Word: picassos
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...before anyone else, that they are uniquely equipped with social antennae that tell us what's wrong with the world before other folk can cotton on to it. Apart from a small number of gifted exceptions, all dead, there is very little evidence for this piety. What supports it? Picasso's Stalinism? Josef Beuys' mystagogic vaporings? Certainly nothing in this Biennial, whose political messages contribute nothing fresh, and little of intelligence, to America's quarrels and complaints about gender, race and marginality...
...legs, they burgeon in time as well as in space, thus seeming to predict Futurism. And indeed, just as Daumier's drawings contain his prehensile relation to the past, so they look forward to the more modern artists: the massive strong men and pathetic acrobats of Picasso's Rose Period are already in Daumier's carnival scenes. Giacometti was deeply influenced not only by Daumier's drawing but by his series of tiny, malignant caricature-sculptures in clay known as Les Celebrites du Juste Milieu...
...debts to Picasso raise a certain irony. Starting around 1907, Picasso got a whole repertoire of forms from African art; Lam took some of them -- the shield masks, the displacement and distortion of limbs -- as a means of reconnecting with his own African inheritance. He was not the first "provincial" to discover in Paris a means of using his local identity; he took what he needed (not only from Picasso but also from Max Ernst and much lesser figures like Hans Bellmer, and even from Jean Cocteau's hypermannered / line drawings) to find what he was. Lam's version...
...with breasts but equipped with phallic chins. The second is the persistence of religious motifs that no European artist was likely to grasp but that were of deep significance to Lam -- the symbols of Santeria ceremonies. Why do Lam's women have heads like horses? Not, fundamentally, because of Picasso and Guernica but because in Santeria ceremonies the medium is known as a caballo, a "horse" carrying the spirit...
...more a tribal artist than Picasso. But his primitivism came from inside, and part of the originality of his art lies in his effort to take back his gods from the man who, with such momentous consequences for art 30 years earlier, had appropriated them...