Word: picassian
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Diego Rivera was born a hundred years ago, in 1886, and he died of cancer in 1957: 71 years, not a long life by Picassian standards, but a staggeringly exuberant and productive one. All his attributes as an artist, including his sometimes overweening vulgarity, were cast in a large mold. He became a symbol, the key figure in cultural transactions between North and Central America in the first half of the 20th century. He played his role for Mexico, part ambassador and part genius loci, to the hilt. His energy had a titanic quality: he covered many acres of wall...
...case of Giorgio de Chirico is one of the most curious in art history. An Italian, born in 1888 and raised partly in Greece-where his father, an engineer, planned and built railroads-he led a long, productive life, almost Picassian in length; he died in 1978. He had studied in Munich, and in his early 20s, under the spell of a symbolist painter named Arnold Böcklin, he began to produce a series of strange, oneiric cityscapes. When they were seen in Paris after 1911, they were ecstatically hailed by painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Eluard...
...inventions of necessity slowly gave way to the needs of mere performance. Picasso's sculpture retained its intensity almost to the end, but his painting did not, and this became clear after 1950. Without doubt, MOMA'S great exhibition ends on a dying fall. The Picassian energy is still there, masquerading as inspiration, but too often it ends as a form of visual conjuring. Was he growing bored with his own virtuosity? Impossible to know. Since anything could be converted into a Picasso, and into a Picasso, and thence into gold, he suffered the dilemma of Midas twice over. This...
...that.) So folk art includes the minutely stitched embroideries over which the dutiful daughters of urban merchants strained their young eyes, no less than such humble ornaments as the chalkware statuettes cast from plaster by itinerant peddlers-of which a brightly spotted goat with striped horns and a Picassian leer (see color page) is one amusing example...
...trace the motifs-the women and children, the reclining lovers, the toreadors and satyrs-and observe in what relationship they stand to the rest of Picasso's long dialogue with such themes. Unfortunately, none of this makes the paintings themselves any better. Under the pressure of haste, the Picassian style became a parody and at last a forgery of itself...