Word: picassos
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Radical changes in art come less often than we like to think, but some have been utterly fundamental. One of these was the arrival of iron as a material of sculpture. This happened in the 20th century -- about 75 years ago -- at the hands of Pablo Picasso and his older friend, the Catalan sculptor Julio Gonzalez. It signaled the first basic change in not only the materials but also the nature of the art since the invention of bronze casting, which occurred so long ago that it belongs to the domain of myth, not history...
...advent of iron is the subject of an extremely beautiful show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, curated by Carmen Gimenez, with excellent catalog essays by Dore Ashton and Francisco Calvo Serraller. "Picasso and the Age of Iron" involves three European artists -- Alberto Giacometti, Gonzalez and Picasso -- and two American ones, David Smith and Alexander Calder. Its time span is from 1928, when Picasso made an open frame of iron rods with a pinhead and two tiny startled hands and called it Figure, to Smith's maturity in the early 1960s. But its core...
...academies had been a leaner, more abstract presence -- the wire armature on which the clay or plaster was built, hidden by the later work of representation. Just as Michelangelo had imagined the figure latent in the raw marble block, hidden by the superfluities of stone, so it fell to Picasso, Gonzalez and others to imagine a second structure within the conventionally sculpted figure: a kind of iron essence, expressed in line and plane rather than continuous surface, in openness rather than solidity...
What such an art might look like, though, was not immediately apparent. With some foresight, it might have been glimpsed in Picasso's famous rusty tin Cubist Guitar of 1912 -- all planes and interstitial spaces. But it wasn't realized until 1928, when Picasso, who had spent much of that year making diagrammatic drawings for sculptures that would be executed in nothing but wire, sought out the help of Gonzalez, who taught him to weld iron. Picasso's energies, in turn, seem to have inspired in Gonzalez the daring to become an inventive sculptor in his own right. The Picasso...
...SERVICE OF TRUTH AND BEAUty, mankind has attempted many seemingly impossible tasks down through the ages. Michelangelo transformed a bare ceiling into one of the most beautiful paintings in the world. Pablo Picasso fashioned a stunning work of art out of a pair of abandoned bicycle handlebars, and Marcel Duchamp achieved similar wonders with a cast-off urinal. Now the folks at Home Box Office have topped them all by making a reasonably watchable movie out of a book about a leveraged buyout: Barbarians at the Gate, which will receive its first showing on HBO this Saturday...