Word: cubistic
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There are some delightful "pure" works of art in this show, like Alexander Calder's little maquette for a huge motorized sculpture at the New York World's Fair -- a small, sharp orrery with strong cosmological overtones. There are also some rarities by lesser-known artists, notably the huge cubist- derived portrait of the workings of a watch by Gerald Murphy, the American expatriate on whom Scott Fitzgerald was to base his character of Dick Diver. . But compared with the knockout confidence of the work of engineers and designers represented in this show, the machine-esthetic painting...
Somewhere director Mark Prascak was hit with the stroke of genius of giving each of the two-dimensional characters a different color, shape, physical tic, and annoying vocal mannerism. Best of all, these accoutrements match their role in the play. It's not really cubist, but it is very funny...
...with the ethereal, came out in a curiously attenuated form. But it supported -- and after Louis' death was in turn supported by -- the argument that after Pollock painting had only one way to go. No more figures, organic symbolism or utopian geometry; no more gestural surfaces, tonal structure or cubist layering of space. In future, art would hang onto the spread-out, expansive quality of Pollock's work while refreshing it with a new intensity of color, inspired by Matisse. At the end of the purge you would have a clipped but radiant discourse of pure hue, fixed...
Marble, wood and bronze remained fundamental materials, but they were used in unorthodox ways; and in addition, a sculptor could use any kind of junk, from cardboard, tin and pine boards (the stuff of Picasso's and Laurens's cubist constructions) to the wire and celluloid favored by constructivists, the steel plates and boiler ends forged by Smith, and so on down to rocks, twigs, burlap, twine or even the artist's own dung, which, canned and labeled by the Italian Piero Manzoni in 1961, provided a nastily prophetic comment on fetishism in late modern art. On its road away...
Rivera became a cubist after 1913, but he was no mere follower. Not only are his cubist canvases a lot bigger and more fiercely colored than those of most of his contemporaries, but they strike a peculiar stance between boldness and indecipherability, making the work of minor French cubists like Gleizes or Metzinger seem wispy and ladylike by comparison. The extreme case was Zapatista Landscape--The Guerrilla, Rivera's masterpiece of 1915. It has everything in it from a rifle and pistol holster to a sarape, a sombrero and the snow-capped Mexican cordillera. Yet despite all the detail...