Cubism artist5/3/2023 ![]() If ‘analysis’ consisted in breaking objects down from their starting point in the real world, ‘synthesis’ meant that they were built up again from the basis of the simple geometrical forms of a piece of collaged paper or a block of colour. ‘Synthetic Cubism’Ĭubist works after 1912 began to include pasted papers, textures such as sand and a greater range of colours – a phase known as ‘Synthetic Cubism’. This fragment of oil cloth, painted to give the illusion of a chair seat, seemed to imply that all oil painting was a game, a means of fooling the spectator into believing what he or she sees. Picasso created the first Cubist collage in May 1912 when he included a piece of imitation chair-caning in a still-life of a table top. In Pitcher and Violin (1909–10), Braque included a trompe-l’oeil nail at the top of the canvas, as if to suggest that the painting itself was simply tacked to the wall, and in 1911 he began to include stencilled lettering in his oil paintings. The need to create an illusion of depth ceased to concern Picasso and Braque as painters in fact they deliberately drew attention to the point that their explorations of objects in space were in themselves as paintings completely flat. The practice and problems of painting became the content and meaning of these Cubist works, where the central question was no longer what to represent, but how to represent it. ![]() These motifs could sometimes become barely recognizable within an overall fluctuating mass of planes, painted in a limited colour palette of greys and browns, suggesting an emphasis on the conceptual process of coming to terms with the subject depicted. ![]() The period of ‘Analytical Cubism’, which lasted until 1912, saw the creation of paintings that took traditional motifs, such as still-life elements, landscapes and nudes, and broke these up into a series of facets, often incorporating fragmentary glimpses of an object or figure from different points of view. ‘Analytical Cubism’īy the end of 1909, Picasso and Braque were close friends, and often painted together, producing works very similar in appearance. To the dizzying handling of space inspired by Cézanne’s landscapes, Picasso added a disregard for the European canonical treatment of the human body influenced by his interest in African art, preferring startling deformations and exaggerations to idealized proportions. Picasso’s friends and collectors were unable to accept this painting, which they felt was ‘mad’ and ‘monstrous’, and it remained rolled up in his studio for almost 10 years. It showed five prostitutes with sharply distorted naked bodies within a room whose space seemed shattered into f ragmentary shards, while the women’s faces derived from Egyptian, Iberian and African art, the latter still viewed as something crude and savage in this period. This work managed to bring together several radical and shocking elements. In 1907 Braque had also made the acquaintance of Picasso, who that same year had produced his extraordinary large-scale painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The box-like appearance of houses in these landscapes led the critic Vauxcelles – who had been quick to label the Fauves – to describe them mockingly as ‘cubes’, inspiring the term ‘Cubism’. Braque made trips to the village of L’Estaque in southern France to paint the same sites depicted by Cézanne, and his resulting series of landscapes were exhibited in Paris in 1908, showing houses, trees and roads as simplified geometric forms squeezed into a shallow picture space. Cézanne’s work was an inspiration, particularly in its use of ‘passages’, the unification of parts of the picture surface through colour and tone, which meant that the difference between foreground and background was no longer sharply maintained. The Legacy of Cézanneīraque had worked initially in a Fauvist style, but after seeing a major retrospective exhibition of the work of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) in Paris in 1907, he pursued a new artistic vision. Two key artists who began to experiment with the Cubist style were French painter Georges Braque (1882–1963) and Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Picasso and Braque: Cubist PioneersĬubism flourished in Paris between 1907 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and its impact was felt in artistic developments throughout Europe during this period. Cubist works would provide a radical challenge to the painterly conventions for producing an illusion of depth, and they would attack the tradition of ‘high’ art by including within two-dimensional paintings and collages a range of extraneous materials not traditionally associated with high art, such as newspaper clippings, scraps of sheet music and stencilled lettering. Cubism was one of the most influential twentieth-century art movements.
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