Cubism
By- Thakur
Dhirendranath
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement pioneered by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, joined by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris[1] that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. Cubism has been considered the most
influential art movement of the 20th century.[2] The term is broadly used in
association with a wide variety of art produced in Paris (Montmartre, Montparnasse and Puteaux) during the 1910s and extending through the
1920s. Variants such as Futurism and Constructivism developed in other countries.
A primary influence that led to Cubism
was the representation of three-dimensional form in the late works of Paul Cézanne, which were displayed in a retrospective at
the 1907 Salon d'Automne.[3] In Cubist artwork, objects are
analyzed, broken up and reassembled 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.[4]
Conception and origins
Cubism began between 1907 and 1911.
Pablo Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon has often been considered a proto-Cubist work. Georges Braque's 1908 Houses at L’Estaque (and related works) prompted the
critic Louis Vauxcelles to refer to bizarreries cubiques (cubic oddities). Gertrude Stein
referred to landscapes made by Picasso in 1909, such as Reservoir at Horta de Ebro, as
the first Cubist paintings. The first organized group exhibition by Cubists
took place at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris during the spring of 1911 in a room called
‘Salle 41’; it included works by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and Henri Le Fauconnier, yet no works by Picasso and Braque were
exhibited.[3]
By 1911 Picasso was recognized as the
inventor of Cubism, while Braque’s importance and precedence was argued later,
with respect to his treatment of space, volume and mass in the L’Estaque
landscapes. But "this view of Cubism is associated with a distinctly
restrictive definition of which artists are properly to be called Cubists,"
wrote the art historian Christopher Green: "Marginalizing the contribution
of the artists who exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911 [...]"[3]
Historians have divided the history of
Cubism into phases. In one scheme, the first phase of Cubism, known as Analytic Cubism, a phrase
coined by Juan Gris a posteriori,[6] was both radical and influential as a
short but highly significant art movement between 1910 and 1912 in France. A
second phase, Synthetic Cubism,
remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity. English art historian Douglas Cooper proposed another scheme, describing
three phases of Cubism in his book, The
Cubist Epoch. According to Cooper there was "Early Cubism", (from
1906 to 1908) when the movement was initially developed in the studios of
Picasso and Braque; the second phase being called "High Cubism",
(from 1909 to 1914) during which time Juan Gris emerged as an important exponent
(after 1911); and finally Cooper referred to "Late Cubism" (from 1914
to 1921) as the last phase of Cubism as a radical avant-garde movement.[7] Douglas Cooper's restrictive use of
these terms to distinguish the work of Braque, Picasso, Gris (from 1911) and
Léger (to a lesser extent) implied an intentional value judgement.[3]
The assertion that the Cubist
depiction of space, mass, time, and volume supports (rather than contradicts)
the flatness of the canvas was made by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler as early as 1920,[8] but it was subject to criticism in the
1950s and 1960s, especially by Clement Greenberg.[9] Contemporary views of Cubism are
complex, formed to some extent in response to the "Salle 41" Cubists,
whose methods were too distinct from those of Picasso and Braque to be
considered merely secondary to them. Alternative interpretations of Cubism have
therefore developed. Wider views of Cubism include artists who were later
associated with the "Salle 41" artists, e.g., Francis Picabia; the brothers Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp, who beginning in late 1911 formed the core
of the Section d'Or (or the Puteaux Group); the sculptors Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Csaky and Ossip Zadkineas well as Jacques Lipchitz and Henri Laurens; and painters such as Louis Marcoussis, Roger de La Fresnaye, František Kupka, Diego Rivera, Léopold Survage, Auguste Herbin, André Lhote, Gino Severini (after 1916), María Blanchard (after 1916) and Georges Valmier (after 1918). More fundamentally,
Christopher Green argues that Douglas Cooper's terms were "later
undermined by interpretations of the work of Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger
that stress iconographic and ideological questions rather than methods of
representation."[3]
John Berger identifies the essence of Cubism with
the mechanical diagram. "The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram:
The diagram being a visible symbolic representation of invisible processes,
forces, structures. A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearance but
these too will be treated as signs not as imitations or recreations."[10]
Technical and stylistic aspects
During the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, Europeans were discovering African, Micronesian and Native American art. Artists such as Paul Gauguin,Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and
inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures.
Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when both artists had recently
acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture, African art and African tribal masks. They became friendly rivals and competed
with each other throughout their careers, perhaps leading to Picasso entering a
new period in his work by 1907, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian and
African art. Picasso's paintings of 1907 have been characterized as
Protocubism, as notably seen in Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon, the antecedent of Cubism.[5]
The traditional interpretation of
"Cubism", formulated post
facto as a means of
understanding the works of Braque and Picasso, has affected our appreciation of
other twentieth-century artists. It is difficult to apply to painters such as Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay and Henri Le Fauconnier, whose fundamental differences from
traditional Cubism compelled Kahnweiler to question their right to be called
Cubists at all. According to Daniel Robbins, "To suggest that merely because
these artists developed differently or varied from the traditional pattern they
deserved to be relegated to a secondary or satellite role in Cubism is a
profound mistake."[12]
The history of the term
"Cubism" usually stresses the fact that Matisse referred to
"cubes" in connection with a painting by Braque in 1908, and that the
term was published twice by the critic Louis Vauxcelles in a similar context. However, the
word "cube" was used in 1906 by another critic, Louis Chassevent,
with reference not to Picasso or Braque but rather to Metzinger and Delaunay:
The critical use of the word
"cube" goes back at least to May 1901 when Jean Béral, reviewing the
work of Henri-Edmond Cross at the Indépendants inArt et
Littérature, commented that he "uses a large and square pointillism,
giving the impression of mosaic. One even wonders why the artist has not used
cubes of solid matter diversely colored: they would make pretty
revetments." (Robert Herbert, 1968, p. 221)[14]
The most innovative period of Cubism
was before 1914. After World War I, with the support given by the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, Cubism returned as a central issue for
artists, and continued as such until the mid-1920s when its avant-garde status
was rendered questionable by the emergence of geometric abstraction and Surrealism in Paris. Many Cubists, including Picasso, Braque, Gris, Léger, Gleizes,
and Metzinger, while developing other styles, returned periodically to Cubism,
even well after 1925. Cubism reemerged during the 1920s and the 1930s in the
work of the AmericanStuart Davis and the Englishman Ben Nicholson. In France, however, Cubism experienced a
decline beginning in about 1925. Léonce Rosenberg exhibited not only the
artists stranded by Kahnweiler’s exile but others including Laurens, Lipchitz,
Metzinger, Gleizes, Csaky, Herbin and Severini. In 1918 Rosenberg presented a
series of Cubist exhibitions at his Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in Paris.
Attempts were made by Louis Vauxcelles to claim that Cubism was dead, but these
exhibitions, along with a well-organized Cubist show at the 1920 Salon des
Indépendants and a revival of the Salon de la Section d’Or in the same year,
demonstrated it was still alive.[3]
`
Pablo Picasso
By- Thakur Dhirendranath
Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso (Spanish: [ˈpaβlo piˈkaso]; 25 October 1881
– 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most
of his adult life in France. As one of the greatest and most influential
artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed
sculpture,[2][3] the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles
that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the
proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a
portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
Picasso
demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a
realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade
of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different
theories, techniques, and ideas. His work is often categorised into periods.
While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly
accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901–1904), the
Rose Period (1904–1906), the
African-influenced
Period
(1907–1909), Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), and Synthetic Cubism
(1912–1919).
Picasso was
baptised Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los
Remedios Crispiniano de la Santísima Trinidad, a series of names honouring
various saints and relatives.[8] Added to these were Ruiz and Picasso,
for his father and mother, respectively, as per Spanish law. Born in the city
of Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first
child of Don José Ruiz y
Blasco
(1838–1913) and María Picasso y López.[9] Despite being baptised Catholic,
Picasso would later on become an atheist.[10] Picasso's family was middle-class.
His father was a painter who specialised in naturalistic depictions of birds
and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School
of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. Ruiz's ancestors
were minor aristocrats.
Picasso showed a
passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his
first words were "piz, piz", a shortening of lápiz, the
Spanish word for "pencil".[11] From the age of seven, Picasso
received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil
painting. Ruiz was a traditional academic artist and instructor, who believed
that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing
the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied
with art to the detriment of his classwork.
The family moved
to A Coruña in 1891, where
his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. They stayed almost
four years. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his
unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son's technique,
an apocryphal story relates,
Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to
give up painting,[12] though paintings by him exist from
later years.
In 1895, Picasso
was traumatised when his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria.[13] After her death, the family moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its
School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness
or nostalgia as his true home.[14] Ruiz persuaded the officials at the
academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This
process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and
the jury admitted him, at just 13. The student lacked discipline but made
friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a small room
for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous
times a day, judging his drawings. The two argued frequently.
Picasso's father
and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid's Royal Academy of San Fernando, the country's
foremost art school.[14] At age 16, Picasso set off for the
first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending
classes soon after enrolment. Madrid held many other attractions. The Prado housed paintings by Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and Francisco Zurbarán. Picasso
especially admired the works of El Greco; elements such as his elongated
limbs, arresting colours, and mystical visages are echoed in Picasso's later
work.
Career beginnings (Before 1900)
Picasso's
training under his father began before 1890. His progress can be traced in the
collection of early works now held by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which provides one of the most
comprehensive records extant of any major artist's beginnings.[15] During 1893 the juvenile quality of
his earliest work falls away, and by 1894 his career as a painter can be said
to have begun.[16] The academic realism apparent in the
works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The First Communion (1896),
a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In the same year, at the age
of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic
portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called "without a doubt one of the
greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting."[17]
Picasso made his
first trip to Paris in 1900, then the art capital of Europe. There, he met his
first Parisian friend, journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped Picasso learn the
language and its literature. Soon they shared an apartment; Max slept at night
while Picasso slept during the day and worked at night. These were times of
severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Much of his work was burned to keep the
small room warm. During the first five months of 1901, Picasso lived in Madrid,
where he and his anarchist friend Francisco de Asís Soler
founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), which published five
issues. Soler solicited articles and Picasso illustrated the journal, mostly
contributing grim cartoons depicting and sympathising with the state of the
poor. The first issue was published on 31 March 1901, by which time the artist
had started to sign his work Picasso; before he had signed Pablo Ruiz
y Picasso.[19]
Blue Period
Picasso's Blue
Period (1901–1904), characterized by somber paintings rendered in shades of
blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colours, began either in
Spain in early 1901, or in Paris in the second half of the year.[20] Many paintings of gaunt mothers with
children date from the Blue Period, during which Picasso divided his time
between Barcelona and Paris. In
his austere use of color and sometimes doleful subject matter – prostitutes and
beggars are frequent subjects – Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain
and by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. Starting in autumn of 1901 he
painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the gloomy
allegorical painting La Vie (1903), now in the Cleveland Museum of
Art.
Rose Period
The Rose Period
(1904–1906)[24] is characterised by a more cheery
style with orange and pink colours, and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequins known in France as saltimbanques. The
harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned
clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a bohemian artist who
became his mistress, in Paris in 1904.[13] Olivier appears in many of his Rose
Period paintings, many of which are influenced by his warm relationship with
her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting. The generally
upbeat and optimistic mood of paintings in this period is reminiscent of the 1899–1901
period (i.e. just prior to the Blue Period) and 1904 can be considered a
transition year between the two periods.
By 1905, Picasso
became a favourite of American art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. Their older brother Michael Stein
and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted
portraits of both Gertrude Stein and her nephew Allan Stein. Gertrude Stein became Picasso's
principal patron, acquiring his drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in
her informal Salon at her home in Paris.[25] At one of her gatherings in 1905, he
met Henri Matisse, who was to
become a lifelong friend and rival. The Steins introduced him to Claribel Cone and her sister
Etta who were American art collectors; they also began to acquire Picasso and
Matisse's paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy. Michael and Sarah
Stein became patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein continued to collect
Picasso.[26]
In 1907 Picasso
joined an art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler was a German art historian and
art collector who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th
century. He was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubism that they jointly developed. Kahnweiler promoted
burgeoning artists such as André Derain, Kees van Dongen, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Maurice de Vlaminck and several
others who had come from all over the globe to live and work in Montparnasse at the time.[27]
African-influenced
Period
Picasso's
African-influenced Period (1907–1909) begins with the two figures on the right
in his painting, Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon, which were inspired by African artefacts.
Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period
that follows.
Cubism
Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso
developed with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral
colours. Both artists took apart objects and "analyzed" them in terms
of their shapes. Picasso and Braque's paintings at this time share many
similarities. Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the
genre, in which cut paper fragments – often wallpaper or portions of
newspaper pages – were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.
At the outbreak
of World War I August 1914 Picasso lived in Avignon. Braque and Derain were mobilized and
Apollinaire joined the French artillery, while the Spaniard Juan Gris remained from the Cubist circle.
During the war Picasso was able to continue painting uninterrupted, unlike his
French comrades. His paintings became more sombre and his life changed with
dramatic consequences. Kahnweiler’s contract had terminated on his exile from
France. At this point Picasso’s work would be taken on by the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg. After the loss
of Eva Gouel Picasso had an affair with Gaby Lespinasse. During the spring of
1916 Apollinaire returned from the front wounded. They renewed their
friendship, but Picasso began to frequent new social circles.Towards the end of
World War I, Picasso made a number of important relationships with figures
associated with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Among his friends during this period
were Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris and others. In the summer of 1918,
Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's troupe, for
whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Erik Satie's Parade, in Rome; they spent their honeymoon
near Biarritz in the villa of
glamorous Chilean art patron Eugenia Errázuriz.After return
from honeymoon, and in desperate need of money, Picasso started his exclusive
relationship with the French-Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg. As part of his
first duties, Rosenberg agreed to rent the couple an apartment in Paris at his
own expense, which was located next to his own house. This was the start of a
deep brother-like friendship between two very different men, that would last
until the outbreak of World War II.
Khokhlova
introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and all the social
niceties attendant to the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son,
Paulo,[31] who would grow up to be a dissolute
motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father. Khokhlova's insistence on social
propriety clashed with Picasso's bohemian tendencies and the two lived in a
state of constant conflict. During the same period that Picasso collaborated
with Diaghilev's troup, he and Igor Stravinsky collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso
took the opportunity to make several drawings of the composer.
In 1927 Picasso
met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began a
secret affair with her. Picasso's marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in
separation rather than divorce, as French law required an even division of
property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have
half his wealth. The two remained legally married until Khokhlova's death in
1955. Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter and
fathered a daughter with her, named Maya. Marie-Thérèse lived in the vain hope
that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after
Picasso's death. Throughout his life Picasso maintained several mistresses in
addition to his wife or primary partner. Picasso was married twice and had four
children by three women:
Picasso was one
of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture
International held at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art
in mid-1949. In the 1950s, Picasso's style changed once again, as he took to
producing reinterpretations of the art of the great masters. He made a series of works based
on Velázquez's painting of Las Meninas. He also based
paintings on works by Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix.
He was
commissioned to make a maquette for a huge 50-foot (15 m)-high public sculpture to be built in Chicago, known usually
as the Chicago Picasso. He approached the project with a
great deal of enthusiasm, designing a sculpture which was ambiguous and
somewhat controversial. What the figure represents is not known; it could be a
bird, a horse, a woman or a totally abstract shape. The sculpture, one of the
most recognisable landmarks in downtown Chicago, was unveiled in 1967. Picasso
refused to be paid $100,000 for it, donating it to the people of the city.
Picasso's final
works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until
the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became
more daring, his works more colourful and expressive, and from 1968 to 1971 he
produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the
time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an
impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime.
Only later, after Picasso's death, when the rest of the art world had moved on
from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see that
Picasso had already discovered neo-expressionism and was, as so often before, ahead of
his time.
Death
Pablo Picasso
died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, while he and his wife
Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. He was interred at the Chateau of
Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958
and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962. Jacqueline Roque prevented
his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral.[44] Devastated and lonely after the death
of Picasso, Jacqueline Roque killed herself by gunshot in 1986 when she was 59
years old.[45]
Georges
Braque
By- Thakur
Dhirendranath
Georges Braque 13 May 1882 – 31 August 1963 was a
major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker andsculptor. His most important contributions to
the history of art were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1906, and the role he
played in the development of Cubism. Braque’s work between 1908 and 1912 is
closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were
indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially
eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso.[1]
Georges Braque was born on 13 May 1882 in Argenteuil, Val-d'Oise. He grew up
in Le Havre and trained
to be a house painter and decorator like his
father and grandfather. However, he also studied artistic painting during
evenings at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Le Havre,
from about 1897 to 1899. In Paris, he apprenticed with a decorator and was
awarded his certificate in 1902. The next year, he attended the Académie Humbert, also in Paris, and painted there
until 1904. It was here that he met Marie Laurencin and Francis Picabia.[1]
Braque's earliest works were impressionistic, but after
seeing the work exhibited by the artistic group known as the "Fauves" (Beasts) in 1905, he adopted a Fauvist style. The Fauves, a group that
included Henri Matisseand André Derain among others, used brilliant
colors to represent emotional response. Braque worked most closely with the
artists Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz, who shared
Braque's hometown of Le Havre, to develop a somewhat more subdued Fauvist
style. In 1906, Braque traveled with Friesz to L'Estaque, to Antwerp, and home to Le Havre to paint.[1]In May 1907, he successfully
exhibited works of the Fauve style in the Salon des
Indépendants. The same year, Braque's style began a slow
evolution as he became influenced by Paul Cézanne who had died in 1906 and whose
works were exhibited in Paris for the first time in a large-scale, museum-like
retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly
affected the avant-garde artists of Paris, resulting in
the advent of Cubism.
Cubism[edit]
Braque's paintings of 1908–1913 reflected his
new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He conducted an
intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means
that painters use to represent these effects, seeming to question the most
standard of artistic conventions. In his village scenes, for example, Braque
frequently reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating
a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and
three-dimensional by fragmenting the image. He showed this in the
painting Houses at l'Estaque.
Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work
closely with Pablo Picasso who had been developing a
similar proto-Cubist style of painting. At the time,
Pablo Picasso was influenced by Gauguin, Cézanne, African masks and Iberian sculpture while
Braque was interested mainly in developing Cézanne's ideas of multiple
perspectives. “A comparison of the works of Picasso and Braque during 1908
reveals that the effect of his encounter with Picasso was more to accelerate
and intensify Braque’s exploration of Cézanne’s ideas, rather than to divert
his thinking in any essential way.”[2] Braque’s essential subject is
the ordinary objects he has known practically forever. Picasso celebrates
animation, while Braque celebrates contemplation.[3] Thus, the invention of Cubism
was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the
style's main innovators. After meeting in October or November 1907,[4] Braque and Picasso, in
particular, began working on the development of Cubism in 1908. Both artists
produced paintings of monochromatic color and complex patterns of faceted form,
now termed Analytic Cubism.
A decisive time of its development occurred
during the summer of 1911,[5] when Georges Braque and Pablo
Picasso painted side by side in Céret in the French Pyrenees, each artist
producing paintings that are difficult—sometimes virtually impossible—to
distinguish from those of the other. In 1912, they began to experiment
with collage and Braque
invented the papier collé technique.[6]
French art critic Louis Vauxcelles used the
terms "bizarre cubiques" in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He
described it as 'full of little cubes'. The term 'Cubism', first pronounced in
1911 with reference to artists exhibiting at the Salon des
Indépendants, quickly gained wide use but Picasso and
Braque did not adopt it initially. 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."[7] The Cubist style spread quickly throughout Paris
and then Europe.
The two artists' productive collaboration
continued and they worked closely together until the beginning of World War I in 1914,
when Braque enlisted with the French Army. In May 1915, Braque received a
severe head injury in battle at Carency and suffered temporary
blindness.[8] He was trepanned, and required a long period of recuperation.
Braque resumed painting in late 1916. Working
alone, he began to moderate the harsh abstraction of cubism. He developed a
more personal style characterized by brilliant color, textured surfaces,
and—after his relocation to the Normandy seacoast—the reappearance of the human
figure. He painted many still life subjects during this time,
maintaining his emphasis on structure. One example of this is his 1943
work Blue Guitar, which hangs in the Allen Memorial Art
Museum.[11] During his recovery he became a
close friend of the cubist artist Juan Gris.
He continued to work during the remainder of
his life, producing a considerable number of paintings, graphics, and
sculptures. Braque, along with Matisse, is credited for introducing Pablo
Picasso to Fernand Mourlot, and most of the lithographs and book
illustrations he himself created during the 1940s and '50s were produced at
the Mourlot Studios. In 1962 Braque worked with master
printmaker Aldo Crommelynck to create his series of etchings
and aquatints titled “L’Ordre des Oiseaux” (“The Order of Birds”),[12] which was accompanied by the
poet Saint-John Perse's text.[13]Braque died on 31 August 1963 in Paris.
He is buried in the cemetery of the Church of St. Valery in Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy whose windows he designed.
Braque's work is in most major museums throughout the world.
Style
Braque believed that an artist experienced
beauty "… in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through
that beauty [he] interpret[s] [his] subjective impression...”[14] He described "objects
shattered into fragments… [as] a way of getting closest to the
object…Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space”.[15] He adopted a monochromatic and neutral color palette in the
belief that such a palette would emphasize the subject matter.
Although Braque began his career painting
landscapes, during 1908 he, alongside Picasso, discovered the advantages of
painting still lifes instead. Braque explained that
he “… began to concentrate on still-lifes, because in the still-life you have a
tactile, I might almost say a manual space… This answered to the hankering I
have always had to touch things and not merely see them… In tactile space you
measure the distance separating you from the object, whereas in visual space
you measure the distance separating things from each other. This is what led
me, long ago, from landscape to still-life”[16] A still life was also more
accessible, in relation to perspective, than landscape,
and permitted the artist to see the multiple perspectives of the object.
Braque's early interest in still lifes revived during the 1930s.
During
the period between the wars, Braque exhibited a freer style of Cubism,
intensifying his color use and a looser rendering of objects. However, he still
remained committed to the cubist method of simultaneous perspective and
fragmentation. In contrast to Picasso, who continuously reinvented his style of
painting, producing both representational and cubist images, and
incorporating surrealist ideas into his work, Braque
continued in the Cubist style, producing luminous, other-worldly still life and
figure compositions. By the time of his death in 1963, he was regarded as one
of the elder statesmen of the School of Paris, and of modern art.
2010
theft
On
20 May 2010, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris reported
the overnight theft of five paintings from its collection. The paintings taken
wereLe pigeon aux petits
pois (The
Pigeon with the Peas) by Pablo Picasso, La Pastorale by Henri Matisse, L'Olivier Près de l'Estaque (Olive
Tree near Estaque) by Georges Braque, La Femme à l'Éventail (fr) (Woman with a Fan)
by Amedeo Modigliani and Nature Morte aux Chandeliers (Still
Life with Chandeliers) by Fernand Léger and were valued at €100
million ( $123 million USD).[17][18] A window had been smashed
and CCTV footage
showed a masked man taking the paintings.[17] Authorities believe the thief
acted alone.[19] The man carefully removed the
paintings from their frames, which he left behind.[20]
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