Word: picassos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rare, and always (so to speak) personal. When a deranged Hungarian-Australian tourist named Laszlo Toth attacked Michelangelo's Pieta in St. Peter's with a hammer in 1972, it was because he believed himself to be the son of God. When the future art dealer Tony Shafrazi vandalized Picasso's Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art in 1974, he moronically fancied he was making a point about art politics...
Both men realized how things already made of iron could be brought into sculpture, thus extending the aesthetics of assemblage and the found object. To see Picasso's joining two tin half-spheres -- kitchen colanders -- to form the cranium of Head of a Woman, 1929-30, or Gonzalez's recycling what appears to be a pair of scythe blades as the wings of a creature midway between angel and praying mantis, is to witness plays of the dreaming, free-associating, punning mind that seem fundamental to modernism. Iron, in the form of objects that could be almost randomly brought together...
Giacometti, by contrast, did not work in iron at all; every object by him in this show is cast bronze. He is included, presumably, because of his relations to Picasso through the Surrealist figure, because of his influence on Smith and because of the linearity of his style -- an obsessive thinning out of sculptural mass that is nevertheless modeled in a wholly traditional way on an armature, and never welded. It's true that Giacometti tended increasingly to think of sculpture as a means of connecting points in space, rather than of setting volume imposingly before...
...their fragility; in extreme cases, like the wonderful Tightrope, 1937, with its wire personages balancing on a string between two balks of wood, they are so fine as to be almost unphotographable. Real as the pleasures of early Calder are, however, they don't have the imaginative force of Picasso, Gonzalez -- or Smith...
Smith remains the true primary heir of Picasso and Gonzalez -- and, to some extent, of Giacometti, whose space constructions like The Palace at 4 A.M. inspired the young American artist in the '30s to make a series of small iron precincts and even a miniature iron house, complete with iron paintings on the walls. Curator Gimenez's choice of his work is an exemplary condensation. Beginning with those initial Surrealist images, it picks up on the early sculptures that clearly indicate the bent of his talent, such as Amusement Park, 1938, a small work that both remembers Picasso's iron...