Word: picassos
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Compared with that of Picasso or Braque, the inventors of cubism, Gris' work does seem programmed and synthesized: in its fondness for the grid and the deliberate repetition, it is a long way from the flickering mutability, the twisting disintegration of objects in newly imagined space, that gave early cubism its wildly adventurous look. Gris was a Madrileño-which was to say, a provincial, brought up in a far stodgier cultural milieu than Picasso the Catalan-and his work does not even look particularly "Spanish": no craziness, no tragedy, no genitals, no folklore...
...Paris' Rue Ravignan, known as the Bateau Lavoir, Gris was not in at the beginning. He started as a cartoonist and illustrator, and did not even start to paint until 1910. His first cubist pictures belong to 1912, five years (a long time in the avantgarde) after Picasso painted his seminal and outrageous Demoiselles d'Avignon, the five women bathers with bodies of planes and angles. Gris' importance to modern art rests on about ten years of productivity. His work weakened into phlegmatic...
...news) combined with unreal space. To complicate things further, the man at the café-melting away, like the elusive Pimpernel, into the wood work-probably depicts Gris' favorite character pulp fiction. He was a supercrook named Fantómas, whose nefarious deeds were eagerly devoured by Picasso, Apollinaire and everyone in the cubist circle. Appearing and disappearing at will, frustrating the law at every turn, Fantómas was to cubism what Superman, 50 years later, would be to Pop. He epitomized the grand game of detection, ambiguity challenging reality, that the cubists, Gris included, wanted to install...
...paintings come, in part, from disappointed tourism. The south of France has drawn artists since Van Gogh; its blue, fouled coast is speckled with monumental names, Cézanne, Renoir, Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard. Though condos, fast-food chains and jammed autoroutes from Bordighera to the Camargue have somewhat dimmed its luster, it still possesses-especially for those who have not been there-a durable allure...
...religious vestments. In the early days, just about everyone he met was famous. Even before he made his first film at 28, Buñuel tells us, he had vanquished Heavyweight Champ Jack John son at arm wrestling; he had met Jorge Luis Borges, and found him tedious; Picasso had given him a painting (which he lost), and Lorca had written poems to him (which he quotes). Later, in Holly wood, Charlie Chaplin thoughtfully ar ranged an orgy for Buñuel, and in New York, the power of the Roman Catholic Church was flexed to remove him from...