Word: fauvism
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...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...
...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...
...compared with the landscapes that surround her Ghost Ranch -- and wondered why so many words had been piled on it. Before her 30th birthday, in small watercolors of epic space like Light Coming on the Plains, 1917, she had become seraphically modernist without imitating cubism, fauvism or any other transatlantic recipes...
...reason, Rubin argues, was that modernism used primitivism when it needed to, and not before. A Fang mask or a Kota funerary effigy would have been useless to an impressionist, whose ambition was to render perceptual reality as faithfully as possible. But the drift of fauvism and especially cubism was toward the conceptual: and here the idea of representing, say, a face as a flat plane with knoblike eyes and a cylindrical funnel of a mouth was infinitely suggestive. Certainly it was convenient for Picasso to rejig the human face in terms of bladelike noses and scarification lines...