Word: picassos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PICASSO AND BRAQUE: PIONEERING CUBISM, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. The title tells all: two giants, and the origins of a style that shook -- and shaped -- the rest of the century. Through...
...Semitic), to Muslims (what about those scenes of false prophets in hell with Muhammad?) or, for that matter, to atheists offended by the intrusion of religious propaganda into a museum. A radical feminist could plausibly argue that her "nonreligious" beliefs were offended by the sexism of Rubens' nudes or Picasso's Vollard Suite. Doubtless a fire worshiper could claim that the presence of extinguishers in a theater was repugnant...
...assemblages and collage- filled scrapbooks seek an awkward beauty in combinations of found objects and unwanted rubbish. Such pieces as his Family Tree, 1986-88, serve as vivid symbols of the appropriationist free-for-all that is Japanese pop culture today -- a tsunami of Mickey Mouse trinkets, teriyaki burgers, Picasso calendars, Swatches and more. They are also dispassionate records of life in what Ohtake calls an "information supermarket," an environment in which traditional Japanese cultural values are up for grabs, along with everything else...
Agreeable to all parties, of course, is the rub. It will always be politically safer to fund an exhibit of old masters than an exhibit of unproven work. Two weeks ago at a meeting in his office, Yates confronted NEA critic Armey with a Picasso painting of the Crucifixion, which offended many people in the 1930s. Armey admitted that he was not offended by the Picasso, but did not concede anything about Mapplethorpe. Armey warned that if the Mapplethorpe catalog is plunked down on the table during the debate on NEA funding, its budget would be "blown...
That is why, however incongruously, some Renis call to mind "classical" Picasso in the early '20s: both are parodies, Reni's part-subliminal and Picasso's wholly deliberate, of the same antique fantasy of ideal beings on the Mediterranean shore. The point is made by Reni's Bacchus and Ariadne, with its enameled colors, its air of travesty -- one doesn't believe for a second in jilted Ariadne's grief, but one does wonder what her right hand is about to do -- and its iron-butterfly stylishness. This is an idyll that makes no bones about its own artificiality. Brilliance...