Information about Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. Analytic Cubism, was both radical and influential, it initially developed as a short but highly significant art movement between 1908 and 1911 in France. In its second phase Synthetic Cubism, the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity.

Conception and Early Years

During the late 19th century and into the early 20th century the European cultural elite was discovering the art of Africa, Micronesia, and Native Americans for the first time. Europeans were fascinated, intrigued and educated by the newness, wildness and the stark power embodied in the art of those faraway places. During the late 1890s Paul Gauguin led the way, and younger artists like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso in the early days of the 20th century were inspired and motivated by the raw power and simplicity of the so-called Primitive art of those foreign cultures. Around 1904, Picasso met Henri Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when both artists had recently acquired an interest in African sculpture. Picasso and Matisse became friendly rivals and competed with each other throughout their careers. Possibly because of this rivalry and friendship, Picasso's work entered a new period by 1907 marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian and African art, and masks in particular. His paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, the antecedent of Cubism. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form — instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles presenting no coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the ambiguous shallow space characteristic of cubism.

Some believe that the roots of cubism are to be found in the two distinct tendencies of Paul Cézanne's later work: firstly to break the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of paint, thereby emphasising the plural viewpoint given by binocular vision, and secondly his interest in the simplification of natural forms into cylinders, spheres, pies and cones.

The cubists went farther than Cézanne; they represented all the surfaces of depicted objects in a single picture plane as if the objects had had all their faces visible at the same time, in the same plane.^{(citation needed)} This new kind of depiction revolutionised the way in which objects could be visualised in painting and art.

The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the movement's main innovators. A later active participant was the Spaniard Juan Gris. After meeting in 1907 Braque and Picasso in particular began working on the development of Cubism. Picasso was initially the force and influence that persuaded Braque by 1908 to move away from Fauvism. The two artists began working closely together in late 1908 - early 1909 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The movement spread quickly throughout Paris and Europe.

French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term "cubism", or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture - that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas."^[1]

Cubism was taken up by many artists in Montparnasse and promoted by art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, becoming popular so quickly that by 1911 critics were referring to a "cubist school" of artists. However, many of the artists who thought of themselves as cubists went in directions quite different from Braque and Picasso. The Puteaux Group was a significant offshoot of the Cubist movement, and included artists like Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, his brother Jacques Villon, and Fernand Léger.

In 1913 the United States was exposed to cubism and modern European art when Jacques Villon exhibited seven important and large drypoints at the famous Armory Show in New York City. Braque and Picasso themselves went through several distinct phases before 1920, and some of these works had been seen in New York prior to the Armory Show, at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery.

Czech artists who realized the epochal significance of cubism of Picasso and Braque attempted to extract its components for their own work in all branches of artistic creativity - especially painting and architecture. This developed into so-called Czech Cubism which was an avant-garde art movement of Czech proponents of cubism active mostly in Prague from 1910 to 1914.

Analytic Cubism

Analytical Cubism is one of the two major branches of the artistic movement of Cubism and was developed between 1908 and 1912. In contrast to Synthetic cubism, Analytic Cubists "analyzed" natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the two-dimensional picture plane. Color was almost non-existent except for the use of a monochromatic scheme that often included grey, blue and ochre. Instead of an emphasis on color, Analytic cubists focused on forms like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent the natural world. During this movement, the works produced by Picasso and Braque shared stylistic similarities.

Analytic cubism is the first form of cubism; it was developed by Picasso and Braque between the years 1908 through 1912. Both painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque moved toward abstraction, leaving only enough signs of the real world to supply a tension between the reality outside the painting and the complicated meditations on visual language within the frame, exemplified through their paintings Ma Jolie (1911), by Picasso and The Portuguese (1911), by Braque.

In Paris in 1907 there was a major museum retrospective exhibition of the work of Paul Cezanne shortly after his death. The exhibition was enormously influential in establishing Cezanne as an important painter whose ideas were particularly resonant especially to young artists in Paris. Both Picasso and Braque had gotten the inspiration for Cubism from Paul Cezanne, who said to observe and learn to see and treat nature as if it were composed of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Picasso was the main analytic cubist, but Braque was also prominent, having abandoned Fauvism to work with Picasso in developing the Cubist lexicon. The main concept of analytic cubism was to analyze the object, hence the name analytic, and then to make them into basic geometric shapes. These shapes were used to represent the natural world. By the name, a person would think it was cubes, but it’s more breaking the 3 dimensional objects up into other shapes. The paintings depict the object from many different perspectives because of this. There wasn’t much emphasis on color, the paintings consisting of primarily simple, monotone colors, like gray and blue.

Synthetic Cubism

Synthetic Cubism was the second main branch of Cubism (the earlier being Analytic cubism) developed by Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris and others between 1912 and 1919. It was seen as the first time that collage had been made as a fine art work.

The first work of this new style was Picasso's Still Life with Chair-caning (1911-1912), which includes oil cloth pasted on the canvas. At the upper left are the letters "JOU", which appear in many cubist paintings and may refer to a newspaper titled "Le Journal". Newspaper clippings were a common inclusion in this style of cubism, whereby physical pieces of newspaper, sheet music, etc. were included in the collages. JOU can at the same time be a pun on the French word(s) for "game" or "play": "jeu" and "jouer" respectively. Picasso and Braque had a constant friendly competition with each other and including the letters in their works may have been an extension of their game.

Whereas analytic cubism was an analysis of the subjects (pulling them apart into planes), synthetic cubism is more of a pushing of several objects together. Picasso, through this movement, was the first to use text in his artwork (to flatten the space), and the use of mixed media—using more than one type of medium in the same piece. Opposed to analytic cubism, synthetic cubism has fewer planar shifts (or schematism), and less shading, creating flatter space.

Another technique used was called papier collé, or stuck paper, which Braque used in his collage Fruit Dish and Glass (1913).

Cubism and its ideologies

Paris before World War I was a ferment of politics. New anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and women's rights movements were especially new and vigorous. There were strong movements around patriotic nationalism. Cubism was a particularly varied art movement in its political affiliations, with some sections being broadly anarchist or leftist, while others were strongly aligned with nationalist sentiment.

Cubism in Other Fields

Gertrude Stein's written works employ repetition and repetitive phrases as building blocks and as structure in passages and whole chapters, that add up to the construction of whole novels as in The Makings of Americans (written, 1906-08), and most of her important works. Not only were they the first important patrons of Cubism, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were also important influences on Cubism as well. Picasso in turn was an important influence on Stein's writing.

The poets associated with Cubism are Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, André Salmon and Pierre Reverdy. As American poet Kenneth Rexroth explains, Cubism in poetry "is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. This is quite different from the free association of the Surrealists and the combination of unconscious utterance and political nihilism of Dada."^[2] Nonetheless, the Cubist poets' influence on both Cubism and the later movements of Dada and Surrealism was profound; Louis Aragon, founding member of Surrealism, said that for Breton, Soupault, Éluard and himself, Reverdy was "our immediate elder, the exemplary poet."^[3] Though not as well remembered as the Cubist painters, these poets continue to influence and inspire; American poets John Ashbery and Ron Padgett have recently produced new translations of Reverdy's work.

Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is also said to demonstrate how cubism's multiple perspectives can be translated into poetry.

In architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright gained widespread notoriety for his three-dimensional cubist building designs with highly fractured floor plans.

References

Further reading

• John Cauman (2001). Inheriting Cubism: The Impact of Cubism on American Art, 1909-1936. New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries. ISBN 0-9705723-4-4. 

See also

• Czech Cubism

External links

• On-Line Picasso Project
• The Cubist Rupture Artistic comments in MundoArta
• ibiblio (internet library) Cubism
• The Czech Cubism Foundation (English)
• Cubism, The Big Picture

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