Word: picassoan
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Dates: during 1983-1983
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...pictorial field as a whole, rather than preserve, in abstraction, the choice of "figure" and "background." In the best of her '50s work, like Blue Level, 1955, the play of raggy shapes and roughly sliced strips of burlap has an impacted pictorial density. She wanted to combine Picassoan drawing, gestural and probing, with Matissean color. There are direct homages to Matisse in the show, like the lacy cut-paper silhouettes of Blue and Black, 1951-53; and the Picassoan body surfaces too, a fleshy phantom, as in Visitation, 1957-73, an allusion, it seems, to Picasso's Girl...
...black frames that evoke the deep shadow of doors in light-struck village walls. But out of these signs Motherwell has fashioned a resonant and funereal sequence of images that, despite its repetitions (when in doubt, paint an Elegy), is one of the few sustained tragic utterances in post-Picassoan art. He has always been faithful to the abstract expressionist dictum (which he helped formulate) that subject matter is crucial...
Smith was an extremely fecund artist. One array of steel parts clanked down and pushed around on the cement floor of his studio could set off a train of associations that led with Picassoan abruptness to a whole group of pieces. For this reason, the National Gallery's show, curated by Art Historian E.A. Carmean, concentrates on the role of series in Smith's work, on how sculptural sets arose out of particular opportunities. The show also has much to say about how material determines imagery in Smith's work. But above all, it is an aesthetic...
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