Curated by Dieter Buchhart, it covers much of his career, with museum loans to bolster privately held work. With a little over forty paintings on two floors, the show feels larger still. Georges Braque had a share in all of these. Even when a woman's profile in black crosses her willowy pose for the artist in flesh tones, she combines not just points of view but darkness and desire. When the JOUR of journal, for newspaper, floats across charcoal and wallpaper, it combines objects with their destruction and the remains of the day. When the top of a glass becomes the shape of an eye, in a diamond like a playing card, it combines object, transparency, their vision, and a token in a game. When a musical score echoes the jagged lines of guitar strings, the edge of a table, and real or simulated wood grain, they combine vision, sound, texture, tactile sensation, and their representation. Even a writer as radical as John Berger-and a critic of anything by Pablo Picasso before or after Cubism-called his popular history Ways of Seeing. ![]() From the mind to mass culture, it turned inside and out into objects before one's eyes.Īctually, people tend to remember Cubism as multiple visions within the same painting. ![]() Cubism touches every corner of Modernism like nothing else, and it did so by turning vision inside-out. Call it the spiritual or a dream, a revolution or reform, postwar America or consumer society, or maybe just a downtown bar. You name it: Blue Rider or Surrealism, Russian Constructivism or the Bauhaus, Abstract Expressionism or Pop Art-they all swept artists up in something both greater than and deeply within any of them. Modern art makes one think of visionaries. Nor should Picasso look reverent or anything less than modern, but a compact survey of his drawings allows him to flirt with both. Willem de Kooning had plenty of skill and training, and his artful quotation can make him look downright postmodern. ![]() Observation of past art did not go out of fashion with Modernism either. Raphael moved in his short life from precocity and sweetness through the High Renaissance to Mannerism without missing a beat. If Braque could paint without merely seeing, could Pablo Picasso draw like Ingres? The Frick speaks of his " Reinventing Tradition," but almost every artist tries, and some feel compelled. The most exquisite, the most powerful, and just happening to lie there not quite before one's eyes. As one Cubist news clipping wryly observes, le puis exquis, le puis puissant. Would Cubism have had the same influence if it were a movement? The question must sound preposterous-but what if Cubism was all about two painters, and what if neither of them had only a vision?įor a while, in fact, they refused one, in favor of a wider range of ideas and sensation, it gives special beauty to a gallery retrospective of Georges Braque. In New York City Georges Braque and Picasso Drawings
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |