Word: cubists
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...century. To compare such objects with their European responses, at this late date, is to enter a strange chamber of mirrors: we now tend to see African art in terms of cubism; one musical instrument in a glass case at the Met, a Zaire harp, is quite simply a cubist guitar plucked out of Picasso's paint of 1915 and materialized in three dimensions. Primitivism owes its prestige, in the West, to modernism...
...French abstraction. Even the best talents involved in it, like Nicolas de Staël (1914-55), now look somewhat mannered and superficial; no wonder that the paintings of the New York School had such a traumatic impact on their aesthetic environment. Nothing could be tamer than the late-cubist scaffolding, the tidy compartmenting of the surface that provided the formal recipes of artists like Serge Poliakoff and Maurice Estève. Then there were the "religious" abstractionists, like Alfred Manessier, with their mock stained glass; and the gestural painters, like the appalling Georges Mathieu...
...prodigy to turn pro. The 112-page result contains three dozen "tricks" for solving the cube (using logic rather than math), as well as a chapter on "Cube Maintenance" (to loosen a stiff cube, "put a blob of Vaseline on the mechanism"). With 250,000 copies of the cubist's book in print, a Penguin executive marvels: "It's the biggest, runaway, immediate success we have had since we published Lady Chatterley's Lover in paperback...
...exhibit also provides a deftly culture-bound experience. Lichtenstein is nothing if not erudite, and to see him parodying established modern masterpieces (Matisse's Red Studio, or the cubist work of Picasso and Juan Gris, or Carlo Carra's Red Horseman) is to see a very informed mind at work, particularly at obscure levels of parody. How, for instance, does one render the odd ambiguities and shifts of cubist or futurist painting in terms of this rigidly determinate dot-and-line style? Of course, it is not paintings but reproductions that Lichtenstein parodies; reproduction itself reduces...
...twiddler who can solve all six sides is known as a cubist or cubemeister. Rather than risk such status, most mortals might better heed the advice of Marc Ingenoso, a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin: "I think it's wise never to pick the thing...