Word: elderfield
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...paintings themselves. How do they look now, 70 years later? A splendid exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, sponsored by SCM Corporation and the National Endowment for the Arts, supplies the means to an answer. The museum's curator of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield, has assembled 114 works by 22 artists under the title "The 'Wild Beasts': Fauvism and Its Affinities." The title is presumably ironic, since the last impression the MOMA wants to give is that Fauve painting might keep so much as an erg of its old offensive power...
Those who still cling to a belief in the "revolutionary" powers of art will no doubt be irritated, but the appropriateness of Elderfield's approach is borne out by the very first room of the show, which holds two celebrated and once controversial Fauve paintings: Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupte...
Soon the swollen contours and lush col ors of paintings like Braque's Still Life with Pitchers, 1906, would give way to the austerities of cubism. The demands of more legible structure and more com plicated feeling drew Matisse away from the style he had largely invented. As Elderfield notes in the catalogue, "Matisse's ideal voluptuous world only fully emerged when Fauvism had ended, and could only be created by renouncing that part of it he felt to be excessive...