Word: cubists
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...absorb space into its own fabric. One of the key moments in this development came in 1912, when Pablo Picasso, then 31, snipped and bent some sheet metal into the semblance of a guitar. It was a guitar that might have been lifted from one of his own cubist still lifes, an open object defined by thin planes. The folding of the tin imitated the layered, overlapped look of the paintings: it was cubism made literal. This battered-looking object is Exhibit A in the Guggenheim show. In it, space was for the first time declared to be the prime...
...curious thing was that he had so little natural talent as an artist; no fluency, little relish. Magritte's paintings from the early '20s are painfully bad, academic cubism-as awkward, in their way, as the cubist paintings of another great ideas man of our time, Marcel Duchamp. Magritte had a poor sense of color, and his drawing was mere tracing; the paint surface is as dead as an old fingernail...
...85th birthday now. It is doubtful whether any other English artist has had a comparable effect on the development of abstract art. For several decades, his muted, delicately cut reliefs and abstracted images of still life and landscape formed the main link between English art and the cubist-constructivist tradition in Europe. Nicholson was born too late, and in the wrong country, to be one of the inventors of this tradition. Instead he became one of its most gifted, sensitive and celebrated propagators...
That sense of reality in the midst of abstraction, of the painting as an object rather than an image, would stay with Nicholson. It is not much to the fore in his first tentative cubist paintings, but it is evident in the severely geometric white reliefs Nicholson did in the 1930s under the spell of constructivism and Mondrian, and it pervades his later work. The viewer is always aware of material gently asserting itself: how the tobacco-brown hardboard, rubbed and glazed with a pow dery white or blue that clings to its sur face like fog to a headland...
...assimilations. The splayed, unideal awkwardness of the figures, and the way they appear half buried in the ground, can be traced to Degas's bronzes. The softly modeled, bulbous heads with their almost genital mouths come straight out of Picasso in the early '30s, as does the sense of cubist rotation; and so forth. But such a catalogue would not take account of Frank's originality...