Word: legere
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Such paintings suggest the strength of the Neue Sachlichkeit tendency to paint a world beyond the spectator's control - not Leger's confidence in technology, but glimpses of an airless place, always the city, with looming buildings, threatening, gray and crystalline, where the exact divisions between things seem to mirror the divisions and conflicts of class that concerned many of the painters. In particular, they obsessed Grosz. One of his friends called him "a Bolshevik in painting, nauseated by painting." This was not quite true, for although Grosz once declared that compared with the practical tasks of political...
...Fernand Leger standardizes the human forms with assembly-line monotony. The people of his "Multicolored Acrobats" do not show the exposed cranks and gears of Ernst's animal. Rather, the smooth, curved limbs and torsos have all the sleek, internalized mechanization of an IBM Selectric...
...show, which includes over 100 pieces, catalogs every step of Davis's career. Davis started out painting realism and moved quickly out of that stage under the influence of European post-Impressionists and cubists. Indeed the first two rooms of paintings strongly echo Picasso, Gris and Leger. Davis, as the chronology points out, was heavily involved in artists organizations, especially during the Depression, and campaigned for recognition of the political and social importance of art and artists. After the Depression, Davis developed some of his most important theories and settled into a style using brilliant colors, well-defined shapes...
Steinberg can fill a sheet with figures, each of them drawn in a different style?cubist, pointillist, child art, hatched shading, mock sculptural, hairy scribble, Leger boilerplate, art deco?and display a wide, ironic complicity with art history while making no final commitment to a "way" of drawing. The drawing works because he so obviously possesses each style. It is imitation without flattery. As a dandy, Steinberg owns all the hats in his wardrobe. A still life like Belgian Air Mail 1971, is not a "cubist-type" drawing, a thing done in homage to Braque and Picasso. It is rather...
...what turned Davis into a complete original was his perception of and enthusiasm for the city. Nothing in French art, other than Leger, resembled Davis' syncopated images of urban life. The blaring posterish color- yellows, scarlets, blacks, emerald greens, a high obtrusive fuchsia - and the writhing knots of line, the words blinking like neon signs, the beat and pulsation of the space: this was visual jazz, American-style, and in deed some of Davis' titles, like The Mellow Pad, 1945-51, were couched in the musicians' argot...