1. Cubism
Pablo Picasso
Georges Braque

2. By 1906 Picasso searching for new ways to depict form,
he looked to:
African sculpture
Ancient Iberian sculpture
Late paintings of Cezanne
(as mentioned expansion of colonial empires in late
nineteenth and early twentieth cent resulted in a wider
exposure to Africa and India.

3. Portrait of Gertrude Stein (his
patron).
Picasso had started the
painting but after over 80
sittings he’d left it
unfinished
The artist told her ‘I can’t
see you any longer when I
look’ After contact with
Iberian sculpture painted
her head as a simplified
planer form, incorporating
aspects derived from his
wide-ranging sources.

4. Iberian sculpture

5. Les Demoiselles
d’Avigion (the young
ladies of Avignon)
June – July 1907,
Picasso worked
on a radically
new method of
representing
form in space.

6. Began work as a
symbolic picture
called Philosophical
Bordello, portraying
male clients mingling
with women in the
reception room of a
brothel (Avignon
Street in Barcelona
was located in the
red-light district).
By the time the artist
had finished had
eliminated the male
figures and simplified
the room’s details.

7. Had become wholly
absorbed in the
problem of finding a
new way to represent
the five female
figures in interior
space.
Fractured their forms
interwove them with
the equally jagged
planes that represent
drapery and empty
space.
Pushed Cezanne’s
treatment of form and
space to a new
tension. Tension
between
representation and
abstraction.

8. Inconsistently
depicted the figures.
Three calm young
women at the left
inspired by Iberian
sculptures, Picasso
saw during visits to
Spain.
2 right violent figures
result of Picasso’s
fascination with
African sculpture.
Revised their bodies.
Figures are seen from
more than one place
in space at once.
three-quarters back
view, from the left
another from the right
and a front view of
the head.

9. For many years this painting only known to other painters.
One of the first was Georges Braque (1882-1963) a Fauve
painter who was so agitated by it that he began to rethink
his own painting style.
Together they both formulated Cubism around 1908.
New style received its name after Matisse described some of
Braque’s work to a critic Louis Vauxcelles, as having been
painted ‘avec des petits cubes’ (with little cubes), and the
critic went on in his review to speak of ‘cubic oddities.’
Thus, critics, through their choice of labels, in part formed
public understanding of this original painting method.

10. Radical turning point in the history of art. Dismissed
pictorial illusionism that had dominated Western art.
Cubists rejected naturalistic depictions, preferring
compositions of shapes and forms ‘abstracted’ from the
conventionally perceived world.
These artists pursued the analysis of form adopted
Cezanne’s suggestion that artists use the simple forms of
cylinders, spheres, and cones to represent nature in art.
Dissected forms and recomposed them by a new logic of
design. For the Cubists, the art of painting had to move
far beyond the description of visual reality.

11. This rejection of accepted artistic practice illustrates
•The period’s aggressive avant-garde critique of pictorial
convention
•Public’s dwindling faith in a safe, concrete Newtonian world,
fears fostered by the physics of Einstein and others.

12. Gombrich’ s imaginary Cubist definition:
We do not want to fix on the canvas the imaginary impression
of the fleeting moment. Let us follow Cezanne’s example,
and build up the picture of our Motifs as solidly and
enduringly as we can. Wny not be consistant and accept the
fact that our real aim is rather to construct something rather
than to copy something? If we think of an
Object, let us say a violin, it does not appear before the eye of
our Mind as we would see it with our bodily eyes. We can
think of its various aspects at the same time. Some of them
stand out so clearly that we feel we can touch and handle
them; others are somehow blurred. And yet this strange
medley of images represents more of the ‘real’ violin than
any single snapshot or meticulous painting could ever
contain.

13. Cezanne mt-st-victoire-chateau-noir-1904-06

14. French writer and theorist Guilame Apollinaire summarised
the central Cubism concepts in 1913
‘Authentic Cubism is the art of depicting new wholes with
formal elements borrowed not from the reality of vision, but
from that of conception. This tendency leads to a poetic kind
of painting which stands outside the world of observation;
for, even in simple cubism, the geometrical surfaces of an
object must be opened out in order to give a complete
representation of it… Everyone must agree that a chair,
from whichever side it is viewed, never ceases to have four
legs, a seat and back, and that if it robbed of one of these
elements, it is robbed of an important part.’

15. Analytic Cubism

16. First phase of Cubism, developed jointly by Picasso
and Braque as Analytic Cubism
Analytic Cubism involves analysing form and
investigating the visual vocabulary (that is, the
pictorial elements) for conveying meaning.

17. Georges Braque’s The Portuguese,
1911
Subject from his memories
of a Portuguese musician
seen years before in a bar
in Marseilles.
Dissected forms and
interaction with the space
around it.
Reduced colour to browns
- very different to Fauves
and Expressionists.
Cubists used limited hues
to focus viewers attention
on form.

18. Georges Braque’s The Portuguese,
1911
Viewers must also work to
discover clues to the subject.
Large intersecting planes
suggests the forms of a man
and a guitar.
Smaller shapes interpenetrate
and hover in larger planes.
Light and dark suggest both
chiaroscuro modelling and
transparent planes that
allow viewers to see
through one level to
another.

19. Georges Braque’s The Portuguese,
1911
As observers look solid
forms emerge only to be
cancelled almost immediately
by a different reading of the
subject.
Stencilled letters and
numbers adds to the
paintings complexity.
Letters and numbers are flat
shapes.

20. Georges Braque’s The Portuguese,
1911
On a book’s pages they exist
outside three-dimensional
space but in a painting the
allow the painter to play with
2 and 3 dimensional space.
Image seems to be under
them pushing the letters
forward into the viewing
space.

21. Georges Braque’s The Portuguese,
1911
Picasso and Braque
pioneered precisely this
exploration of visual
vocabulary. – composition,
two-dimensional shape,
three dimension form,
colour and value – and its
role in generating meaning.
Constantly shifting imagery
makes it impossible to arrive
at any definitive reading of
the image.

22. Whereas Picasso and
Braque avoided colour
Robert Delaunay
(1885-1941) worked
towards a colour
cubism.
French writer
Guillaume Apollinaire
called this art Orphism
(after Orpheus, the
Greek God with
magical powers of
music.)

23. His red tower seen as a
metaphor for the
destruction in society
before first world war.
His experiments
strongly influenced the
Futurists and German
Expressionists (he
exhibited with Der
Blaue Reiter)

24. Figure works

25. Ambrose
Vollard, 1910

26. Cezanne’s portrait of
Ambrose Vollard
1899

27. Daniel Henry
Kahnweiler, 1910

28. Synthetic Cubism

29. In 1912, Cubism entered a new phase when it no longer relied
on a decipherable relation to the visible world.
Artists constructed paintings or drawings from objects and
shapes cut from paper or other materials to represent parts of a
subject.

30. Picasso’s ‘Still-life with Chair-Caning, included a piece of oil-cloth pasted on the
canvas after it was imprinted with the photolithographed pattern of a cane chair
seat. It is framed with a piece of rope.

31. Challenges people’s perception of ‘reality.’ The photographically replicated chair
seems so real that one expects the holes to break any brush strokes laid upon it.
Actually only an illusion. In contrast, the painted abstract areas do not refer to
tangible objects in the real world.

32. Yet the fact that they imitate anything makes them more real
than the chair caning – no pretence exists, they are what they
are!

33. extended the visual play by making the letter U escape from
the space of the accompanying J and O and partially covering
it with a cyclindrical space that pushes across its left side.

34. The letters JOU appear in many Cubist paintings; these letters formed part
of the masthead of the daily French newspapers (journals) often found
among the objects represented. Picasso and Braque delighted in puns for
jouer and jeu the French words for ‘to play’ and ‘game.’

35. Continued to explore the new medium of collage (from
French word meaning ‘to stick.’ Collage composition of bits
of objects, such as newspapter or cloth glued to the surface.
Variant of collage papier colle (stuck paper), or gluing
assorted paper shapes to a drawing or painting.

36. Braque Fruit Dish
and Cards, 1913,
Charcoal and pencil
lines and shadows
provide clues to the
Cubist multiple
views of table,
dishes, playing
cards, and fruit.

37. Braque Fruit Dish and
Cards, 1913,
Roughly rectangular
strips of woodgrained.
Grey and black paper
run vertically up the
composition.
Both echo the space
of lines and reinforce
sense of flatness. All
images both push
forward and drop
back.

38. Braque Fruit Dish and
Cards, 1913,
The game is part of
the meaning and
deciphering all levels
of interpretation. No
longer analysed the 3dimensional qualities
of the physical world.
Constructed or
synthesised objects
and space alike from
the materials he used.

39. ‘Not only did we try to displace reality; reality was no longer
in the object… In the papier colle… [we]e didn’t any longer
want to fool the eye; we wanted to fool the mind… if a piece
of newspaper can be a bottle, that gives us something to
think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles,
too.’
Modern in materials too – used mass produced materials
never found in ‘high’ art – and modern in how the artist
embedded the art’s ‘message’ in the imagery and the nature
of these every day materials.

40. Cubism not just about formal innovations, public also
viewed the revolutionary and subversive nature of Cubism
in socio-political terms.
Was an attack on society’s complacency and status quo.
Many French critics allied Cubism with anarchism,
revolution and disdain for tradition. Impact of Cubism
extended beyond the boundaries of art world.
Unlike Braque, Picasso’s work would include political
events Glass and Bottle of Suze included clipplings dealing
with the first Balkan war of 1912-13 which contributed to
world war 1

41. Cubist Sculpture

42. In works known as ‘assemblage’ Picasso used wood scraps
and found objects. Also introduced space into the interior used contained space rather than mass – redefined sculpture
now much more than a solid in a void was now a mixture of
solids and voids..

43. Study for Head of a Woman
Head of a Woman 1910

44. The Guitar 1912

45. Mandolin and Clarinet
1913
Synthetic sculpture
In works known as
‘assemblage’ Picasso used
wood scraps and found
objects.
Also introduced space into
the interior - used
contained space rather
than mass – redefined
sculpture now much more
than a solid in a void was
now a mixture of solids
and voids.

46. Other Cubist sculptors

47. Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973) Bather
1916-17
–
Worked out most of his ideas
in clay.
Broke forms into cubic
volumes and spaces,
Recalls Picasso’s paintings.

48. Aleksandr Archipenko (1887 – 1964)
Woman Combing her Hair 1915
Face is a void.
Space penetrates the figure’s
continuous mass and space
helps define form.
Same fluid intersecting
planes seen in a Cubist
painting.
Still representational but
started shaking off
representation.

49. Compare to Expressionist sculpture….

50. Aristide Malliol, La
Méditerranée 1906
Was painter but took up
sculpture
Work shows influence
of Egypt and Roman
Renoir
The poses favoured by
Rodin,.
Simplification of form

51. Henri Mattise The Serf
1900-03
Early work shows
influence of Rodin

52. La Serpentine 1909
thinned the forms
Movement would be
comprehensible from
all points of view.

53. Constantin Brancusi, Maiastra 1911
Sought to portray the essense of things like
Marc and Matisse,
represents a Golden bird which was source
of many Romanian folk tales
Assistant to Rodin but rejected his
modelling technique for carving in stone –
very simple.
Interest in Plato, all worldly objects and
being are imperfect imitations of their
perfect models or ideas, which exist in the
mind of God.

54. Erich Heckel Erect Figure propping
her Chin with her Hands 1912
member of De Brucke
Crudely carved in wood
rejecting the classical
tradition of marble and
bronze suggesting the desire
to return to nature.