Cubism

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Cubism

Cubism was an early 20th century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and which inspired related movements in music and literature.

In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form — instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to present the piece in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles presenting no coherent sense of depth. The background and object (or figure) planes interpenetrate one another to create the ambiguous shallow space characteristic of cubism.

History

Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, then residents of the Montmartre quarter of Paris, France are the movement's main innovators. After meeting in 1907 they began working on the development of Cubism in 1908, and worked closely together until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term "cubism", or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it.

Cubism was taken up by many artists in Montparnasse and promoted by art dealer Henry Kahnweiler, becoming popular so quickly that by 1910 critics were referring to a "cubist school" of artists. However, many of the artists who thought of themselves as cubists went in directions quite different from Braque and Picasso. The Puteaux Group was a significant offshoot of the Cubist movement, and included artists like Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger. Braque and Picasso themselves went through several distinct phases before 1920.

The influence of cubism on artists of the first decades of the 20th century can be seen in the development of new trends in art like futurism, constructivism, vorticism and expressionism.

Analytic cubism

Picasso and Braque worked alongside one another (1906-1909 pre-cubism) and then started to work hand-in-hand to further advance their concepts into what was later termed "Analytic Cubism" (autumn 1909 to winter 1911/1912), a style in which densely patterned near-monochrome surfaces of incomplete directional lines and modeled forms constantly play against one another. Braque would later describe their relationship as being like 'two mountaineers roped together'.

Picasso's 1907 painting of the Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is considered a transitional work essential in the development of cubism. In it Picasso first experiments with seeing the same object, or figure in this case, from various directions. Impressed by the painting, Braque experimented further with this idea. The explorations of both men led to what would be cubism.

Some art historians have also identified a secondary phase in this analytical period, the "Hermetic" phase, in which the works are characterized by being monochromatic and hard to decipher. The painters gave clues as to what is portrayed by leaving some identifiable object. For example a pipe, which leads to identifying that a person is smoking it. During this time the cubists neared abstraction. Some alphabetic letters were introduced to the works during this phase, to also serve as clues. Braque introduced these which gave immediate connection to everyday objects like a bottle of rum or a newspaper.

Synthetic cubism

The second phase of cubism, beginning in 1912, is called "Synthetic Cubism".

Unlike analytic cubism, which fragmented an object into its composing parts or facets, synthetic cubism brought many different objects together to create new forms. Distinct superimposed parts were painted or often pasted onto the canvas, one effect of which was the introduction of brighter colors into cubist space.

This phase constitutes the birth of the collage and of papier collé. Picasso invented the collage with his Still Life with Chair Caning, in which he pasted a patch of oil cloth painted with a chair-caning design to the canvas of the piece. Braque, interested by Picasso's technique, first employed papier collé in his piece Fruitdish and Glass. Papier collé consists of pasting material to a work much in the same way as a collage, except the shape of the patches are objects themselves. For example, the glass on the left in Fruitdish and Glass is a piece of newspaper cut into the shape of a glass.

While Braque had previously used lettering in his compositions, the two artists' synthetic pieces greatly developed this idea. Letters that had hinted to the objects, became objects themselves. Newspaper scraps are among the usual items the artists pasted to their canvases, but they also used wallpaper, paper with a wood print, advertisements, or other types of scraps..

Besides employing mixed media, Picasso and Braque varied their paint applications with decorative painting techniques such as combing, faux graining and adding sand for texture. They often drew objects and added shadows with graphite or charcoal, mixing drawing and painting techniques. Picasso especially made use of pointillism and dot patterns to suggest transparent planes and to differentiate space.

Settings in Music

A prime example of cubism in music was given by composer Igor Stravinsky in his Piano-Rag-Music, for solo piano. It was written during Stravinsky's stay in France around 1919 as a result of contact with American popular music (ragtime culminated, at that time) from the early '20s. Elements reassembled were rhythmic and harmonic segments from ragtime and polyrhythm, bitonality and melody from his Russian influence.

Cubism in Literature

Cubism also was adapted into literature, especially poetry, by the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Gertrude Stein and Pierre Reverdy. Such poets adopted a number of techniques which could be classed as close to Analytic Cubism (destruction of grammar, strange or absent punctuation, free verse, etc.) and also some others close to Synthetic Cubism, especially in the case of Guillaume Apollinaire (fusion of poetry and drawing in caligrammes; collages involving postcards, letters and the like; use of musical notation, etc.) It should be noted that Cubist poetry frequenty overlaps with Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism or even more diverse movements such as Vicente Huidobro's Creationism.

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