Word: picassos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...exhibit also provides a deftly culture-bound experience. Lichtenstein is nothing if not erudite, and to see him parodying established modern masterpieces (Matisse's Red Studio, or the cubist work of Picasso and Juan Gris, or Carlo Carra's Red Horseman) is to see a very informed mind at work, particularly at obscure levels of parody. How, for instance, does one render the odd ambiguities and shifts of cubist or futurist painting in terms of this rigidly determinate dot-and-line style? Of course, it is not paintings but reproductions that Lichtenstein parodies; reproduction itself reduces...
Whether this point is worth making over and over again, at such length and great expense to collectors, seems moot-though not to Cowart, who detects in Lichtenstein's ability to apply his method an almost Picasso-like energy. "Tomorrow he could take Renaissance, Classical or other known subjects or, on the other hand, quickly invent a new vocabulary of images," Cowart writes in the catalogue. Perhaps, but would it matter? What one misses in a large proportion of the work on view in St. Louis is, simply, the sense of necessity-an engagement deeper than style...
...that art history was continuous, that no fundamental break had occurred between the high traditions of European classicism (exemplified by Paolo Uccello in the 15th century and Ingres in the 19th, both of whom he worshiped) and the work of the founding fathers of modernism: Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso. To understand one, you had to work through the other. Gorky was under no illusions about how much time that would take; in fact, it would be almost 20 years before he found a pictorial syntax entirely...
...Weary of It All worldlings of London, Ellington did for the smart, sassy Take the "A " Train Harlem-Manhattan axis. This mood resonates throughout the show, particularly in Set Designer Tony Walton's scenic imagination. He inscribes the Cotton Club in neon across the night sky rather as Picasso painted with a flashlight in the dark. Through dark blue and white lighting, a flight of stairs becomes a piano keyboard to prance...
Satie suffers most. His featherweight Parade owes its place in theatrical history largely to Picasso's sets and costumes. The story of carnival players trying to lure a crowd into their act is trampled by the arrival of weary soldiers from the front, still wearing gas masks. Nor is there any support from Gray Veredon's pallid, inert choreography. (Leonide Massine created the original dances.) As Harlequin, Gary Chryst works hard, but his role is never allowed to gain momentum...