Word: picabia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...inherited content, in the hope of freeing life itself. Chance, ambiguity, insult, nonsense, anything would serve, if it promised to break the crust. Above all, there was irony: the indifference of Duchamp, -the attacks on the social jugular perpetrated by German Dadaists like George Grosz and John Heartfield, and Picabia's drawings, which make mock of the cult of the machine. When this battery of anarchic techniques moved to Paris in the '20s, colliding with a long but temporarily dormant tradition of romanticism, surrealism was the result...
...York Cézannists, the traumatic blow of the 1913 Armory Show (partly reconstituted here, with 19 of its more aggressively modern works, including Duchamp's then infamous Nude Descending a Staircase), and the absorption of cubism by New York, which was itself, as the Dadaist Picabia remarked, "the only cubist town in the world." And so on to the surrealist artists who, sponsored by Peggy Guggenheim in the '30s and '40s, helped provoke the climactic movement of the early American avantgarde: abstract expressionism...
...Chardin. Despite a few contemporary intrusions (newspaper headlines, printed tickets, linoleum), the subjects of cubism were classical, traditional. They ignored the technology, whose scale, speed, ingenuity and arrogant newness so captivated poets like Guillaume Apollinaire, Filippo Marinetti and Blaise Cendrars, or painters like Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia -and Delaunay. The machine culture extolled by these early modernists of the Belle Epoque is our own archaeology, but we cannot revive the mixture of innocent awe and millenarian hope with which they confronted it. Like the faith that raised Chartres, that has gone...
Perhaps the most interesting of Dove's early works was a series of about 25 assemblages he did between 1924 and 1930, including Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry (1924). It owes something to Picabia (who, some years before, had done a number of "object-portraits"-Stieglitz as a camera and so forth), but the fascinating aspect today is how prophetic this small image is. No doubt Dove meant the folding inch-rule that runs round the portrait like a frame to be a gruff joke-how do you measure the fictional space of a painting? But that joke, 35 years...
Mellow has fine vignettes from the '20s and '30s. Francis Picabia, the rich, eccentric Cuban painter-owner of 100 autos in his lifetime-darts in and out of the narrative. "If you want clean ideas, you must change them as often as your shirts," he advised Gertrude. Her triumphant American tour in 1934 is a familiar story, but Mellow has new anecdotes, such as renting a You-Drive-Yourself car in Chicago because Gertrude was enchanted by the firm's name...