Word: cubists
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Some Commusicals did fit the stolid stereotype--Mikhail and Judit shouting, "Let's harvest the beet crop right here!"--but many have an enduring buoyancy. Grigori Alexandrov's pioneering The Jolly Fellows (1934) percolates with jaunty jazz, Cubist compositions and a Dietrichish blond in a party hat. The amazing Midnight Revue (G.D.R., 1962) is a comically cynical parable about the difficulty of making a musical when your producer is not Arthur Freed but a pack of philistine bureaucrats. We can't approve your film, the apparatchiks sing...
...split in American taste revealed itself with the first impact of Modernist art--Cubist, Fauvist, Dada--at the scandalous Armory Show in New York in 1913. Conservatives decried Modernism as un-American, an imported madness, and connected it to the paranoia many Americans felt at the rapid change of their society under the pressure of immigration--"Ellis Island art." But early American Modernists were concerned, sometimes obsessed, with rendering peculiarly American experience. Charles Demuth (1883-1935) was fascinated by the blaring contrasts of signs and numbers on the new urban surface; John Marin (1870-1953) believed that "you cannot create...
...single picture: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. It became the star freak of the show--its bearded lady, its dog-faced boy. People compared it to a Navajo rug, a cyclone in a shingle factory, an earthquake in the subway. A dull brown painting in a Cubist idiom, its overlapping planes were partly derived from the motion-analysis photos of Etienne-Jules Marey. Its very title was ironic, almost insupportable. Nudes, in art, were not supposed to move, let alone walk downstairs. They were meant to stand or lie as still as statues. Movement suggested indecency, even though...
...also caused some scandal at the Armory Show. Picabia returned to New York in 1915, prophesying that the city would soon become the center of modernist effort because its reality had made it the modernist site to beat all others. "Your New York," he told the press, "is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses modern thinking in its architecture, its life, its spirit"--everything but its art, which Dada would supply. This image of the city as social compressor also comes out in Man Ray's neatly epigrammatic New York, 1917--a bunch of slats, stacked to mimic...
...transition to woodcuts marks an important period in both Feininger's work and German post-war works in general The process of chiseling and cutting figures in wood lent itself to Feininger's Cubist-inspired "transformation and crystallization" methods. Fragmenting and recomposing his choppy images was perfectly suited to the carving knife...