Cubism

Cubism - One of the most influential art movements ( ) of the twentieth century, Cubism was begun by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, ) and Georges Braque (French, ) in They were greatly inspired by African sculpture, by painters Paul Cézanne (French, ) and Georges Seurat (French, ), and by the Fauves.art movementsPaul CézanneFauves In Cubism the subject matter is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form. Picasso and Braque initiated the movement when they followed the advice of Paul Cézanne, who in 1904 said artists should treat nature "in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone."abstracted formcylinderspherecone

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso: Head of Woman (1924) What two different perspectives do you see in this artwork? Profile (nose) and frontal view (head).

This small painting demonstrates Picasso’s ability to capture an image through very direct means: taut lines laid over four colours. The stylization of the face makes reference to the flattened planes associated with Cubism, but the incised line also reflects the texture and layering that dominated his work of the 1920s. He was much admired by the Surrealists but, even though sharing their interest in the unconscious and the irrational, resisted any official connection.

Weeping Woman (1937) How many perspectives do you see in this next artwork? There isn’t necessarily a right or wrong answer.

Subject: Subject: Dora Maar, the Surrealist photographer who was Picasso's lover from the mid- 1930s until the end WWII. Distinguishing features: This is a study of how much pain can be communicated by a human face. It has the features of a specific person, Dora Maar, whom Picasso described as "always weeping". She was in fact his close collaborator in the time of his life when he was most involved with politics. Let your eyes wander over the sharp surface and you are led by the jagged black lines to the picture's centre, her mouth and chin, where the flesh seems to have been peeled away by corrosive tears to reveal hard white bone. The handkerchief she stuffs in her mouth is like a shard of glass. Her eyes are black apertures. When you are inside this picture you are inside pain; it hits you like a punch in the stomach. Picasso's insistence that we imagine ourselves into the face of this woman, into her dark eyes, was part of his response to seeing newspaper photographs of the Luftwaffe's bombing of Guernica on behalf of Franco in the Spanish civil war on April 26, This painting came at the end of the series of paintings, prints and drawings that Picasso made in protest. It has very personal, Spanish sources. In May 1937 Picasso's mother wrote to him from Barcelona that smoke from the burning city during the fighting made her eyes water. The Mater Dolorosa, the weeping Virgin, is a traditional image in Spanish art, often represented in lurid baroque sculptures with glass tears, like the very solid one that flows towards this woman's right ear.

Subject: Dora Maar ( ), the Surrealist photographer who was Picasso's lover from the mid-1930s until the end of the second world war. Distinguishing features: This is a study of how much pain can be communicated by a human face. It has the features of a specific person, Dora Maar, whom Picasso described as "always weeping". She was in fact his close collaborator in the time of his life when he was most involved with politics. Let your eyes wander over the sharp surface and you are led by the jagged black lines to the picture's centre, her mouth and chin, where the flesh seems to have been peeled away by corrosive tears to reveal hard white bone. The handkerchief she stuffs in her mouth is like a shard of glass. Her eyes are black apertures. When you are inside this picture you are inside pain; it hits you like a punch in the stomach. Picasso's insistence that we imagine ourselves into the excoriated face of this woman, into her dark eyes, was part of his response to seeing newspaper photographs of the Luftwaffe's bombing of Guernica on behalf of Franco in the Spanish civil war on April 26, This painting came at the end of the series of paintings, prints and drawings that Picasso made in protest. It has very personal, Spanish sources. In May 1937 Picasso's mother wrote to him from Barcelona that smoke from the burning city during the fighting made her eyes water. The Mater Dolorosa, the weeping Virgin, is a traditional image in Spanish art, often represented in lurid baroque sculptures with glass tears, like the very solid one that flows towards this woman's right ear.

Studio of Milliner (1926) Even more perspective are included in this painting. This painting is monochromatic. What do you think that means? It means only using one color, but varying the value. What is a value? The lightness or darkness of a color.

George Braque:

"Georges Braque developed his painting skills while working for his father, a house decorator. He moved to Paris in 1900 to study where he was drawn to the work of the Fauve artists, including Matisse, Derain and Dufy, as well as the late landscapes of Cézanne. Meeting Picasso marked a huge turning point in Braque's development and together they evolved as leaders of Cubism. After a brief interlude in which he was called up to fight in the First World War, Braque's style developed in the direction he was to follow for the rest of his life. In establishing the principle that a work of art should be autonomous and not merely imitate nature, Cubism redefined art in the twentieth century. Braque's large compositions incorporated the Cubist aim of representing the world as seen from a number of different viewpoints. He wanted to convey a feeling of being able to move around within the painting. The still life subject remained his chief preoccupation from 1927 to 1955."Matisse DerainDufyCézannePicassoCubism

trained to be a house painter and decorator like his father and grandfather. However, he also studied serious painting in the eveningshouse painterdecorator Braque's paintings of 1908–1913 began to reflect 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, appearing 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. In this way, Braque called attention to the very nature of visual illusion and artistic representation.perspective Fruitdish and Glass, papier collé and charcoal on paper, 1912.papier collé Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work closely with Pablo Picasso,Pablo Picasso

Glass on a Table ( ) How many perspectives of the glass do you see?

Instead of presenting the single vantage point of traditional painting, Braque and Picasso fragmented the object into a series of geometric facets and planes, which imitate the darting, fleeting nature of sight. In this painting, the glass and pears on a table appear obscured by the scaffolding of vertical, horizontal and curvilinear forms. Braque believed that it was only by breaking up the picture plane that he could get closer to a true depiction of the object

The following are examples of monochromatic paintings, a few in the cubist style we just talked about. These examples are meant to give you ideas for your painting. What do you want to make your paining of? What color scale will you select? Think about if your painting will follow the cubist thought, be prepared to explain why or why not.

Your assignment First you will need to select a subject matter to paint. You may create your own drawing or look at photographs. Think of still life, portrait, landscape, abstract, city scene, cubism……. If you use a photograph you will need to copy in into black and white. A rough drawing should be done before the final drawing to be painted. Drawings must be checked in before paint paper.