Word: cubists
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Picasso's pre-cubist phase where he concentrated on destroying a priori space is evident here, as it was in the Matisses. A Priori space is the conventional three-dimensional, perspectively accurate depiction of depth that originated with Giotto and Pierro Della Francesca in the Renaissance...
...painted with matte gray gouache on fine linen, but they seem at first glimpse to be actual stone. So little in art is new: what Mantegna was doing with this play of illusion was not so far from the wood graining and stencils in Georges Braque's Cubist paintings more than 400 years later...
...Ashcan School -- actually counted against him. What the postwar art world liked was "spirituality" and "sublimity," the tincture of melancholy elevation. But Davis had always liked the American vernacular, the look of the street, the jostle and visual punch of signs, life imagined in jazz tempo, hard-edged, Cubist-based and infused with optimism. So that left him on the margin...
...which the bent- neck bottle of a mouth disinfectant is presented, plain and planar -- name brand, slogan and all -- as its own icon, the ancestor of Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes. But Davis' work was grounded in Cubism, as that of the later artists was not; the Cubist scheme of fragments of media culture and packaging (newspaper headlines, labels and so on), absorbed into a painterly matrix, gave Davis his way of handling the American cityscape. It was brasher than Cubism but far more attached to deliberate aesthetic construction than Pop -- and with none of the new movement's camp...
...salons and diffused through the decorative arts, especially in France. And it turned pompier, as in the morbid and overblown paintings of society artist Tamara de Lempicka. The birth of Art Deco is one of the themes of this show -- designers' homages to larger avant-garde ideas: a Cubist table lamp, for instance, or "skyscraper" furniture...