everyone, especially himself, as a prodigy. Around 1929, after moving to Paris and serving an apprenticeship in various realist and cubist styles, he saw that realism, when pressed to a photographic extreme, could subvert one's sense of reality. He therefore used what he called "tricks of eye fooling" to invoke "sublime hierarchies of thought...
...making of cubism after 1910 -- "roped together like mountaineers," in that famous phrase of Braque's -- was of course the legendary partnership of 20th century art. Like most legends, this one is ill understood. Who was the dominant and who the submissive partner? Neither, but Braque's cubist paintings, and even more his papiers colles of 1912-14, show a continuity of inspiration quite unlike the more darting, prehensile mental habits of Picasso...
...Braque's cubism, the subject matter of Chardin -- a violin, a table, a pipe, a bottle, a printed page -- was born again into the fragmented world of the modern city, its silvery-brown light intact. The speckles in his cubist paintings became a fine-tuned vibrato, unlike the more assertive planes of his partner. This made coherent form melt more readily toward abstraction, which Braque did not want. Rather, as he put it, he wanted to "take the object and raise it high, very high...