Clement Greenberg and Modernist Aesthetics Clement Greenberg was a rare character in history: the right person in the right place at the right time, writing the right things to the right people. A New York intellectual and art critic, Greenberg was uniquely positioned...
COLLAGES, CONSTRUCTIONS, AND COLOR Synthetic Cubism eliminated mimetic representation in favor of using direct materials directly. The parts of a Cubist collage are large and visible, distinct and separate. The design is stressed nakedly and subject matter is...
ANALYTIC CUBISM One could ask the question, when did “Cubism” begin? Some art historians consider a single painting of 1907, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as the beginning. But that would be assuming that Picasso was the most important Cubist artist. The problem...
THE CUBISTS AND THEIR CIRCLE Today Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) are considered to be the “True Cubists,” to borrow a phrase from art historian, Edward Fry. But at the time Cubism was famous or infamous with the Parisian public,...
CUBISM AND ITS CONTEXT Perhaps more than any other major art movement of the first half of the Twentieth Century, Cubism is both transitional and Janus-faced in its response to the decades of changes of the Nineteenth Century. On one hand, the Cubist artists shared...
Modernism in New York City Why and How did the impetus for Modernist painting move from Paris to New York? This podcast traces the historical and artistic reasons that resulted in New York becoming the center of avant-garde painting the Fifties. The presence of the...
