Word: picabia
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...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...
There are many claimants, from Picabia to the obscure Lithuanian Ciurlionis. But if one angles the question a little and asks who was the first painter to produce a major life's work from systematic abstraction, there is only one answer: Wassily Kandinsky, who was born in Moscow more than a century ago, in 1866, and died in France...
...display. Two abstract works by the Russian Serge Poliakoff, big blocks of carefully modelled color, can be seen on entering the exhibit, near a very subtle work in cement--"In the Shadow of a Field"--by ex-conservationist Raoul Ubac, while the plastic, organic cubism of an early Picabia is across the hall...