Word: picassos
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pope went on to explain how an artist, by manipulating one of these three elements, could create the illusion of space or light, could create a mode in his work that is linear, sculptural, pictorial or visual. The exhibit uses familiar works from the Fogg's collection-works by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Copley and Tiepolo-as examples of these modes. The idea is grand, but a grand result never materializes. The exhibit is not organized with the idea that someone who knows nothing about color might want to explore it. That jargon is obscure and not explained is one example...
...still life. Still life was the test bed of cubism-the static arrangement of homely objects, a glass, a bottle, a bowl, a newspaper, some cards or grapes, which could bear all the twisting and rotation and chopping that the cubist eye demanded. With a few rare exceptions, like Picasso's famous portrait of Kahnweiler or Gris's 1912 portrait of Picasso, the human figure, mutable and livery and emotionally expressive as it is, was not the ideal cubist subject. Distortion of the face or the body becomes a sort of violation in the interest of form...
When he did paint the figure, Gris resorted to its most masklike aspect: that of Pierrot, whose sad face and bright costume were among Picasso's favorite motifs too. But when Picasso dealt with clowns and circus performers, there was a pathos behind the image that extended back to Watteau. The Picassos also refer to the late 19th century vision of the artist as an exalted clown and are tinged with autobiography. In Gris, it is solely the interlocking shapes, checkerboard lozenge cloth and elliptical buttons that count...
...Guitar, whose hot crimsons and acid stripes of green wall paper go far beyond the sober grays and ochres that Gris normally favored, tells us nothing of any significance about the nature of musical instruments; nor can it be said to push the analysis of form as far as Picasso or Braque were taking it at that time. But it is a marvelously controlled arrangement: frozen music...
...more nat ural to make subject X coincide with a painting that one gets to know rather than to make painting X coincide with a known subject." Composition, in short, gives us our sense of reality. In this way, Gris was the most formal of all the cub ists. Picasso's formality was modified by his enormous appetite, Braque's by his aristocratic fervor, Leger's by his blunt populism, but Gris was obsessed by shape and only by shape...