Word: painter
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Essentially untrained as a painter, he fell in with the German Expressionists in 1910-12 by sheer brightness of character. He knew August Macke, whose ideas about pantheistic nature were to reverberate in Ernst's work right up to its end. Macke was killed in the trenches. Ernst survived the war and emerged from its troglodytic lunacy with a deep hatred of Kaiser and country...
...look like sci-fi cliche. By the '50s he was thinking illustratively rather than pictorially. To some extent he always had, but now the visions were more diffuse, and the paintings of his last decade (he died in 1976) are feebly hermetic. No matter. He was always a painter for the young; his own youth speaks to that of others. Each generation discovers him for itself, finding its instincts of rebellion confirmed by him, as by a deliciously conspiratorial uncle. The last Ernst retrospective was in 1979. There ought to be one every 15 years or so, as a public...
...same, Popova's talents as a painter could hardly have grown as fast and as confidently as they did without the security of her liberal, upper- middle-class background, the way of life the revolution mercilessly crushed. She was the adored child of a rich Moscow textile merchant, whose money enabled her to go to Paris in 1913 and study under those secondary Cubists, Jean Metzinger and Henri le Fauconnier. Even her student work -- the big studio nudes in a Cubist idiom represented in the show -- has striking analytic toughness. Its painted planes, jutting and curling in imagined space, become...
...basically too material an art for Popova. A gifted colorist, she wanted to explore what illusions of visual depth and energy a flat surface could contain. One sees this ambition unfolding phase by phase with a steadfast, though unprogrammed, logic. Malevich catalyzed her in 1915, but her series of "Painterly Architectonics" is by no means an imitation of the look of his Suprematism. They are equally inspired by the planes and colors of ancient Russian and Islamic architecture; she married an architectural historian and went as far afield as Samarkand. Occasionally her work strikes an apocalyptic, Kandinsky-like note...
...scheming Bolshevik, the Negro with his thick lips and saxophone, the slavering pervert. In here it was all David and the Apollo Belvedere, noble simplicity and calm grandeur as $ interpreted by such heirs of Michelangelo and Polyclitus as Hitler's favorite sculptor Arno Breker and his court painter Adolf Ziegler. What kind of Germany, the two shows asked, do you want...