Word: cubists
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...prototype and practice: if his paintings of the decade 1945-55 looked a mile forward, they also looked two miles back. Their inherent structure had nothing to do with German or any other kind of modernist expressionism. It was closer to cubism, but with the turning and flickering of cubist shape given a jostling density, almost literally made flesh: a shallow grid torn and reconstituted by the wristy, virile, probing action of de Kooning's line. His two near monochrome abstractions at the end of the decade, Attic, 1949, and Excavation, invoke the body without depicting...
...when they came, their blossoming was remarkable. In fact "blossoming" is hardly the word, for it suggests a soft, floral, ethereal event, adjectives one would not pick for the tough paintings, often full of barely controlled anger, that she was to produce after 1960. Krasner's cubist background had given her a strong sense of how to manage her pictorial field as a whole, rather than preserve, in abstraction, the choice of "figure" and "background." In the best of her '50s work, like Blue Level, 1955, the play of raggy shapes and roughly sliced strips of burlap...
Living in the hatchery of cubism, the expatriates' studio in Paris' Rue Ravignan, known as the Bateau Lavoir, Gris was not in at the beginning. He started as a cartoonist and illustrator, and did not even start to paint until 1910. His first cubist pictures belong to 1912, five years (a long time in the avantgarde) after Picasso painted his seminal and outrageous Demoiselles d'Avignon, the five women bathers with bodies of planes and angles. Gris' importance to modern art rests on about ten years of productivity. His work weakened into phlegmatic...
...Parisian culture with puns and gossip, the arcane jokey language of their own group. As a former cartoonist, Gris delighted in this "Pop" view of his tunes, and it suffuses some of his best paintings. The Man at the Café, 1914, looks at first like a conventional cubist figure, the clues to its presence being the hat, the blue hand holding a newspaper, and the stein of beer with its " white froth. But if one reads the glued-on newspaper he is reading, the main story turns out to be about art forgery and how fingerprinting might be used...
...Gris' mind, this duality was part of the ever active debate over what was true and what false in cubist representation, where fragments of the real world (including the news) combined with unreal space. To complicate things further, the man at the café-melting away, like the elusive Pimpernel, into the wood work-probably depicts Gris' favorite character pulp fiction. He was a supercrook named Fantómas, whose nefarious deeds were eagerly devoured by Picasso, Apollinaire and everyone in the cubist circle. Appearing and disappearing at will, frustrating the law at every turn, Fant...