Early Cubist Painting
Prototype Cubism, History, Styles: By Picasso
and Braque.
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Early Cubist Painting
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Early Cubist Painting (c.1907-9)Contents • When did Cubism
begin? |
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Examples Self Portrait (1906) Woman with Loaves (1906) Large Nude (1908) |
If pushed, most art historians would say that the movement known as Cubism began in 1907 with Picasso's picture Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (MOMA, NY). This work signalled the start of an exploratory phase, during which Picasso and Georges Braque came together to establish a number of new and important principles of modern art.
This collaboration did not happen overnight: it wasn't until 1908 that both artists formed the intimate working relationship ("two mountaineers roped together"), based on the ideas of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) - especially as expressed in his masterpiece The Large Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) (1894-1905) - which led to the invention of first Analytical Cubism (c.1909-1912) and then Synthetic Cubism (1912-14). |
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GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION TWENTIETH CENTURY
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Woman with Loaves was painted in the summer of 1906 (despite the date 1905, added in error beneath the signature). Earlier that year Picasso had begun a Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), the American writer who had set herself up in Paris a few years earlier and had already become a major patron, proselytizer, and practitioner in the international intellectual avant-garde. After eighty sittings Picasso had wiped out the face of her portrait. Whatever the face had been like, it is obvious that in the rest of the picture Cezanne is very much present. When Picasso returned to the picture after the summer interval during which he painted Woman with Loaves, the new force at work in his art produced the masklike face which is so at variance with the Cezannesque forms that surround it. In his Self Portrait (1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art) painted immediately afterward, the masklike quality has increased, and its severe half-primitive quality has extended to the figure also. |
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By his own statement, in Woman with Loaves, the Stein portrait, and his own portrait, Picasso was influenced by the archaic sculpture of pre-Roman Spain. But the two portraits show that he had already discovered African sculpture also. At any rate the ingredients for Cubism were now assembled. These were: the painting of Paul Cezanne, with his concept of volume and space as abstract geometry to be dealt with at whatever necessary rejection of their natural relationships; primitive art, that is, African and archaic sculpture with their untheoretical but exciting reduction of natural forms to geometrical equivalents; and, finally, the intuitive genius of Picasso and the deductive mind of Braque to merge these components with dashes of several others in their search for new expressive means. This new expression was soon to have a name, Cubism, and to be codified into a theory. But for the moment it manifested itself half formed, in 1907, in a large painting by Picasso which, although technically ambiguous, is decisively the beginning point of Cubism. A composition involving five female nudes, the traditional bathers motif, it was later dubbed Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as a joke, and has continued by that name as a convenience. Everyone admits that these five 'demoiselles' are among the unloveliest females in the history of art, and no one pretends that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, MOMA, New York) is an unqualified success in every way, but on the other hand no student of 20th century painting denies its position as a landmark. It is a discordant picture, not only in the way it ruptures, fractures, and dislocates form with a violence that would probably have appalled Cezanne, but in the disharmony of its own parts. On the left the standing figure is hieratic in its formality, posed in a standard attitude of Egyptian sculpture. But by the time the right side of the picture is reached, this formality has given way to a jagged, swinging, crashing line, and the African mask makes its impact with full force in the grotesque faces. As it was, the year 1907 was exceptionally stimulating for Picasso. He was in the middle of his African or Negro period (1906-7), during which he was absorbing the aesthetics of African tribal art - a process which as we have just seen culminated in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, as well as oils like Head (1907, Barnes Foundation), Bust of a Woman (1907, MoMA, NY) and Nude (Bust) (1907, Hermitage, St Petersburg). Other vivid examples of his 'African' paintings of the time include: Woman with a Fan (1907, Hermitage, St Petersburg) and Dance of the Veils (Nude with Drapery) (1907, Hermitage, St Petersburg). In 1908, he continued with the primitivist style of Les Demoiselles, executing a number of ethnic-style works with well-modelled, angular bodies. They include: Seated Woman (1908, Hermitage, St Petersburg), Dryad (1908, Hermitage, St Petersburg), and Farm Woman (Full-Length) (1908, Hermitage, St Petersburg). Only in his mid/late-1908 works such as Friendship (1908, Pushkin Museum, Moscow) and Three Women (1908, Pushkin Museum), does the influence of Cezanne begin to emerge. How Did Braque Arrive at Cubism? At the start of 1907, Braque was known as a member of Fauvism, the high-fashion style of colourism which had burst onto the Parisian art world in 1905. However two events in 1907 would rapidly change his life. First, he was bowled over by the major Cezanne retrospective, at the Salon d'Automne. Second, his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler introduced him to Apollinaire and Picasso. Braque visited the latter at his studio in the tumbledown Bateau Lavoir complex in the Rue Ravignan, Montmartre, where he was profoundly impressed by Les Demoiselles. Indeed, he was so taken with it, that he abandoned Fauvism and spent the next six months working on a new picture - Large Nude (1908, Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou) - which required him to transform his whole method of painting. Unlike Picasso, however, Braque moved directly directly from his Large Nude to more overt Cubist imagery (in the manner of Cezanne), namely his landscapes at L'Estaque. So by late 1908, stylistically he was fractionally ahead of his Spanish partner.
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Picasso and Braque: Collaboration (1908-9) In 1908, by now both deeply intrigued by Paul Cezanne's geometric-style landscapes, Picasso and Braque set about extending their mentor's ideas. First, they completed a series of landscape paintings that were very similar to those by Paul Cezanne. Thus all natural forms were reduced to basic geometric shapes and the colour palette was predominantly subdued blues and greens. (Picasso still maintained his keenness for his warmer ochres and siennas). They painted houses in the form of 3-D cubes: Braque at L'Estaque; Picasso at Horta del Ebro in Spain. It was these paintings that the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles was describing in 1909, when he used the expression 'bizarreries cubiques' - which led to the adoption of the word Cubism.
Conventions of Perspective Rejected In this early phase of prototype-Cubism, Picasso and Braque utilized several technical devices to undermine the illusion of space. To begin with, they rejected all the normal conventions of linear perspective. Instead of diminishing size signifying background, perspective was rendered by means of colour: warm reddish browns were used for foreground, cool blues for background. Buildings appear one on top of the other instead of standing one behind the other. In Houses on the Hill (1909, MoMA), Picaso used similar cubic-shaped imagery for his background and foreground (houses). By rendering earth and sky in the same way, he introduced greater unity to the picture but also introduced ambiguity: after all, there was now less difference between ground and air. Another technique used by both Braque and Picasso in their early Cubist art, involved the use of different light sources. Whereas traditional pictures employ a consistent light source (to create the illusion of three-dimensional space), in Cubist canvases light appears to enter the composition from numerous different angles thus confusing the viewer as to whether shapes are convex or concave. Greatest Early Cubist Paintings In addition to works already cited, here is a short selected list of early Cubist pictures, executed in the manner of Cezanne, which can be seen in some of the best art museums around the world. Georges Braque Pablo Picasso Note: Picasso's most famous late Cubist paintings include: Guernica (1937, Reina Sofia Art Museum, Madrid) and Weeping Woman (1937, Tate, London). For works by other Cubists, see Cubist Painters. |
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• For a list of schools and styles,
see Modern Art Movements.
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