Cubism |
Pablo Picasso |
| When: |
1881-1973 |
| Where: |
Born in Malaga, Spain and worked in Paris and
New York. |
| Who: |
One of the most dynamic and influential artists
of our century, achieved success in drawing, printmaking,
sculpture, and ceramics as well as in painting.
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He experimented with a number of different artistic
styles during his long career - Cubism, Surrealism, Neo-Classicism,
Expressionism… |
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| Early Years: |
Hated school and spent his time drawing. |
First Communion 1895/96 Oil on canvas
Museo Picasso
Barcelona, Spain.
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Father, a teacher of drawing and painting, supported
him throughout. |
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Enrolled in art school in Madrid. |
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Said to be able to paint like Raphael (academism)
at the age of 16. |
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| Blue Period: |
1901-1904 |
Self-Portrait in Blue Period. 1901
Oil on canvas
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Arrived in Paris in 1900 and was captivated by
the lively bustle on the streets and night life in the dance
bar. |
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After the death of a close friend, he became more
aware of the darker side of city life and began to paint outcasts,
people living in poverty and misery. |
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His paintings were immersed in a melancholy blue.
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Woman and Child by the Sea 1902
Oil on canvas
Private Collection Japan
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The Old Guitarist 1903
Oil on panel
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
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La Vie (Life) 1903
Oil on canvas
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, USA.
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| Rose Period: |
Circus Acrobats and Ape 1905
Watercolour
Göteborg Museum of Art, Sweden
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1905-1906 |
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His blue period only lasted a few years, his colours
brightened when the his life circumstances improved. |
| Collectors started to buy his works, so he was
less financially worried. Also, he is believed to have fallen
in love at this time. |
| Historians call this his Rose period because of
the pinks and reds that started to appear in his works at this
time. |
| For some reason, the lives of carnival people
was one of the subjects that was common in these paintings. |
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The Family of Saltimbanques 1905
Oil on canvas
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA.
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Early Cubism 1907-1909: |
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1907 Oil on canvas
The Museum of Modern Arts, New York, USA.
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Les Demoiselles de Avignon was Picasso's earliest
work which broke dramatically from his figurative and poetic
works of the first part of his life.
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| Relates directly to the prostitution district
of Paris. |
| The women's facial features disintegrate into
primitive masks, and their bodies are so hard-edged that it
looks as if it would cut you if you touched them. |
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At this time, Picasso was increasingly influenced
by the raw expressive power of African and Oceanic tribal arts.
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| The women are simultaneously seductive and horrifying.
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| It would take a while before this work would become
acceptable to even the most progressive members of artistic
circles. But this was the painting that changed everything for
Picasso. |
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Georges Braque
Large Nude
Paris, spring 1908
Oil on canvas
140 x 100 cm
Collection Alex Maguy, Paris
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By 1907, a collaboration between
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque was beginning.
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| The two artists worked side by side, both experimenting
with a system which sought to totally flatten space. |
| One of the primary goals of cubism was to depart
from the traditional understanding of perspective and spatial
cues. |
| Their early experiments with the style uses extremely
bright colours, hard edged forms, and flattened space. |
| Though previous art movements (Impressionism
and Post Impressionism)
began to evolve into flatter forms, Picasso and Braque were
more radical in their approach. |
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German
Expressionism and Fauvism
were going on simultaneously, and the works of those artists
also tended towards flattened pictorial space.
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Pablo Picasso
Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table. 1909
Oil on canvas. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
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Georges Braque
Musical Instruments
Oil on canvas
50 x 61 cm
Private collection |
| A primary difference between Cubism and those movements is
that Cubism is based much less on the expression of emotion
than it is an intellectual experiment with structure. |
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Paul Cezanne, whose
canvases tended to defy the logic of space and gravity, is the
main inspiration.
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Pablo Picasso
House in a Garden 1908
Oil on canvas
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia. |
| The cubists push the distortion just a little
farther, and there are extreme similarities between the two
artists' works. |
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| Analytical Cubism 1910-1912: |
After 1909, Picasso and Braque began a more systematic
study of structure which we know as "Analytical Cubism".
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Girl with a Mandolin
1910
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
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| In this period, they removed bright colours from
their compositions, favouring monochromatic earth tones so that
they could focus primarily on the structure. |
| The paintings of this period look as if they have
deconstructed objects and rearranged them on the canvas. |
| One goal of this is to depict different viewpoints
simultaneously. |
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Traditionally, an object is always viewed from
one specific viewpoint and at one specific (stopped) moment
in time.
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Portrait of Ambroise Vollard
1910 Oil on canvas
The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow, Russia.
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| Picasso and Braque felt that this was too limiting,
and desired to represent an object as if they are viewing it
from several angles or at different moments in time. |
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Georges Braque
Man with a Guitar
Oil on canvas
116.2 x 80.9 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York |
Innovative as this was, the danger was that
many of the works of this period are completely incomprehensible
to the viewer, as they start to lose all sense of form. |
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Synthetic Cubism 1912-1914 |
Still Life with Chair Caning
1912 Oil and oilcloth on canvas, with rope frame
27 x 35 cm
Musee Picasso, Paris |
After the artists had grown tired of the Analytical
period, they began to develop what is known as the Synthetic
period.
Picasso and Braque continue to introduce new and controversial
changes with the introduction of collaged objects into their
paintings.
Still Life with Chair Cane was one of the first of
these experiments, and integrates chair caning with the paint,
framed with a length of rope. |
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Guitar, Sheet Music, Glass
1912
Papers and newsprint (Le Journal, 18 November 1912)
pasted, gouache and charcoal on paper
48 x 36.5 cm
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio |
Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass includes various
collaged papers: wall paper, a page of sheet music, a drawing
of an abstracted glass, and a newspaper clipping.
Incidentally, this clipping includes the headline, “The
battle has begun” (in French), which refers the revolution
of representation the artists are achieving by introducing
objects of the real world into their "paintings".
It truly was a revolution which would change the face of modern
art for many years to come. |
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Georges Braque
Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe, and Glass
1913
Charcoal and various papers pasted on paper
48 x 64 cm
Private collection, New York |
Braque, Georges
Violin and Pipe: "Le Quotidien" 1913
Chalk, charcoal, and pasted paper
74 x 106 cm
Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
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| Neo-Classical Period 1916-1925 |
Paul as Harlequin
1924, Paris
Oil on canvas
130 x 97.5 cm
Musee Picasso, Paris
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The collaboration between Picasso
and Braque was ended by the First World War.
After this, Picasso reverted to a more Classicist mode of
representation.
The result of his preoccupation with the works of Ingres,
whose figures are enclosed in clear contours.
Also studied composition of the Renaissance and antiquity.
It is believed that he did this as a reaction to society's
disillusionment and shock from the horrors of the war.
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Mother and Child on the Seashore 1921 |
Perhaps, in its own way, it was a way of returning
his own psyche to a state of order and peace. Whatever the
reason, this was not a final stage in Picasso's career.
He soon continued to produce cubist works again, always finding
new ways to express himself with the style. |
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| Surrealism 1925-1934 |
Female Bather 1929 |
Picasso was introduced to the ideas of Surrealism
in 1925.
Resulting in a series of works that freed form from nature.
Only a few points or outlines can be interpreted to represent
descriptive body parts. |
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| The Picasso Style: |
Woman With Book
1932 |
Mother and Son
1938 |
Weeping Woman
1934 |
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WW2, France occupied by Germany - time of
turmoil and unrest.
Worked with a highly individual language of forms which later
known as “Picasso Style”.
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Combined 2 principles from his previous stages:
1. Figurative (pre-Cubist & Neoclassical Periods)
Based on laws of perspective and use of nature as a model.
2. Dissociative (Cubist Periods)
Free from single point perspective, front and back of objects
are seen simultaneously in the picture. |
| Bulls c1930s-40s |
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This set of drawing shows the process of
simplification which typifies the 'Picasso' Style. |
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Guernica 1937
25 ft x 11ft
Madrid |
Depict the brutality of fascist aggression in
the Spanish Civil War. |
| Returns to a monochromatic palette in an attempt
to suggest the bleakness of this tragedy, in which hundreds
of Spanish citizens were killed during a "test" of
the effects of the atomic bomb. (The Spanish general, Francisco
Franco agreed to let the Nazis do this in exchange for military
aid). |
| Picasso's disturbing painting about the victims
of this senseless act is his cry of protest. |
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The Kiss
1969 |
Man With Pipe
1968 |
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