Features October 2003
Modernism & its institutions
The second in a series titled “Lengthened shadows.”
I couldn’t portray a woman in all her natural loveliness. I haven’t the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is a mere pretext for a decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to expose the Absolute, and not merely the factitious woman.
—Georges Braque, circa 1908
Subject, with her, is often incidental.
—Wallace Stevens, on the poetry of Marianne Moore, 1935
Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny—very tiny, content.
—Willem de Kooning, 1963
Although we have lately been advised that “the days when one...
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