Word: shows
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Guggenheim Museum's landmark sculpture show...
This conquest of the "planar dimension" has not, up till now, been properly explained by a museum show. Rowell has done the job with tonic intelligence, bringing together 114 sculptures done between 1912 and 1932 by 39 artists: French, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Russian, Italian and American. She has traced sculpture's passage from closed mass to open form with a precision of focus and a variety of little-known works that no earlier effort has matched. This may be the most important show of modernist sculpture in the past ten years...
...guitar that might have been lifted from one of his own cubist still lifes, an open object defined by thin planes. The folding of the tin imitated the layered, overlapped look of the paintings: it was cubism made literal. This battered-looking object is Exhibit A in the Guggenheim show. In it, space was for the first time declared to be the prime subject of sculpture, but by means traditional to painting: the flat surface, the boundary line. Since tin sheets do not ask to be stroked, as stone or bronze does, the Guitar was wholly visual sculpture, another mark...
...them was small compared with that for a radical poet like Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the link that planar sculp ture sought between art and technology was often frustrated by shortages of materials and know-how. Still, these works cast a long shadow. The most surprising aspect of the show is the quality of some of the lesser known artists whose work Curator Rowell has ferreted out. One was Katarzyna Kobro, a Russian woman who worked with Malevich and Lissitzky in the years just after the 1917 Revolution, and whose exquisitely organized sculptures of painted sheet steel radiate an un common...
...that respect, the Guggenheim's show is an interesting rebuke to historical myopia. But it is also, quite simply, a visual delight; and if any one exhibition in the U.S. may be seen as a weathercock, signaling the shift of taste away from romanticism and toward the once unpopular rigors of constructivism, this...