Word: pre-cubist
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Picasso's pre-cubist phase where he concentrated on destroying a priori space is evident here, as it was in the Matisses. A Priori space is the conventional three-dimensional, perspectively accurate depiction of depth that originated with Giotto and Pierro Della Francesca in the Renaissance...
Hence its collection is uneven: strong in fauvism and the pre-cubist school of Paris but weak in surrealism, with some early Picassos, like the 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein, and the late Braques, like The Billiard Table, 1944-52, of ravishing quality; obstructed by (mostly) dull American figurative works by John Steuart Curry, Jack Levine and the like, bought with Hearn's money in the '20s and '30s, that ought to be a footnote to the American Wing; dense with fair-to-splendid examples of early American modernists (Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and others) and later...
...There are many references to African tribal art, but they tend to be formal and oblique. What one does not see is the same kind of quotation that artists, generally white, have taken from Africa (or their idea of Africa) since Picasso started using Bakota grave figures in his pre-cubist paintings. Picasso treated African art as raw material and cared nothing about its tribal contexts or religious meanings. As far as he, Matisse and Braque were concerned, it was made by savages: the masks and carvings were emblems of ferocity, a thrilling rupture in the smooth herd of French...
...Soviets have been gradually rehabilitating the impressionists, despite the Communist dictum that men like Renoir "reflect modern bourgeois realities.'' Last spring, in its show of French moderns, the Hermitage moved further, hung 20 Matisses, 17 Gauguins, 19 Cézannes, 21 Monets and 24 pre-Cubist Picassos. But it will probably be years before the full glory of Soviet modern-art acquisitions is considered safe enough to be seen. Modern art is still suspect. Says cautious Hermitage Director Mikhail Artamonov: "Modern Western art is not uniform. Some new paintings are quite unacceptable for us, though doubtlessly there...
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