Cubism

Analytic Cubism
• In this phase, Cubism developed in a highly systematic
fashion. Later to be known as the Analytic period of the style,
it was based on close observation of objects in their
background contexts, often showing them from various
vantage (a position, condition) points. Picasso and
Braque restricted their subject matter to the traditional
genres of portraiture and still life and also limited their
palette to earth tones and muted grays in order to lessen
the clarity between the fragmented shapes of figures and
objects. Although their works were often similar in
appearance, their separate interests showed through over
time. Braque tended to show objects exploding out or
pulled apart into fragments, while Picasso rendered them
magnetized, with attracting forces compelling elements
of the pictorial space into the center of the composition.
Works in this style include Braque's Violin and Palette (1909)
and Picasso's Ma Jolie (1911-12).
 Ma Jolie
(1911-12)
• In this work, Picasso challenges the distinction between
high art and popular culture, pushing his experiments in
new directions. Building on the geometric forms
of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso moves
further towards abstraction by reducing color and by
increasing the illusion of low-relief sculpture. Most
significantly, however, Picasso included painted words
on the canvas. The words, "ma jolie" on the surface
not only flatten the space further, but they also liken
the painting to a poster because they are painted in a
font reminiscent of one used in advertising. This is
the first time that an artist so blatantly uses
elements of popular culture in a work of high art.
Further linking the work to pop culture and to the
everyday, "Ma Jolie" was also the name of a popular
tune at the time.
Violin and
Palette
(1909)
• By 1909, Picasso and Braque were collaborating, painting
largely interior scenes that included references to music, such
as musical instruments or sheet music
(music printed on unbound sheets of paper). In this early
example of Analytic Cubism, Braque was experimenting
further with shallow spacing by reducing the color palette
to neutral browns and grays that further flatten out the
space. The piece represents Braque's attempts to show the
same item from different points of view. Some shading is used
to create an impression of bas-relief with the various
geometric shapes seeming to overlap slightly. Musical
instruments such as guitars, violins, and clarinets
(a woodwind instrument in the form of
a cylindrical tube with a single reed attached to its mouthpiece) show up
frequently in Cubist paintings, particularly in the works of
Braque who trained as a musician. By relying on such
repeated subject matter, the works also encourage the viewer
to concentrate on the stylistic innovations of Cubism rather
than on the specificity of the subject matter.
• Towards the end of this stage of Cubism,
Juan Gris began to make contributions to
the style: he maintained a sharp clarity to
his forms, provided suggestions of a
compositional grid, and introduced more
color to what had been an austere,
monochromatic style.
 Synthetic Cubism
• In 1912 both Picasso and Braque began to
introduce foreign elements into their
compositions, continuing their experiments
with multiple perspectives. Picasso incorporated
wall paper that imitated chair caning into Still Life
with Chair-Caning (1912), thus initiating Cubist
collage, and Braque began to glue newspaper to
his canvases, beginning the movement's
exploration of collage. In part this may have
resulted from the artists' growing discomfort with
the radical abstraction of Analytic Cubism, though
it could also be argued that these Synthetic
experiments touched more conceptual rendering
of objects and figures. Picasso's experiments with
sculpture are also included as part of the Synthetic
Cubist style as they employ collaged elements.
Still Life with Chair Caning (1912)
• By 1912, Picasso and Braque had done experiments with
monochromatic color and with the illusion of low-relief
sculpture across the surface of the canvas. In Still Life with
Chair Caning, Picasso reintroduces color and goes further
into experimentation with multiple perspectives. The image
depicts a tabletop at a café; Picasso shows various
objects on the table from multiple points of view
including the knife, pieces of fruit, and wine glass that
are in the top right of the image. Combining both paint and
collage, Picasso also incorporates a piece of oilcloth (a cheap
tablecloth) that resembles chair caning to reference to the
type of seating common in a traditional café. The work is
playful in that Picasso conveys the transparent quality of the
tabletop by making it appear as if the caning of the chair can
be seen through the glass. The spacing in the image,
however, is even flatter than in previous works with no
shading of objects, thus the café table is not depicted
illusionistic ally as if in three dimensions, but conceptually.
• Still Life with Chair Caning is celebrated for being
modern art's first collage. Picasso had affixed
preexisting objects to his canvases before, but this
picture marks the first time he did so with such playful
and emphatic intent. The chair caning in the picture in
fact comes from a piece of printed oilcloth - and not,
as the title suggests, an actual piece of chair caning.
But the rope around the canvas is very real, and
serves to evoke the carved border of a café table.
Furthermore, the viewer can imagine that the canvas
is a glass table, and the chair caning is the actual seat
of the chair that can be seen through the table. Hence
the picture not only dramatically contrasts visual space
as is typical of Picasso's experiments, it also confuses
our sense of what it is that we are looking at.
• Cubism developed in the aftermath of Pablo Picasso's
shocking 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in a period
of rapid experimentation between Pablo
Picasso and Georges Braque. Drawing upon Paul
Cezanne’s emphasis on the underlying architecture of
form, these artist used multiple vantage points to
fracture images into geometric forms. Rather than
modelled forms in an illusionistic space, figures were
depicted as dynamic arrangements of volumes and
planes where background and foreground merged.
The movement was one of the most groundbreaking of
the early-20th century. Artists working in the Cubist
style went on to incorporate elements of collage and
popular culture into their paintings and to experiment
with sculpture.
• The artists abandoned perspective, which had been used to depict
space since the Renaissance, and they also turned away from the
realistic modeling of figures.
• Cubists explored open form, piercing figures and objects by
letting the space flow through them, blending background into
foreground, and showing objects from various angles. Some
historians have argued that these innovations represent a
response to the changing experience of space, movement, and
time in the modern world. This first phase of the movement was
called Analytic Cubism.
• In the second phase of Cubism, Synthetic Cubists explored the
use of non-art materials as abstract signs. Their use of
newspaper would lead later historians to argue that, instead of
being concerned above all with form, the artists were also acutely
aware of current events, particularly WWI.
• Cubism paved the way for non-representational art by putting new
emphasis on the unity between a depicted scene and the surface of
the canvas. These experiments would be taken up by the likes
of Piet Mondrian, who continued to explore their use of the grid,
abstract system of signs, and shallow space.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
Pablo Picasso
• Picasso's painting was shocking even to his closest artist
friends both for its content and for its formal experimentation.
The subject matter of nude women was not in itself unusual,
but the fact that Picasso painted the women as prostitutes in
aggressively sexual postures was new. Picasso's influence
from non-Western art that is most evident in the faces of three
of the women, which are rendered as mask-like, suggesting
that their sexuality is not just aggressive, but also primitive.
The unusual formal elements of the painting were also part of
its shock value. Picasso abandoned the Renaissance illusion
of three-dimensionality, instead presenting a radically
flattened picture plane that is broken up into geometric
shards. For instance, the body of the standing woman in the
center is composed of angles and sharp edges. Both the cloth
wrapped around her lower body and her body itself are given
the same amount of attention as the negative space around
them as if all are in the foreground and all are equally
important.
• The painting was widely thought to be
immoral when it was finally exhibited in
public in 1916. Braque is one of the few
artists who studied it intently in 1907,
leading directly to his later collaboration
with Picasso. Because it predicted some
of the characteristics of Cubism, Les
Demoiselles is considered proto or pre-
Cubist.
Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905)
• Gertrude Stein was an author, close friend, and even
supporter of Picasso, and was integral to his growth as
an artist. This portrait, in which Stein is wearing her
favorite brown velvet coat, was made just a year
before Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and marks an
important stage in his evolving style. In contrast to the
flat appearance of the figures and objects, the forms in
this portrait seem almost sculpted, and indeed they
were influenced by the artist's discovery of archaic
sculpture. One can almost sense Picasso's
increased interest in depicting a human face as a
series of flat planes. Stein claimed that she sat for
the artist some ninety times, and although that may be
an exaggeration, Picasso certainly wrestled long and
hard with painting her head. After approaching it in
various ways, abandoning each attempt, one day he
painted it.
Violin and Pipe (1913)
(Braque)
• Collage helped Braque to realize that, "color
acts simultaneously with form but has nothing
to do with it,". He made collages to inspire
painting compositions, but also as works
themselves. In Violin and Pipe, he chooses a
stringed instrument as his subject matter.
Since there is no concrete evidence that this
is a violin, one can understand better how
Braque is studying the shapes within the
object and pulling them apart to move
them around, as if shuffling a deck of
cards.
Still Life with Open Window, Rue
Ravignan (1915) (Juan Gris)
• Juan Gris' work is often considered closest to that of Picasso and
Braque with whom Gris was in close contact beginning in 1911. By
1914, Gris had developed collage techniques in which he
pasted elements from newspapers and magazines onto
deconstructed, abstract scenes. His works were sometimes
actual collages, but could also be paintings that resembled collages
as in Still Life with Open Window. In this work Gris combined
interior and exterior views through interlocking elements and
subtle shifts in color, including an intense blue that suffuses
the work and, like Synthetic Cubism, reintroduces color to the
Cubist style. A still life in the foreground features traditional
elements such as a book, a carafe (flask) , and a bottle of wine on
an upturned tabletop. These objects are refracted through shafts of
colored light from the open window that bring the neighboring
houses and trees into the composition; the interior electric light
contrasts with the moonlit scene outside the window. Gris's
compositions were more calculating than those of other Cubists.
Every element of the grid-like composition was refined to
produce an interlocking arrangement without unnecessary
detail. Within the grid, Gris balances different areas of the work:
light to dark, monochrome to color, and lamplight inside the
room to moonlight outside.