Word: cubists
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...work must go to San Francisco; the museum has an unequaled collection of it, ranging from an emaciated and muddily impasted striding figure painted in 1934, to a trio of enormous canvases done 40 years later. The early work is of special historical interest. It illustrates Still's cubist affinities then-a painting like PH-591, which dates from 1936-37, with its sinuous line meandering among black planes, is like a Braque made with an ax-but it also shows the common root of interest in biomorphic and mythical imagery shared by Rothko, Newman and other abstract expressionists...
...looked through my studio window," he recalls, "and I found that the outside world was more beautiful than my picture." He is now 71 and at the height of his powers. What pervades his paintings is a wry and original sense of human stance and gesture; under the cubist planes of the surface lies a marked appetite for the sensuality of commonplace things. "A cabbage is a magnificent rose, which is green, which costs one franc a kilo, and which one eats." This generosity about the physical world pervades even a nominally "sinister" Helion like Exorcism, 1973 (see color page...
...supremely visual: accurate observation combined with an amazing clarity of design. The panther hammered from a sheet of gold and worn as a shield ornament in the late 7th or early 6th century B.C. contains, in its bulging, simplified planes, all the rhythmical vitality one might expect from Cubist sculpture: an epigram of predatory sinew translated into metal...
...mass audience, the old regionalist's pronouncements were oracular. He was, after all, a reformed modernist: up to 1918 he had painted "lifeless symbolist and cubist pictures," full of "my aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns." He had studied in Paris, the Antichrist's lair. So he could be believed. The rhetoric never altered; he was too ancient a drummer for that. The circumstances of his career did, and violently. For a brief time, the decade ending in 1939, he-with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood-bestrode and dominated the taste of America. His emergence, however...
...innocent art world, which New York had in the '50s-innocent not only about modern art, but to some degree about its history. It took more than a decade before the relationship of his big combines to Kurt Schwitters' tiny Merz pictures and to the formality of cubist collage could be talked about without heat and seen, not as proof of derivativeness, but as simply part of his work's ecology. Besides, the '50s were the last time a public could be provoked by art. (Since then, an overload of images has rendered...