Word: gonzalez
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...walking wounded extends further. Boris Yeltsin in Russia and Poland's Lech Walesa were heroes in opposition, but in power have revealed feet of clay. Deng Xiaoping in China is on his last legs, with no sign so far that anyone of comparable vision will succeed him. Felipe Gonzalez, the boy wonder of Spain a decade ago, barely squeaked by in national elections last month and is still struggling to form a minority government. In New Delhi a press commentary calls P.V. Narasimha Rao "the Prime Muddler of India...
With his studied style, Roberto Robaina Gonzalez looks more like a manager of a rock band than a Marxist model. Yet Robaina, at 37, exemplifies the new face of Cuba. Two months ago, Fidel Castro surprised Havana by picking the man he affectionately calls Robertico, a math teacher who speaks only Spanish, as Foreign Minister. U.S. diplomats dismissed him as "dynamic but dumb." Havana's bureaucrats were speechless: in his previous job as head of the Union of Communist Youth, Robaina had wooed the young with discos and salsa music -- and those T shirts. Even Fidel had a public laugh...
Both men realized how things already made of iron could be brought into sculpture, thus extending the aesthetics of assemblage and the found object. To see Picasso's joining two tin half-spheres -- kitchen colanders -- to form the cranium of Head of a Woman, 1929-30, or Gonzalez's recycling what appears to be a pair of scythe blades as the wings of a creature midway between angel and praying mantis, is to witness plays of the dreaming, free-associating, punning mind that seem fundamental to modernism. Iron, in the form of objects that could be almost randomly brought together...
...fragility; in extreme cases, like the wonderful Tightrope, 1937, with its wire personages balancing on a string between two balks of wood, they are so fine as to be almost unphotographable. Real as the pleasures of early Calder are, however, they don't have the imaginative force of Picasso, Gonzalez -- or Smith...
Smith remains the true primary heir of Picasso and Gonzalez -- and, to some extent, of Giacometti, whose space constructions like The Palace at 4 A.M. inspired the young American artist in the '30s to make a series of small iron precincts and even a miniature iron house, complete with iron paintings on the walls. Curator Gimenez's choice of his work is an exemplary condensation. Beginning with those initial Surrealist images, it picks up on the early sculptures that clearly indicate the bent of his talent, such as Amusement Park, 1938, a small work that both remembers Picasso's iron...