Word: picasso
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...modernism itself. As a 19-year-old tyro from Philadelphia, he exhibited in the Armory Show in 1913; and he outlived Jackson Pollock by eight years. His early model was cubism-though he did not visit Paris until 1928-and the sight of Davis grappling with the diction of Picasso and Gris, working his way through the lessons with the persistence of a man taking a correspondence course, remains very moving. For a whole year, he painted and repainted an eggbeater, a rubber glove and an electric fan. His Eggbeater No. 4, 1927-28, with its cool interlocking planes...
...theatrical high jinks, concrete-poetry recitals, chance-based collages and mock rituals. Surrealism became a common ground for bourgeois intellectuals agonized by the futility of their expected social roles. But it smacks of artificiality to confine either Dada or surrealism too closely to any group or period. Some of Picasso's paintings, from 1913 onward, are regarded as major surrealist icons by virtue of their aggressive, oneiric distortions, though he was never in any formal way a member of the movement...
...gnome-like Teshigahara, 77, is Japan's most innovative and successful master of the ancient art of ikebana, which bears about the same relationship to flower arranging as usually practiced in the West as Rachmaninoff to country rock. Within that art, Sofu is commonly referred to as "the Picasso of flowers...
...dandy of American art is a woman, Louise Nevelson. Nobody is more recognizable: the fine, blade-nosed Aztec face with its monstrous false eyelashes, like clumps of mink, is as manifestly the property of an artist as Picasso's monkey mask. The sight of Nevelson under full sail-mole-colored hunting cap, peasant flounces, Chinese brocade and wolfskin, bronze pendants clanking, boar's teeth rattling-is one of the few spectacles of complete self-possession in American life; the 19th century poet who walked his live lobster on a ribbon outside the Ritz could not have looked more...
...painted flagstones. They seem hermetic and trivial, both at once. They lack the iconic force of the flags, maps, numbers and targets. No painter ever marked time more elegantly. But there can be no summing-up of a 47-year-old in midcareer. Johns is, at present, the Picasso of en-.ropy. But even that strange position commands respect, if not always allegiance or pleasure. -Robert Hughes