Word: fauvism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Othon Friesz and Raoul Dufy, he began to paint the colder northern light of Antwerp in a fauve style. But in this early work there is a sense of discomfort. Braque did not draw very well, and, as he lacked the graphic fluency of his mentors, his responses to fauvism were awkward and corseted...
...world enlaced with traditional forms, in which the idea of an avant-garde was barely conceivable and the notion of radical renewal seemed like cultural parricide. Terms like expression and the self had quite different loadings in Paris and in Tokyo. The rapid change of styles in Paris -- fauvism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism -- was bewildering. But they seemed portents of cultural renewal; so even with Japanese who were painfully aware that their country had a name in Europe for imitation, not invention, the need overran the obstacles. "Of course one has to imitate," remarked one old Paris hand, a Western-style...
...plane here, a little faceting or transparency there -- but in general the Japanese seem to have avoided it, with one exception: Yorozu Tetsugoro (1885-1927). The self-styled wild man of the Japanese expatriates ("I am a kind of walking aborigine," he proclaimed), Yorozu ran through Van Gogh and fauvism and, after returning to Japan in 1907, arrived at a frenetic mixture -- synthesis is not the right word -- of expressionism and cubism in works like Self Portrait with Red Eyes...
...many of the lesser-known things in this show -- like the dense and acerbic paintings of Degas's friend Walter Richard Sickert, or Matthew Smith's responses to fauvism, or the work of the vorticists around 1914 (Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska), or that of individuals like Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein and Paul Nash, and so on through to the post-'60s paintings of men like Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj and Howard Hodgkin -- now strike us as not just a footnote to, but an essential part of, the visual culture...
Hence its collection is uneven: strong in fauvism and the pre-cubist school of Paris but weak in surrealism, with some early Picassos, like the 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein, and the late Braques, like The Billiard Table, 1944-52, of ravishing quality; obstructed by (mostly) dull American figurative works by John Steuart Curry, Jack Levine and the like, bought with Hearn's money in the '20s and '30s, that ought to be a footnote to the American Wing; dense with fair-to-splendid examples of early American modernists (Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and others) and later...