Looking at 20th Century Art: 1900 to 1945

Unit 6: Cubism - A Revolution in Form

As we saw in the last Unit Georges Braque, originally a member of Matisse's Fauve circle had both observed and absorbed Les demoiselles D'Avignon, Picasso's challenge to centuries of artistic tradition. This extraordinary painting had sent him off on a journey of self-discovery and there he found inspiration in the work of Paul Cézanne. Cézanne would let his eyes roam over the scene in front of him and select different viewpoints and various vanishing points. In a letter to Émile Bernard, Cézanne suggested that artists study geometric objects, such as the cube, cylinder, sphere and cone, adding that Nature could be treated as composed from these forms.

Braque was excited by the idea of multiple viewpoints. He believed that the one point perspective of the Renaissance was actually quite a false view of the world as we do not see through one lens and experience one vanishing point. Working with these new ideas, he submitted six examples of his work to the Salon d'Automne in 1908, but even with Matisse on the jury, his work was refused. When asked by the critic Louis Vauxcelles, the man responsible for inventing the term Fauve, what the works refused by the Salon looked like, Matisse answered, "Braque sent a painting made out of little cubes". He was describing The Viaduct at L'Estaque (1908. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris).

Matisse's description inspired Vauxcelles to write that Braque "reduces everything, places, figures and houses, to geometrical diagrams, to cubes". Vauxcelles had invented yet another 'ism' and soon the word 'cubism' would become firmly planted in the dictionary even if only a handful of Braque's paintings actually used cube like forms.

Although Braque had started to develop a relationship with the work of Cézanne there is no doubt that 'cubism' evolved out of the partnership of Braque and Picasso. For around six years, Braque and Picasso were inseparable - it was a marriage in art. They exchanged ideas and artworks and often painted side by side. In fact people had trouble telling their work apart, especially when they decided not to sign their paintings.

Together they demolished the traditional idea of pictorial space, they wanted to paint as they thought, not as they saw. They were not interested in the superficial appearance of objects and wanted to reveal many aspects at once and encompass a whole experience. This period of their work lasting from 1908-1912 is known as Analytical Cubism, during this phase the two artists concentrated on the breakdown or analysis of form working almost entirely with a monochromatic palette of muted colours so as not to distract the viewer from the structure of the form itself. The subjects that inspired them came from everyday life. They chose simple figures, landscapes, townscapes and still-life, all plucked from the environments and past-times they most enjoyed such as the pleasures of café drinking, reading the newspaper, card games, food and perhaps most importantly music.

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Picasso's Girl with Mandolin (1910. Oil on canvas, MoMA)

In this painting Picasso is still experimenting with cubism. He regarded the painting as unfinished and although it is clear that his work is becoming more abstract he still cannot break away from the idea of form.

If you look at Picasso's portrait of Ambroise Vollard you can see this experimentation continuing, the outlines of the central figure are beginning to fade. Vollard's head is made up of a series of planes at different angles to one another and shaded with light and dark edges that vary between blurred and defined. If you half close your eyes you will see that the head appears to lift off the picture plane into your space. On his body the facets are more sharply divided into dark and light and solid and opaque. This section of the picture looks remarkably like an x-ray, or a picture of solid matter as a mass of cells or atoms and molecules.

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Picasso, Ambroise Vollard

(1910. Oil on canvas, 92 x 65 cm. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow)

Georges Braque, Candlestick with Playing Cards on a Table

(1910. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum New York)

This still life presents one of the earliest instances of Braque's choice of an oval format. In the centre of the composition, it is possible to make out the corner of a table with the base of a candlestick and two playing cards. Braque and Picasso would return quite often to the oval format so they could concentrate their forms in the centre of the composition.

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Towards the end of the Analytic phase, Picasso and Braque introduced stenciled lettering to their painting. The letters quoted titles of popular songs and newspapers. This was another rejection of the establishment because stencils were usually reserved for inn signs and packing cases, not fine art.

Braque, The Portuguese

(1911. Kunstmuseum, Basel)

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Picasso, Ma Jolie

(1911-1912. MoMA)

This work was inspired by the vibrant café culture of early-twentieth-century Paris, in which artists, dancers, musicians, and celebrities would all gather in cafés to socialize, dance, debate, and exchange ideas. The expression "ma jolie," translated as "my pretty" comes from a popular 1911 song and was Picasso's pet name for Eva Gouel, his girlfriend at the time.

Picasso painted Still Life with a Bottle of Rum (1911. Metropolitan Museum, New York) during the summer of 1911 in Céret a small town in the French Pyrenees. The town became so popular with poets, musicians, and artists before World War I that nowadays is has become known as the "spiritual home of Cubism". Braque joined Picasso in Céret in the same summer and the pair spent all their time painting together. Their work became so similar during this period that it is almost impossible to tell apart.

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Braque, Still Life with a Pair of Banderillas

(1911. Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum)

Sculpture

Analytical Cubism also inspired new approaches to sculpture such as Picasso's Woman's Head. Picasso first sculpted his lover Fernande's head out of clay. Like his early cubist paintings, the shape of her sculpted head is faceted into smaller units, her hair is made up of a series of crescent blobs while her face is more sharply chiseled into flat planes. Intended to be seen in the round, the composition changes form when viewed from different angles. The head's slight tilt and the neck's sweeping curves give the illusion of movement as if the figure was about to look over her shoulder. Picasso's dealer, Ambroise Vollard, bought the original clay version from Picasso in 1910, and with the artist's permission he arranged for it to be cast in plaster and then in bronze.

While Picasso concentrated most of his cubist experiments on paintings, one of the most successful sculptors in the Analytic Cubist style was Lithuanian artist Jacques Lipchitz. Lipchitz was introduced to Picasso by the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Inspired by the cubist work of Picasso and Braque he soon began to translate their pictorial ideas into three-dimensional sculpture as can be seen in Head and Man with a Guitar. In his sculpture The Batherform is broken into cubic volumes and planes and made to interlock and intersect to produce irregular and spatially ambiguous facets and curves.

The Ukrainian-American artist Alexander Archipenko was another sculptor highly influenced by the Cubist movement. He began to explore the interplay between interlocking voids and solids and between convex and concave surfaces, forming a sculptural equivalent to cubist paintings' overlapping planes and, in the process, revolutionizing modern sculpture as in his bronze Walking Woman.

As he developed his style, Archipenko achieved an incredible sense of vitality out of minimal means: in works such as Boxing, he conveyed the raw, brutal energy of the sport in nonrepresentational, machinelike cubic and ovoid forms.

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By 1912, Picasso and Braque felt that they had exhausted the possibilities of Analytic Cubism they abandoned their abstract analyses of form and began to synthesize images from found shapes and textures. As this new approach, was constructive and synthetic rather than analytic, this period became known as Synthetic Cubism.

Picasso created Still Life with Chair-Caning (1912. Oil and oilcloth on canvas, with rope frame, Musée Picasso, Paris). Rather than painting the image on the canvas, Picasso pasted a piece of oil cloth onto the canvas after it was imprinted with the photo lithographed pattern of a cane chair seat the picture is framed with a piece of rope. This invention marked the beginning of the technique of collage (taken from the French word coller, meaning "to glue").

Inspired by Picasso's method, Braque invented a variant of collage called papier collé (stuck paper) that involved gluing assorted paper shapes to a drawing or painting. Braque Fruit Dish and Glass (1912. pasted papers and charcoal on paper Private collection). It was using found objects such as newspapers, textured metal, handbills, tobacco wrappers that both artists were able to reintroduce colour into their works.

Like Braque, Picasso would also simulate textures like wood grain, suggesting different layers on the surface of the painting thereby confusing what was real and what was an illusion. He would use collage to confuse the boundaries of realism such as painting a newspaper as well as cutting newsprint into the shape of another object entirely.

This way he could give the viewer two representations of a newspaper, one real and one painted but neither was naturalistic. Picasso Man with Hat and Violin (1912. Cut-and-pasted newspaper, with charcoal, on two sheets of cut-and-pasted paper Metropolitan Museum). Picasso also made Synthetic Cubist sculptures by exploring the techniques of papier collé and collage in three dimensions.

Picasso, Glass of Absinthe

(1914. Painted bronze with absinthe spoon MoMA)

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Picasso, Guitar

(1914. Sheet metal and wire MoMA)

Archipenko also introduced the concept of collage in sculpture in his famous Medrano series, depictions of circus figures in multicoloured glass, wood and metal. During that same period he further defied tradition in his "sculpto-paintings," works in which he introduced painted colour to the intersecting planes of his sculpture such as Woman before Mirror.

By 1911, several other artists in Paris had taken up cubism. The most important were Juan Gris and Fernand Léger; the lesser figures included Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, Jean Metzinger and Francis Picabia. Two of these, Gleizes and Metzinger, wrote the first book on cubism, published in 1912.

The Spanish artist Juan Gris is often referred to as 'Third Musketeer of Cubism', Gris's first cubist paintings, generally more calculated than those of Picasso and Braque, appeared in 1912. His interpretations of synthetic cubism help to spread the cubist style.

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Juan Gris, Portrait of Picasso

(1912. Oil on canvas, 93.4 x 74.3 cm, Art Institute of Chicago)

Violin and Playing Cards

(Metropolitan Museum, New York)

The French artist Fernand Léger using his architectural training, adapted Picasso and Braque's techniques but broke down their forms into mechanical tubular shapes turning the

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human body into a as a mass of slabs and cylinders that resembled a robot. Louis Vauxcelles, who seems to have a word for every art movement, dubbed his style "tubism."

Léger, Woman in Red and Green

(1914. oil on canvas, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris)

Unlike the other cubists, Léger was not interested in traditional subjects like the still life and the portrait - instead he painted the city in all its dramatic and often tawdry glory.

The City

(1919. Oil on canvas Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia)

During World War I, Léger was drafted into the French Army where he became inspired by the machinery of war as can be seen in Soldiers Playing at Cards (1917. oil on canvas, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo).

Here are the helmeted soldiers depicted in a cylindrical form, with arms like shell casings and artillery pieces, smoking their pipes with fingers shaped like forks.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 marked the end of the intimate collaboration between Braque and Picasso. Braque joined the army while Picasso, as a Spaniard, stayed a civilian;

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the symbiotic partnership was broken, but even without its leaders the core Cubist movement continued through to the 1920's.

Cubism was able to break the artistic boundaries that still remained in early 20th century art and in the process clear a path for a variety of newer and even more radical movements including Dada, Surrealism and Abstract Art, all of which we will be encountering throughout this course. It also inspired simultaneous artistic movements such as Orphism.

The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the name Orphism or Orphic Cubism in 1912 after he had encountered the paintings of Robert Delaunay and his Russian wife Sonia Delaunay-Terk. Although he saw in their work the intellectual inspiration of Cubism he was entranced by their use of vibrant colours, which he believed had brought poetry and music into the colourless techniques of Braque and Picasso. As Orpheus was the Greek god of music and lyrics he dubbed the Delaunays' work Orphism.

Robert Delaunay's early work tackled modern themes such as cities and architecture, although one of his first paintings is of the gothic church of Saint Severin No. 3, (1909-1910. Oil on canvas, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). However, rather than concentrating on the architecture alone, he becomes fascinated by the interplay of light reflected by the stained glass windows, an idea that would continue to have a great influence on his work.

Delaunay explored the developments of cubist fragmentation more explicitly in his series of paintings of the Eiffel Tower.

Eiffel Tower with Trees (Tour Eiffel aux arbres)

(1910. Oil on canvas, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

He is said to have first painted the tower as a celebration of his engagement to Sonia Terk in 1909, but it so inspired him that he would go on to paint the La Tour Eiffel another thirty times over the next few years and again in the 1920s.

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Delaunay showed the structure from several viewpoints at once, suggesting the movement of the eye through space and time and expressing what he called a Simultanist vision. This series marks the beginning of his "destructive" phase: the solid form in his earlier works becomes fragmented and begins to crumble, though unlike the objects in cubist paintings, the tower remains distinguishable from the surrounding space.

Delaunay's attraction to windows and window views appears to have been linked to the Symbolists' use of glass panes as metaphors for the transition from internal to external states and it culminated in his Simultaneous Windows series.

The series derives its name from the French scientist Michel-Eugène Chevreul's theory of simultaneous contrasts of colour, which explores how divergent hues are perceived at once. Delaunay stated that these works began his "constructive" phase.

Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part)

(1912. Oil on canvas Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

Windows Open Simultaneously (1st Part, 3rd Motif)

(1912. Oil on canvas, Oval Peggy Guggenheim Collection)

The Orphist group was broken up by World War I, but in spite of its short life it had considerable influence on the later German expressionists, notably Paul Klee, August Macke, and Franz Marc who we will be meeting in Unit 8.

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Discussion Forum

I have to confess that I have never felt comfortable with Cubism but I'd like to hear your thoughts in the discussion forum on this artistic revolution.

In preparation for Unit 7 read pages 31-60 British Art Since 1900 by Frances Spalding.

Recommended Reading

The Cubist Epoch by Douglas Cooper (Paperback - 1 Mar 1995) Cubism (Art & Ideas) by Neil Cox (Paperback - Nov 2000) Cubism and Culture (World of Art) by Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten (Paperback - 8 Oct 2001) Architecture and Cubism by E Blau (Hardcover - 16 Jan 1998) Cubism and Twentieth-century Art by Robert Rosenblum (Paperback - 11 Jun 2001) Cubism (Taschen Basic Art Series) by Anne Gantefuhrer-Trier (Paperback - 26 Nov 2004) Cubist Picasso by Anne Baldassari and Pierre Daix (Hardcover - 19 Nov 2007) Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism by William Rubin (Hardcover - 30 Oct 1989) Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier by Jeffrey S. Weiss, Valerie J. Fletcher, Kathryn A. Tuma, and Pablo Picasso Georges Braque: A Life by Alex Danchev (Paperback - 29 Mar 2007) Braque (Great Modern Masters) by Jose Maria Faerna (Hardcover - 1 Jan 1998) Fernand Leger Paris-New York by Yve-Alain Bois, Brigitte Hedel-Samson, and Fondation Beyeler (Hardcover - 22 Jul 2008) Fernand Leger by Glenn D. Lowry, Carolyn Lanchner, and Beth Handler (Paperback - Jun 2002) Juan Gris by C Green (Hardcover - 16 Sep 1992) Juan Gris: La Pasion Por El Cubismo / the Passion for Cubism by Paz Garcia Ponce De Leon (Hardcover - 28 Feb 2008) Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay's Series (Guggenheim Museum Publications) by Mark Rosenthal and Matthew Drutt (Hardcover - 1 Mar 1998) Robert Delaunay: Hommage a Bleriot by Roland Wetzel, Sigrid Schade, and Amelie Jensen (Hardcover - 1 Aug 2008) Apollinaire, Cubism and Orphism by Adrian Hicken (Hardcover - 6 Sep 2002)

Websites

Ballet Mecanique (Fernand Léger's Short Film) Cubism (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) Delaunay's Eiffel Tower exhibition Geometry in Cubist Art Online Picasso Project Robert Delaunay

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