Word: picassos
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Motherwell never dissembled about his sources. Not only was a sign for the human body like Figure in Black, 1947, with its mask's eyes staring from the bent trapezoid of a head, clearly derived from Picasso, but Motherwell would also write more knowledgeably about Picasso than most of his contemporaries, critics included. If the rectangular opening that kept appearing, as a promise of space beyond the picture plane, in painting after painting from the early '40s to the Open series of the late '60s and early '70s derived its authority from Matisse's Blue...
...wind stream from the blue, heat radiates from the brown. Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic, a lengthy series that lasted some 30 years and ended after the death of Franco and the restoration of parliamentary democracy in Spain, are best seen as an American pendant to Picasso's Guernica, though with different imagery. Black in the hands of some painters-a Manet, a Goya, a Matisse-is a color, not an absence of light; and el negro Motherwell, as the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti called it, sometimes acquires a walloping chromatic power...
Basically, Picasso cared nothing about civilization or its discontents. He admired, and tried to embody, the child and the savage, both prodigies of appetite. To feel, to seize, to penetrate, to abandon: these were the verbs of his art, as they were of his cruelly narcissistic relationships with the "goddesses or doormats," as he categorized the women in his life. Hence, the energy of The Embrace, 1925, its lovers grappling on a sofa in their orifice-laden knot of apoplectic randiness. Hence, too, the fear (amounting sometimes to holy terror, but more often to a witch-killing misogyny) that emanates...
...Picasso's climactic work of the '30s was Guernica, 1937. In its way it is a classicizing painting, not only in its friezelike effect, but also in its details. The only modern image in it is a light bulb; but for its presence, the mural would scarcely seem to belong in the world of Heinkel bombers and incendiary bombs. Yet its black, white and gray palette also suggests the documentary photo, while the texture of strokes on the horse's body is more like collaged newsprint than hair...
...Picasso was the most influential artist of his own time; for many lesser figures a catastrophic influence, and for those who could deal with him-from Braque, through Giacometti, to de Kooning and Arshile Gorky-an almost indescribably fruitful one. Today such a career seems inconceivable. No one even shows signs of assuming the empty mantle. If ever a man created his own historical role and was not the pawn of circumstances, it was that Nietzschean monster from Malaga...