Word: picassos
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...William Rubin, had the work of a few early modern masters, among them Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, refitted in no-frills borders. Part of Rubin's rationale was that undistracting borders would help to clarify continuities between the early modern painters and their inheritors, from Picasso through Johns, whose work elsewhere in the museum is likewise in simple frames. "Very successful," says Thomas Messer, director of the nearby Guggenheim Museum, which has a reputation for simple frames. "Very institutional," says Scott Schaefer, curator of European painting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "I think...
Punk is concerned essentially with the negation of traditional forms of society: good taste, politeness, moderation in dress and volume, and the family. Painters, writers and musicians had accomplished a similar negation before any of today's punks were born. The fractured images of any of Picasso's Guernica period paintings are as visually disturbing as a youth with a safety pin through his cheek. Atonal symphonies, far more dissonant and demanding than anything a punk can create with simple feedback techniques, have existed since the days when people still listened to Glen Miller. The best indicator of the punk...
...Everything I need to know about Africa is in these objects," Picasso declared...
...Matisse's Portrait of Madame Matisse, 1913, possibly one of the dozen greatest portraits of the 20th century, was based on a mediocre Fang mask from Gabon. Sometimes, though, a modernist work would take off from an African object of the first rank. Such was the case with Picasso's bronze of Marie-Therese Walter, 1931, whose erotically swollen blimp of a nose is based on an effigy he owned of the fertility goddess Nimba from the Baga. The sight of these two sculptures confronting each other is as much a spectacle of parity as a Rubens beside...
...artists, and Picasso most of all, were enthralled by the associative power of the fetish. The otherness of tribal art was infinitely compelling, and remains so today: practically no Western sculpture in the 20th century has the sheer iconic majesty of the wooden goddess from the Caroline Islands lent to MOMA from Auckland, New Zealand, or the creepy terribilita of the British Museum's figure of the Austral Islands' god A'a, one of Pi casso's favorites. The main value of primitive art to modernism was not formal but quasi-magical. It gave the artist...