![]() Indeed, many understand Cubism as the beginning of a new page in Western art history-when the illusionistic representation of objects and figures in space gave way to pure abstraction.Ĭubism underwent several stylistic shifts, but at its core, the artists associated with the movement distilled forms down to their essential elements. Picasso and Braque would go on to experiment with the style in every genre: figural works, landscapes, and still lifes, and it would ultimately be viewed as one of-if not the-most influential artistic movements of the 20th century. “ has contempt for form,” Vauxcelles wrote, and “reduces everything-places and figures and houses-to geometrical patterns, to cubes.” Vauxcelles’s review is widely credited as the first use of the term “cubes” to describe this style, which eventually led to the movement’s name: Cubism. He exhibited the work at Kahnweiler’s Paris gallery in November 1908, earning a caustic review from the notoriously outspoken art critic Louis Vauxcelles in the literary periodical Gil Blas. He soon began work on a series of landscapes in which the picture plane was similarly fractured into pieces. But Picasso’s painting, with its dynamic, off-kilter, and convention-exploding perspective and form, quickly turned Braque in a new direction. ![]() Gone was the female nude as a submissive, demure object for consumption.Īt the time, Braque had been painting in the radically colorful style of the Fauvists. Gone was any vestige of realistic representation or perspective. Picasso also provides the viewer with concurrent views of the crouching woman’s back and front as her body faces one way, her head is turned impossibly to look confrontationally at the viewer. One has the sensation of looking down upon the table, while simultaneously looking directly ahead at the women in the room. A table featuring a bowl of fruit at the center of the painting is tilted dramatically upward, giving the viewer a skewed perspective. In his analysis, Kahnweiler zeroed in on one of the most perplexing aspects of the composition. “This is the beginning of Cubism,” Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, an art dealer who worked with Picasso and Braque, later wrote in his 1920 book The Rise of Cubism ( Der Weg zum Kubismus), “the first upsurge, a desperate titanic clash with all of the problems at once.” ![]() Every surface in the painting-bodies, furniture, even walls-is composed of fractured, geometric planes, almost as if looking into a smashed mirror. ![]() There, Braque first laid eyes on the Spanish artist’s latest painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a monumental canvas depicting five aggressively angular nude women with mask-like faces, standing in a shallow space. What he saw upon entering the space would have a profound and lasting impact on him-and on the entire history of Western art. In 1907, a young French painter named Georges Braque visited Pablo Picasso’s studio in Montmartre, Paris. ![]()
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