Word: picassos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...demonic obsessive. He dealt with the question Why should your fantasies matter? by insisting that he was such an extraterrestrial creature, so tuned to the zeitgeist through the trembling antennas of his waxed mustache, that he could not be ignored. Armored in paradox, he was a household word rivaling Picasso in fame, at least in the eyes of a mass public that knew him as an eccentric first and a painter second...
...Unlike Picasso, however, Dali in the last few decades of his life produced little but kitsch. The perfunctory replays of images from his inventive youth -- the burning giraffes, androgynous St. Johns of the Cross and nudes with chewing-gum hips -- were printed in tens of thousands of "rare" or limited works; this was art sleaze, surrealism pathetically embracing the ethos of the Franklin Mint. Dali's last years, surrounded by flacks and barracuda (from whom he was, to put it mildly, not protected by his wife Gala, who died in 1982), were a cautionary horror. Several years ago, when...
...solidity that young Cezanne would emulate, along with the pasty, almost mortared paint that evokes their surfaces. His rolling waves, marbled with foam as solidly as a steak with fat, reappear on the other side of the Atlantic in Winslow Homer's seapieces at Prout's Neck in Maine. Picasso would do versions of the sleeping girls on the banks of the Seine. In fact, Courbet has always been a painter's painter, because the scope of his appetite could show others how not to be afraid of their own vulgarity. His career reminds us that great and idiotic artists...
...probably best remembered for the photographs he took of his friends, including Joyce, Hemingway and Picasso. Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray (Abbeville; 348 pages; $55) reproduces these pictures, of course, but much else as well. Ray flourished in Paris during the 1920s and '30s as a painter and a maker of often whimsical objects, such as a flatiron with a row of tacks attached. Photography was almost an afterthought, a means of recording his sometimes perishable constructions. But Ray's camera also captured an era -- when art belonged to Dada -- that this book scrupulously assembles and preserves...
...Picasso went through his Rose and Blue Periods, and now his works have taken on a greenish hue. At least that is how investors see them. Betting that fine art will appreciate more quickly than stocks and other investments that have been sluggish since the Black Monday crash, high rollers have sent auction prices for masterworks skyrocketing to unheard of levels. Earlier this month a 1923 Picasso painting titled Birdcage was auctioned for a record $15.4 million, only to be topped four days later by the sale of the 1901 Motherhood for $24.8 million. Then last week a 1905 gouache...