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ARCHITECTURE AND CUBISM
Edited and with an introduction by Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy. London: MIT Press. 1998.

The fascination of this collection of essays, dedicated to the late Daniel Robbins, respected mentor of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal is most of all in recognizing the vast scope of Cubism’s influence as it reached out across the Continent after the First World War from the thoroughly menacing and chilly but endlessly exciting silhouette of the Eiffel Tower. Detlef Mertins describes the Germanification of the original idea; Robert L Herbert’s account of Leger’s dedication to the type of public participation in art normally associated with the puritan high-mindedness of northern Europe reminded me of the artist’s church tapestry of Audincourt of 1950 which provided Basil Spence with a precedent for Sutherland’s at Coventry. On the other hand, Dorothee Imbert’s description of Cubist landscape design is as funny as it is enlightening. Cubism seems to have been caught between the pure and the perverted, the north and the south, and the comfortable and the agonizing: the familiar Rowe-Slutzky insistence on the Corbusian interpretation looks a little dull now in retrospect.

TIMOTHY BRITTAIN-CATLIN