Word: cubists
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...many references to African tribal art, but they tend to be formal and oblique. What one does not see is the same kind of quotation that artists, generally white, have taken from Africa (or their idea of Africa) since Picasso started using Bakota grave figures in his pre-cubist paintings. Picasso treated African art as raw material and cared nothing about its tribal contexts or religious meanings. As far as he, Matisse and Braque were concerned, it was made by savages: the masks and carvings were emblems of ferocity, a thrilling rupture in the smooth herd of French metaphor painting...
Right from the start, Dali was a glacial opportunist with weak powers of formal invention. He was also precocious and adroit, and so, as one might expect, his early work is an anthology of secondhand manners. He begins as a late-Picasso cubist, turning out bland art deco still lifes that contain a few premonitions of his later imagery; the lank, droopy fish in Moonlit Still Life, 1927, for example, predicts the flaccidity that was to appear in his soft watches and piano lids. But he did not find a style until he came to Paris and met the surrealists...
DIED. Sonia Delaunay, 94, pioneering modernist painter and seminal designer of the art deco look; in Paris. Ukrainian-born Sonia Terk moved to Paris in 1905 and made a splash as an innovative colorist. In 1910 she married Cubist Robert Delaunay, whose work and thought came to overshadow and fuse with her own. While her painting made its mark only after his death in 1941, she established herself in the '20s by applying abstract principles of color and geometry in designing books, ceramics, costumes for Serge Diaghilev and fabrics for Coco Chanel...
...woven into the American sense of the epic-and in painting, Still is its living example. His entire output is a repudiation of the cult of the "well-made picture." From the beginning, Still's art-unlike, say, de Kooning's-set itself in opposition to the cubist tradition with its small scale, ambiguities of space and geometric calibration. What he wanted, and had found by 1947, was a much simpler, grander and more declarative kind of structure: opaque, ragged planes of color rearing up the surface, emphatic in their brush-work-none of the characteristic cubist tonal...
...zanne and, above all, Matisse (Bruce once lent Picasso money, but refused to take his art seriously: it was too showy and volatile for him.) His homages to Matisse never ended. Matisse's insistence on achieving structure through local color contrast lies behind Bruce's post-cubist compositions of 1916, in which he tried, not altogether successfully, to fuse color with the implied movement of sculpture and the actual movements of jazz dance...