In the early 1920s, in response to the industrial age and increasing consumerism, Stuart Davis began to incorporate commercial goods and advertising graphics into his art. Edison Mazda (1924), with its flattened space and collage-like composition, resembles the Cubist still lifes of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. But rather than portraying pipe racks and candlesticks, Davis includes a contemporary manufactured object: a blue, seventy-five watt light bulb.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
In 1922, upon discovering the cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris in the window of a Paris gallery, Gerald Murphy (1888 – 1964) told his wife, “If this is painting, then this is what I want to do.” Soon after, he ended his career as landscape architect and turned to painting. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Wasp and Pear By Gerald Murphy→
By the 1970’s, Lichtenstein turned his eye toward the history of art, appropriating figures and motifs from the first half of the twentieth century and repainting them with Benday dots – the means of shading in newsprint and magazine pictures – in his signature palette of bright primary colors. For Stepping Out, (1978), he took one of Fernand Leger’s famous compositions, Three Musicians (1944), and added a female figure whose dramatically reduced and displaced features resemble the Surrealist women painted by Picasso in the 1930s.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Stepping Out is part of the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Post yesterday’s crazy snow storm, I was out exploring today and walked south from Central Park down Fifth Avenue and around the front of the Plaza Hotel, just because. Right across from the Plaza’s posh entrance, on West 58th Street, there sits this mythic Bull Statue by the great Pablo Picasso, which was added in 2000 to what is actually the north facade of The Solow Building, also referred to as 9 West 57th Street.
Between 1907 and 1911, Pablo Picasso continued to break apart the visible world into increasingly small facets of monochromatic (using one color) planes of space within his cubist style. Painted in Paris, during the Winter of 1908-09, Fruit Dish is considered to be one of the most outstanding examples of this process.
Fruit Dish is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.
