Cubism Simplified
Cubism is an art style which aims at simultaneously showing all potential views of a person or an item. It is known as Cubism since the objects depicted in the works of art seem like they are formed of cubes and other geometrical forms. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began Cubism initially.
Summary of Cubism
Cubism evolved in a time of fast experimentation between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque after Pablo Picasso’s stunning in 1907, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. With the focus of Paul Cezanne on the architecture of form, these painters utilised many angles of view in order to split the pictures into geometrical shapes. Instead of modelling shapes, people were represented in an illusion space as dynamic configurations of volumes and planes where background and foreground were fused together. The movement was one of the most revolutionary in the early 20th century, challenging Renaissance representations of space and nearly immediately led to non-representation attempts by many other artists. Cubist artists continued to integrate collage elements and popular culture into their paintings and experiment with sculpture.
A number of painters, notably Fernand Léger and Juan Gris, and others who formed a group known as the Salon Cubists took on Picasso and Braque’s geometrical faceting of things and space.
The painters abandoned the perspective that had been employed since the Renaissance to portray space and also departed from the realistic figural modelling.
Cubists investigated open form, perforating people and objects by allowing space to flow through them, mixing backdrop into first plane, and displaying things from different perspectives. Some historians have suggested that these developments reflect the evolving experience of time, space and mobility in today’s world. The movement’s initial phase was named Analytic Cubism.
In the second phase of cubism, practitioners of synthetic cubism investigated the use of non-art elements as abstract signals. Their usage of newspapers would lead subsequent historians to claim that artists were keenly aware of current occurrences, especially World War I, rather than being preoccupied with form.
Cubism opened the path for non-representational art by emphasising the unit of a represented scene and the canvas surface. These experiments were conducted by people like Piet Mondrian, who continued to investigate their usage of the grid, abstract symbol system and low space.
Why is it Called Cubism
The term “cubism” appears to have originated from a remark by the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who characterised them as reducing everything to “geometric outlines, cube,” viewing many of Georges Braque’s pictures shown in Paris in 1908.
Everything About Cubism
The Beginnings
The posthumous exhibition of Paul Cézanne’s paintings at the Salon d’Automne in 1907 marked a turning point for the development of cubanism. Cézanne has been immensely important in using generic shapes to reduce nature, both for Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. In the preceding year, Picasso was also exposed to non-Western art: to Iberian art in Spain, to African art through Matisse, and to the anthropology museum Trocadero. Picasso relied on these creative traditions, instead of the realistic forms of the European Renaissance past, via his abstract or simplified depiction of the human figure.
These many inspirations may be observed in the pioneering work of Picasso in 1907, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which is regarded to be proto-Cubism. This painting forecasts some of the main features of later Cubism in its severe distortion of forms, its display of volumes as shattered surfaces and its muted palette.
Racque increased his comparable studies in simplicity of form, when he saw Picasso’s Les Demoiselles in his studio. In the summer of 1908 he created a sequence of landscape paintings including L’Estaque houses in which trees and mountains were transformed into shaded cubes and pyramids that seemed like building shapes. Cubism was presented to the public in November 1908 at the gallery of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler on Vignon Street with Braque’s one-man show. It was this show which prompted French art critic Louis Vauxcelles to characterise them as “bizarreries cubiques,”
Picasso and Braque’s experiments owe a great deal to Kahnweiler, who was their main backer. Picasso and Braque were both very impoverished in 1907 and Kahnweiler promised them to purchase their works as they painted them, so that artists could not worry about satisfying customers or get bad reviews. Following the 1908 exhibition, the two painters showed exclusively at the Kahnweiler Gallery with only a few exceptions.
In 1909, close cooperation between Picasso and Braque was essential to the birth of the style. The two painters met frequently to review their progress and sometimes the work of one artist was difficult to discern from another (as they liked it). In the years before and during the First World War they both lived in the bohemian area of Montmartre in Paris, making their cooperation simple.
In 1912, Kahnweiler gave his first public interview on cubism, without a doubt in reaction to the movement’s increasing public attention and recognition. Kahnweiler, being a German, was banished from France when the First World War started. Throughout the war Léonce Rosenberg became the primary dealer of Cubist Art in Paris with his brother Paul Rosenberg acting as Picasso’s dealer during the interwar years.
Although Picasso and Braque returned frequently to Cuba shapes throughout their careers and work exhibits until 1925, the two-man movement was not long after World War I.
The Salon Cubists did not work directly with Picasso or Braque, since they exhibited their work at public exhibitions such as the Salon d’Automne, they were inspired by their experimentation. The work of the Salon Cubists led to a widespread public awareness of the movement in the early 1910s. These were: Robert Delaunay, Fernand Gris, Henri Le Faukonnier, Fernand Léger, Robert de La Fresnaye and Jean Metzinger. As a consequence of the annual Salon d’Automne Metzinger and Delaunay, who were friends at least since 1906, started to collaborate with Gleizes. They encountered Le Fauconnier via Gleizes, who wrote a Note on la painture (1910), in which he lauded Picasso and Braque for their “total emancipation” of painting.
These painters presented Cubism to the wider public together at the 1911 Salon des Independants. The Independents were an unlegal exhibition in which the audience reacts depending on how and where artworks were placed. The neo-Impressionists controlled the hanging committee so that their paintings could be hung together as a cohesive school in one room. The paintings created an uplift, Gleizes notes: “Whilst the press was sounding the alarm to alert people to the danger and public authorities were called upon to do something about it, songwriters, satirists and other spiritual men provoked great pleasure among the leisure class by playing the word ‘cube,’ discovers that it was a very appropriate way to induce people to play it.
Besides exhibiting their work at big exhibits, the Salon Cubistas were also different from Picasso and Braque because they often painted on a massive scale, prompting one art historian to use the phrase ‘epic cubism’ to distinguish their work from Picasso and Braque’s personal paintings. While objects and people have been split into geometrical shapes such as Picasso and Braque, the Salon Cubists have neither challenged Renaissance notions of space nor embraced the monochromatic colour of Analytic Cubism or synthetic Cubism collages.
At the end of 1911 at Puteaux, a suburb of where painter and graver Jacques Villon and his brother Raymond-Duchamp-Villon had studios, Gleizes and Metzinger, who dwell closely together in the Parisian suburbs, and others in the group, started regular meetings (leading to them sometimes being called the Puteaux group). As a consequence of these discussions, it is probable that the basic concepts for Metzinger and Gleizes’ On Cubism (1912) were codified.
The group planned the following year also the start of the Salon de la Section d’Or (1912), which brought together the most extreme currents in painting. The phrase “Section d’Or” was a moniker chosen by the Salon Cubists for their attitude to the golden medium, i.e. to the belief in order and the significance of mathematical proportions, which mirrored them in nature in its art. The Section d’Or show was presented at the Galerie La Boetie following the Salon d’Automne in 1912. This show originated the name Orphism for the work of Delaunay by the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire released aesthetic meditations the next year: Cubist painters (1913). The many exhibitions and publications in both Paris and overseas have been designed to have an effect.
As with the Picasso and Braque Cubism, the Salon or Section d’Or group did not consistently continue after the Second World War, with only few occasional exhibitions between 1918 and 1925.
Concepts in Cubism
This early phase of the movement occurred after the retrospectives by Paul Cézanne in 1907, when many of the artistic creations of Cézanne, who had lived in Aix-en-Provence before his death and had not shown in Paris for many years, were reintroduced or presented for the first time. Various artists who viewed the retrospective were affected by its absence of 3D, its material quality and the use of consistent brushstrokes. L’Estaque (1908) Braque’s Houses is an excellent example of this kind of Cubism.
Cubism evolved in this stage in a very methodical way. Later to be known as the analytical phase of the style, the items were closely looked at in their surrounding settings, which frequently showed them from different points of view. In order to reduce transparency between the fragmented people and objects, Braque and Picasso confined their subject matter to conventional genres of portraiture and still life and limited their palettes to earthy tones and subdued greys. Although their paintings frequently looked identical, their different interests have become evident over time. Braque tended to portray the things exploded or broken up into pieces, whereas Picasso magnetised them, drawing forces towards the centre of the composition, convincing components of the visual space. Works of this kind include Violin and Palette of Braque (1909) and Ma Jolie of Picasso (1911-12).
By the conclusion of the stage of Cuba, Juan Gris started contributing to the style: he kept clear its shapes, suggested a structural grid, and added more colour to what was an austere, monochromatic style.
In 1912 Picasso and Braque both started to add foreign elements to their compositions and continued experimentation with various viewpoints. Picasso integrated wallpaper that resembled chair caning with Chair-Caning into Still Life (1912), initiated Cubist Collage, and Braque started to glue newspapers on his screens, starting the study of paper collection movement. Partly due to the creation of a growing discomfort of the artists against the radical abstraction of Analytic Cubism, it can be argue that these synthetic experiments have reversed the Renaissance representations of space even more radically and have moved towards a more conceptual rendering of objects and figures. Picasso’s efforts with sculpture also incorporate collaged components as part of the Synthetic Cubist style.
In reaction to the turmoil of the war, many French artists tended to reverse extreme experimentation; this trend was not limited to Cuba. This level of Cubism was characterised by an art historian as the “end product of a progressive closing down of possibilities.” For example, in Léger’s Three Women (1921), the topics shown are harsh rather than overlapping pieces of low-relief sculpture. Léger did not try to display things in different directions. Crystal Cubism is linked to Salon Cubism and to Picasso and Braque works. Crystal Cubism is part of a major movement called a return to order in connection with painters in the School of Paris (also known as interwar classicism).
The End of Cubism
In the 1910s, Cubism grew rapidly throughout Europe, both due to its systemic approach to imaging and to the freedom that it provided in portraying things in a new manner. Critics were divided as to whether Cubists were primarily interested in distorting and abstracting images more objectively – showing more of their fundamental nature.
The movement is based on a number of styles from the early 20th century, including Constructivism, Futurism, Suprematism, Orphism and De Stijl. Many major painters had a cubist period in growth, possibly most remarkable of which was Marcel Duchamp, who received much notice at the Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) and many unfavourable reviews at the Armory Show in New York City in 1913.
The concepts of the movement also led to popular phenomena such as design and architecture in Art Deco. Later trends like as minimalism have also been inspired by the Cubist usage of the grid, and the evolution of non-representational art without experimentation by the Cubists is hard to conceive. Like other paradigms that are altering creative movements in the 20th-century, such as Dada and Pop, the Cubism has shaken the foundations of conventional craftsmanship by flipping the Renaissance tradition over and transforming art history into a post modern age.
Key Art in Cubism
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
1907
Picasso’s artwork was startling both for its content and for its formal experiments even to his closest artist pals. The topic of naked women wasn’t uncommon in itself, but the fact that Picasso portrayed women in aggressively sexual positions as prostitutes was new. Picasso’s impact on non-Western art has increased their obvious sexuality. This is particularly apparent on the faces of three women, who are masks, indicating that their sexuality is not only violent but also primal. The extraordinary formal features of the artwork also formed part of its shock effect. Instead, Picasso left the Renaissance illusion of three-dimensionality with a drastically flattened image plane split up into geometrical shards. The body of the lady in the middle, for example, is made up of angles and sharp edges. Both the clothing wrapped around the lower body and the body are given the same emphasis as the negative space surrounding them as though they were all in the forefront.
All About Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso
Violin and Palette
1909
By 1909, Picasso and Braque collaborated, mainly painting indoor settings with allusions to music, for example, musical instruments or sheet music. Braque was experimenting with narrow spacing in this early example of analytic cubism, decreasing the colour pallet to neutral browns and greys which further flatten down the space. The work also shows the efforts of Braque to portray the same object from various perspectives. Some shadings are utilised to give a sense of low relief that seems to overlap somewhat with the different geometric forms. Musical instruments like guitars, violins and clarinets often appear in cubist paintings, especially in the work of the musician Braque. By depending on such repetitive subjects, the paintings also urge the spectator to focus instead on the uniqueness of the topic, on the aesthetic advances of Cubism.
Tea Time
By Jean Metzinger
1911
The critic Andre Salmon called this work at the Salon d’Automne in 1911 “The Mona Lisa of Cubism.” Picasso and Braque, although their works dematerialized people and objects, remained devoted to intelligibility, combining modernism with classicism, which is Salmon’s surname. Despite painting realism, Metzinger leaves, like other Cubists, the single point of view that has been used since the Renaissance. The female figure and the components of still life are shown from various perspectives as if the artist had walked physically around the subject in consecutive times, capturing it from different views. The teacup is shown in both the profile and the top, while the figure of the lady in the centre position is displayed straight and in the profile. In Metzinger and Gleizes’ book Du Cubisme (1912), and in Apollinaire’s Cubist Painters, the picture was copied (1913). At that time the painting was more recognised than any work by Picasso or Braque that had taken themselves away from the public by not showing in the show. For the majority of people in the 1910s Cubism was linked to painters such as Metzinger instead of their Picasso or Braque originators.
Still Life with Open Window, Rue Ravignan
By Juan Gris
1915
The work of Juan Gris is generally seen as closest to that of Picasso and Braque with whom Gris was in close touch from 1911. By 1914, Gris had perfected collage methods by pasting newspaper and magazine pieces in abstract landscapes. His works were occasionally real collages, but may also be paintings like collages with Open Windows in Still Life. In this work, Gris merged the inside and outside perspectives via interlocking components and minor colour changes, including a blue intensity that suffuses the piece and reintroduces colour to the cubist approach, as in synthetic cubism. Traditional components such as a book, a carafe and a bottle of wine on a tilted tabletop highlight a still life in the foreground. These items are refracted by the open window shafts of colourful light which incorporate the surrounding homes and trees into the composition; the electrical light in the inside contrasts with the light scene from the window. The compositions of Gris were more calculative than the other Cuba pieces. Each piece of the grid-like structure has been polished to create an interconnection without excessive detail. Gris balances various work sections within the grid: bright to dark, monochrome to colour, and lamps inside the space to light on external lights. The spectator feels a feeling of silence in his environment.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
