Word: picassos
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...Weber who persuaded the photographer Alfred Stieglitz to mount a Picasso show in 1911 at Stieglitz's pioneering 291 Gallery in New York City. That exhibition, Picasso's first in the U.S., included at least some of his newest Cubist images. For budding American modernists like Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, it was a first glimpse of work that would transform their own. Later the inexhaustible Stuart Davis came across Picasso's work and likewise reunderstood himself. In the 1920s Davis saw the broad, sharp-edged, irregularly shaped planes of color in some of Picasso's later Cubist work...
...through the 1920s Picasso's work found its way fitfully into the U.S., through occasional, short-lived exhibitions or dim black-and-white reproductions. But when the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) opened in Manhattan in 1929, it allowed for the first time the permanent display of a few real Picassos in the city where nearly all of the most alert American artists were gathered. That is what happened to The Studio, which Picasso completed in 1928. It was first seen briefly in the U.S. five years later. But by 1935 it had found its way into MOMA's permanent...
Identifying the routes through which he made his way into the awareness of American artists and the uses they made of him is the nicely executed purpose of "Picasso and American Art," a new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York that continues there through Jan. 28 before moving on to San Francisco and Minneapolis, Minn. It's a show, by the way, that might just as well be called "Big Daddy." For artists seeking a way forward, Picasso was the classic Oedipal father, the man who had to be dealt with, digested and finally overthrown...
...first they had to learn that he existed at all. That turns out to be a story that begins with the painter Max Weber, a Russian Jewish émigré to New York City. It was Weber who brought the first Picasso canvas to the U.S., in 1909, on his return from a four-year stay in Paris, where he had befriended the indispensable Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, cocksure tastemakers and champions of Picasso. By that year Picasso and Braque were already off and running through the first stages of Cubism. Meanwhile, advanced American painting, such...
Gorky, who would spend years appropriating the successive styles of Picasso (plus Kandinsky's and Miro's) until he had them fully digested, apprenticed himself with typical fierceness to The Studio, to its subtracted forms, flat surfaces and shallow space. After the Tinkertoy intricacies of Cubism, this was Picasso glancing in the direction of Mondrian, arriving at something close to the railway armatures of hard-edge abstraction. In 1936, after three years of study and effort, Gorky replied with Organization, his own breakthrough into a new understanding of how soft form could coexist with hard...