Word: giotto
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...were approaching Florence, the city of Michelangelo, of Giotto, of Raphael. The Uffizi, a Florence art gallery, had been bombed the month before and we were somewhat apprehensive...
...Piombo, were shredded by flying glass. No doubt the terrorists, whoever they were -- and Italian authorities seem to be in little doubt that the beleaguered Mafia set the bomb -- would have much preferred to have taken out Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Michelangelo's Doni Tondo and perhaps a Giotto or two. But as an image of unrepentant terrorist power striking back against the Italian state, the bombing of the Uffizi could hardly have been improved upon. Florentine tourism may plummet. No Italian museum or church, however great or venerated, can be considered safe from this new breed of butchers...
...learned about this tension and its anxieties from Cezanne. But there has never been a great figurative artist who did not feel and exemplify it. It can be as poignant in Giotto or even in Poussin as it is in Cezanne or Matisse. For Matisse it was of prime importance, whereas in abstract art it tends to fall away, because one end of the cord is no longer anchored in the world and its objects. This is not an argument against abstraction, but it helps explain why, in those abstract paintings that derive from Matisse, one so rarely feels...
Picasso's pre-cubist phase where he concentrated on destroying a priori space is evident here, as it was in the Matisses. A Priori space is the conventional three-dimensional, perspectively accurate depiction of depth that originated with Giotto and Pierro Della Francesca in the Renaissance...
...catalog's nagging about the "mainstream" seems all the more pointless because Bearden possessed a deep aesthetic education: he was immersed in the self-sufficient culture of Western painting from Giotto right through to his own time, as well as in African art. It may be that curator Sharon F. Patton thought she was paying him some kind of compliment in writing that "like Pollock, de Kooning . . . and Rothko, Bearden, too, rejected the modernist tradition," but this is nonsense: none of those artists, Bearden least of all, did any such thing...