Word: cubists
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...years. His efforts have been labelled "barefoot inconsequentiality," "a much-needed shot in the backside," "self-indulgent and camp," and "the principal creative force in America's modern dance." And Cunningham himself has been both scorned as a fraud and hailed as a revolutionary in the tradition of the Cubist painters. At this point, most dance enthusiasts would probably agree with Barnes that "it is easy to idolize or hate Mr. Cunningham, but terribly difficult to be fair...
There was a time, long past, when modern art was thought dangerous. Its subversive reputation rested on two movements, Dada and surrealism. From them, most subsequent avant-gardes have sprung. Cubist paintings by Georges Braque now look about as threatening as a pastoral scene by Nicolas Poussin. But most of the "radical" gestures in these dying years of the avant-garde have emerged from Dada or surrealist precedents. The swarm of prototypes is so thick that when a Los Angeles body artist, a few years ago, created an "event" by shooting a pistol at a jet aircraft passing over Venice...
...vertical-horizontal grid, or held like parts of a collage in shallow framing boxes; those formal devices, along with the shapes themselves (the jig-sawed edge of a plank recalling the side of a Braque guitar) allude to cubism. But Nevelson's work, although grounded in a cubist syntax, has very different aims. It is addressed, above all, to mystery. Unified by the black paint, the thousands of objects that make up Mrs. N's Palace shed their identity. They do not become sinister -this is no mere haunted house-but they do become less knowable, withdrawn from...
...carved out of a single block of black soapstone. The figures are huddled together. They are heavy, clumsy and coarse-featured, but oddly uncertain, despite their solidarity. Likewise, a carved hunter seems very much at the mercy of his surroundings. His axe raised and face contorted, he twists, almost Cubist, with a tremendous tension that must be a mixture of determination to kill his prey and fear, always fear. From warm and comfortable libraries it is easy to exclaim at the savagery of such an existence. It is harder to imagine what it must really feel like living there...
...slow realization in America that serious art is indivisible, that the mere fact of being American does not conscript a painter into a doomed Oedipal struggle with his European ancestors, that the battlegrounds of art history soon revert to pastures. There is no secret about Motherwell's sources: cubist collage, surrealism, Matisse. In fact, his own collages -perhaps the most consistently beautiful body of work produced by any artist in the past five years-could not exist without the example of Matisse's découpages. His natural tone as a painter is probably the closest any American...