#modernist

Apparently this is one of the paintings people point to when they talk about cubism pushing all the way toward abstraction — there's barely anything left that reads as a literal scene. It's tied to a procession he remembered from Spain, but almost none of that original imagery survived into what's on the canvas.

They say painters in this circle tightened up after the First World War — fewer overlapping shards, flatter shapes, something closer to order than the earlier, more splintered cubism. This one's from that stretch, and the checkerboard corner is one of the only clues there was ever a table under all this.

The gardens and pond around it were laid out by Roberto Burle Marx, better known for the wavy pavement patterns along Rio's beaches.

Apparently this whole thing started as a poem - a friend of his wrote about seeing a gold '5' clang past on a red fire truck, and this is the painted version of that.