Word: trapezoidal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...guide, with his spear and tribal finery, the yellow-and-black-bead cords crisscrossed on his chest, the tops of his ears sprouting the bead horns that gave the Samburu warrior, Toad thought, an air of medieval imp. Toad admired Lutupen's sense of style. Lutupen had slipped a trapezoid of broken mirror under his bead headband for decoration, so that he now had a kind of third eye, a window in the center of his forehead that flashed as he slipped along through the forest...
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...
This is especially true of the Open paintings, which consist of broad fields of color whose only additional feature is an HANSNAMUTH incomplete rectangle or trapezoid, formed by three or four lines of charcoal or black paint, that seems to give access to a field behind the field. This enclosure may be strict-edged or fuzzily tremulous, but it always conveys the impression of architectural form-a window or a door, a passage from inside to outside. A painting like Summer Open with Mediterranean Blue, 1974, creates a strikingly concise yet opulent impression of landscape by these pared means...