PICASSO AND CUBISM - Mr. Sherwood's Blogmadill.typepad.com/mr_sherwoods_blog/files/avi4m/AVI4M-5_isms.pdf · Module: Art Theory and History for Senior Students Course Code: AVI 4M

Course Code: AVI 4MModule: Art Theory and History for Senior Students

23Chapter 3: Five -Isms

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)

Post Impressionists like van Gogh and Cezanne set the stage for a new generation of artists to push the boundaries of art even further. Young artists were inspired by the bold approach of these artists but wanted to go even further in the use of expressive colour, and in the flattening of the pictorial space of painting.

Artists like Henri Matisse and a group known as the Fauves pushed the use of brilliant colour and impasto texture further than van Gogh had dared and Pablo Picasso took Cezanne's experiments with perspective to the next level.

The early twentieth century was a turbulent time of industrialization and violent political upheaval and the art of this era was suitably adventurous. We will begin our look at this time with the development of cubism through the work of Pablo Picasso.

PICASSO AND CUBISM

Picasso was the child prodigy son of Jose Ruiz Blasco, a drawing master of Malaga Spain, and Maria Picasso. Until 1898 Picasso included his father’s name, Ruiz, as well as his mother’s, when signing works, but after 1900 he dropped the name Ruiz from his signature. More than any other artist Picasso has become associated with the development of the Modernist aesthetic in the period between the two world wars.

Three Musicians. 1921. 6’7””x7”33/4”. oil on canvas.The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Picasso first visited Paris in 1900, and alter-nated between Paris and Barcelona from 1900-1904. During this early Paris period he was very much influenced by the drawings of Toulouse Lautrec. The subject matter of his work became the poor and social outcasts of society, dominated by blue tones. In 1904 Picasso took a studio the Bateau-Lavoir and became the center of an avant-garde circle of artists.

Man Ray (1890-1976) © ARS, NY Pablo Picasso. 1933. Gelatin silver print. 35.2 x 27.9 cm (13 7/8 x 11 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 (1987.1100.18). Copy Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art Location :The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Photo Credit : Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY


24 Chapter 3: Five -Isms

THE BLUE PERIOD 1901-1904

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The Old Guitarist, 1903/04. Oil on panel. 122.9 x 82.6 cm The Art Institute of Chicago



From 1905-1908 Picasso’s fortunes changed and so did his art. The subject matter of this period was predominately acrobats, dancers and harlequins, with an introduction of grey and pink tones to his

THE ROSE PERIOD 1904-1908

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The Family of Acrobats with Ape. 1905. oil on canvas 41”x291/2”.gouache, watercolour, pastel, India ink on cardboard.

palette. He met Matisse in 1906, and although he admired the work of the Fauves he continued to de-velop his own aesthetic.



The years from 1907-1909 are often called his "African" period, when he concentrated on the simplification of forms in his work based on a study of African sculpture and the works of Paul Cezanne.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 1907. 8’x7’8”. oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art. New York.

THE AFRICAN PERIOD 1907-1909

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The culmination of this work was the painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon a work so radical it was not publicly displayed until 1937.



From 1910-1916 Picasso worked closely with the artists Georges Braques and Juan Gris, developing the various aspects of Cubism, first Analytical Cubism, (1910-1912), and then Synthetic Cubism, (c.1912). Analytical Cubism had begun

THE ANALYTICAL CUBIST PERIOD 1910-1912

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Portrait of Vollard. 1910. 361/4”x255/8”. oil on canvas.Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art, Moscow.

with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and continued to develop the process of fracturing the viewing plane of the canvas. Perhaps Cubism’s most important influence on modern art was that it insisted that art was an object in its own right and not just a represen-tation of the real world.



After Cubism Picasso worked in a variety of styles including Synthetic Cubism, a monumental Neoclassical style and his own version of Surrealism. The culmination of this period was his epic painting “Guernica” in 1937, which expressed his horror of the bombing of the Basque capital and foreshadowed the coming war in Europe.

THE SYNTHETIC CUBIST PERIOD 1912-1917

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Still Life with Chair Caning. 1912. 101/2”x133/4”.collage of oil, oilcloth and pasted paper simulating chair caning on canvas. Musée Picasso. Paris.

Picasso continued to push the boundaries of art throughout his life and expressed his genius in almost every artistic medium with equal skill.



HENRI MATISSE (1869-1954)

Henri Matisse and a group of young artists ex-hibited a collection of vibrantly coloured paintings in

Paris in 1905. A critic reviewing the work at the time referred to the painters as "fauves", which is French for wild beasts, because he could not comprehend their intense use of colour and texture. The artists however were fine with the name given to them and the Fauvist movement was born. Artists such as Matisse, Derain, Dufy, de Vlaminck and Rouault continued to create works with violent colour and distortion.MATISSE AND FAUVISM

Henri Matisse was born in Le Cateau in the Picardy region of France. He abandoned the study of Law and went to Paris in 1892 to study art in the academic tradition under the painter Bouguereau, (1825-1905). He also worked at the Academie Julien and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts were he studied with Gustave Moreau and met many of the artists who would later form the Fauves group of painters.

Woman with the Hat. 1905. oil on canvas 32”x231/4”. Private collection, San Francisco.

Coburn, Alvin Langdon (1882-1966)Henri Matisse, painter, 1913. Platinum print.Location :Royal Photographic Society, London, Great Britain Photo Credit : SSPL/National Media Museum / Art Resource, NY



THE FAUVE PERIOD 1905-1908

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The Green Stripe (Madame Matisse). 1905. 157/8”x127/8”. oil on canvas. Statens Museum, Copenhagen.

He studied in this way much in the style and colour ranges of the realists like Corot until 1896, when painting in Brittany he began to use the lighter palette of the Impressionists. He seems to have been mostly influenced by Renoir during this time. By 1899 he began to experiment with Neo-Impressionist techniques similar to those used by Seurat and the Divisionists.



THE POST FAUVE PERIODS 1908-1954

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Harmony in Red. 1908-09. 711/4”x967/8”. oil on canvas.The Hermitage Museum, Leningrad

In 1905 together with artists such as Derain and Vlaminck he exhibited new works in a now famous Salon d’Automne show that gave rise to the name “Fauve”. The story goes that a critic seeing a sculpture that was like the work of Renaissance sculptor Donatello remarked, “Donatello au milieu des fauves”, (Donatello among the wild beasts). Accuracy of the story aside the name appealed to the group of painters and stuck!



Le Tobogan from “Jazz”. 1944 . collage.

In 1906 Matisse met Picasso and shared his interest in African art, but remained distant from the cub-ists, preferring to develop his own aesthetic. In 1907 Matisse founded his own academie. During this period he began to formalize his approach to painting, coming back to several themes which would continue to be a source of inspiration throughout his career.

He continued to develop a style based on line and colour shapes with alternating periods of more naturalistic and more abstract compositions. After the First World War, Matisse like Picasso, led the revolt against traditional representation, defining the period known as Modernism. In later life he became known for his “papiers collés” which he began in 1941 during a convalescence from a serious operation. His most famous of these works were for the book “Jazz” completed in 1944.

THE COLLAGES OF MATISSE

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Their exhibition in Paris 1912 seemed to mark the culmination of theory with practice and it drew considerable attention from the art world. The exhibit traveled from Paris to other major cities in Europe and suddenly Futurism became a significant part of the avant garde. They attempted to bring art into closer con-tact with life by capturing movement with simultaneous views of the same object or by lines of force.

Balla was the oldest member of the group and a teacher to some of the others. He continued his own experiments showing simultaneous views of the same object. Street Light is one of the earliest examples of Futurism using V shaped brush strokes and complementary colour pairs to create the optical illusion of light rays vibrating away from the light and into the space around it.

Futurism was an artistic movement with political implications, (unfortunately it was later associated with the rise of Italian fascism) that was founded by the Italian poet Marinetti. It is one of the few serious art movements that began first as a theory and was taken up by painters as a way of “il-

GIACOMO BALLA 1871-1958

Italian Futurism

lustrating “ the ideas. It was the attempt of a number of young artists to free Italy from its past and the cultural stupor it found itself in by the early part of the 20th century. It glorified the modern world, ma-chinery, speed and violence. A militant faction of the Futurists also supported destroying museums, librar-ies and academies as a way of wiping away the past and starting fresh.

The painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini announced their dedication to the movement in 1910 with a technical manifesto of Futurist painting, fol-lowed in 1912 with a manifesto on Futurist sculpture by Boccioni. In 1910 the Futurists were following the colour techniques of the Neo-Impressionists as interpreted by Balla, but by 1912 it seemed to be an attempt to infuse Cubism with more life and dyna-mism.

Street Light- Study of Light. 1909. oil on canvas 68 3/4”x451/4”. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, (Balla)



Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. 1912. oil on canvas, 89.85 x 109.85 cm. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

Celebrating the machine and war as a way of “cleansing” the old society many Futurists eagerly participated in the First World War. Many of course never returned including Boccioni, (perhaps the most talented of the Futurist group), which marked the end of Futurism even though it continued to win over new members and in turn influenced other new styles of art such as Russian Constructivism, Vorticism and the Dadaists.

THE ART OF BALLA

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LUIGI RUSSOLO 1885-1947

The Solidity of Fog. 1912. 393/8”x285/8”.oil on canvas. Collection of Gianni Mattioli, Milan, (Russolo)

Russolo was the strongest theorist if not the most creative painter. In The Solidarity of Fog he translates the light radiating from the sun into ever increasing solid circles segmenting the figures into rhythmic pat-terns. He became interested in Futurist music and gave up painting for a number of years to explore the pos-sibilities of paving the way for much of the electronic music that was produced later in the century.

THE ART OF RUSSOLO

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UMBERTO BOCCIONI 1882-1916

Riot in the Gallery. 1909. 30”x251/4”. oil on canvas.Collection of Emilio Jesi, Milan, (Boccioni)

Boccioni was perhaps the most talented of the group but his career was cut short in 1916 when he was killed in World War 1. His first important Futurist painting was Riot in the Gallery which combined some of Balla’s Street Light elements with a movement and energy. This painting in a way was preparatory to his later masterpiece The City Rises. Perhaps one of Boccioni’s greatest accomplishments was the creation of Futurist sculpture which revitalized the medium and influenced many new styles of art, such as Constructivism, Vorti-cism and the very influential Dada movement.

Boccioni was perhaps the most talented of the group but his career was cut short in 1916 when he was killed in World War 1. His first important Futurist painting was Riot in the Gallery which combined some of Balla’s Street Light elements with a movement and energy. This painting in a way was preparatory to his later masterpiece The City Rises. Perhaps one of Boccioni’s greatest accomplishments was the creation of Futurist sculpture which revitalized the medium and influenced many new styles of art, such as Constructivism, Vorti-cism and the very influential Dada movement.



The City Rises. 1910-11. 6’6”x9’10”. oil on canvas.The Museum of Modern Art, New York

THE ART OF BOCCIONI

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The City Rises is a masterpiece of Futurism integrating labour, light and movement. The composition is dominated by the large, surging figure of the horse in the foreground which pushes aside the people. It encap-sulates one of the credos of Futurism which was to capture the dynamism of work and labour in the modern industrial society. Solid objects appear to dissolve into light and movement and are reintegrated into the com-position as energetic brush strokes of pure colour.



Salvador Dali was a gifted and imaginative painter from Spain who developed an interest in the sub-conscious and Freudian psychology. As a young artist Dali revered his fellow countryman Picasso. Later he became associated with artists of the surrealist movement in Paris and Madrid and in 1929 developed his "Paranoiac Critical" method of painting, (juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated objects from which the mind could intuit links or relationships), in the early 1930's.

Surrealism was a movement that began in the early part of the 20th century. It began primarily as a philosophical movement after Andre Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.

SALVADOR DALI 1904-1989

FOUR PAINTERS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND

The ideas of surrealism developed out of the Dada art movement of the 1916 - 1920 period which rejected logic and embraced chaos as a reaction to the society that had led to the horrors of the First World War. Many of the artists

Sigmund Freud's work with free association, dream analysis and the hidden unconscious became very important to the Surrealists who worked to de-velop methods to liberate imagination.

The Persistence of Memory. 1931. oil on canvas 24.1”x / 3cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Salvador Dali, ca. 1960. Location : Photo Credit : Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY



Salvador Dali experimented with photography and film as well as traditional art techniques to explore his approach to surrealism including famous collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney. Often his outrageous personal behaviour eclipsed his art.

Dali's later art experimented with different technical approaches including optical illusions and holog-raphy. The subject matter of his art tended to include a mix of science and Christian symbolism in a style he called Nuclear Mysticism.

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, (Premonition of Civil War). 1936. oil on canvas 100 x 99 cm. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.



The Accommodations of Desire. 1929. oil on cardboard 22.2 x 34.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

THE ART OF DALI

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GIORGIO de CHIRICO 1888-1978

Ariadne. 1913. 135.6 cm x 180.3 cm. oil and graphite on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

De Chirico was a Greek born Italian painter who studied art in Athens, Florence and Munich. He spent most of his mature period in Paris and Rome where he gained fame for an approach he called the Metaphysi-cal School of art which featured odd, moody city-scapes populated by statues and shadows, and cluttered store rooms with mannequin-like figures.

THE ART OF de CHIRICO

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RENE MAGRITTE 1888-1967

The Menaced Assassin. 1926. 59 1/4”x 76 7/8”. oil on canvas.Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Magritte was a Belgian artist who studied art from an early age. He produced his first surrealist painting in 1926 which did not meet with critical success. He later moved to Paris and became involved with the sur-realist group of artists working there. He made his money early on as a graphic designer for a large firm and then later with is own agency which he formed with his brother.

His work often contained ordinary objects in odd or unusual contexts which gave them new meaning.

THE ART OF MAGRITTE

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MÉRET OPPENHEIM 1913-1985

Oppenheim was a German born Swiss artist who was associated with the Dada art movement and Surrealism. At the age of 18 she travelled to Paris where she met many of the artists involved with the Sur-realist movement and exhibited with them in 1933.

She continued to exhibit with Surrealist artists until 1960 with her work often focusing on female sexu-ality and feminist concerns. Her sculpture "Object" may be one of the most notorious Surrealist "found objects.

Object. 1936.fur covered cup, saucer and spoon. The Museum of Modern Art, New York

THE ART OF OPPENHEIM

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ERNST KIRCHNER 1880-1938Kirchner was a student of architecture in Dres-

den when he became interested in pursuing a career as a painter. Together with fellow students Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel he formed an artists' movement called Die Brücke.

It is important to understand that although it is often used as a term of reference for artwork pro-duced in Germany in the very early part of the 20th century there never was a specific movement known as expressionism at that time.

PAINTING THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

There were actually two distinct groups of art-ists working in Germany and Austria that are con-sidered to be expressionists; Der Blaue Reiter, (the Blue Rider) and Die Brücke, (the Bridge). These artists were influenced by the philosopher Nietzsche breaking with academic tradition by making use of bold colours and distorted forms often without perspective to conveying an aesthetic experience beyond merely imitating the real world.

Die Brücke was a movement that was founded in 1905 by art students in Dresden which they hoped would form a bridge between the art of the past and that of the new century. Der Blaue Reiter was established in Munich between 1911 and 1914 by artists wishing to express spiritual truths through their art.

The term expressionism itself was coined by the art historian Antonin Matĕjček in 1910 to de-scribe artists whose work rejected simple representa-tion and worked at a more complex psychic level.

Street, Berlin. 1913. oil on canvas 120.6 x 91.1 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

These artists admired earlier German artists such as Dürer, Grünewald and Cranach the Elder as well as European avant-garde movements and they saw themselves as a link between the two. Kirchner established an individual reputation as an artist out-side the Die Brücke group in 1913-14 with his paint-ings of Berlin street life.



Self Portrait as Soldier. 1915. oil on canvas 27 1/4" x 24" The Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin Ohio.

Kirchner served briefly in the First World War but suffered a nervous breakdown and was dis-charged in 1915. He recovered over the next two years in sanatoriums in Switzerland.

THE ART OF KIRCHNER

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He spent the rest of his life in Switzerland where he became associated with the Rott-Blau group of artists. The Nazi party labelled him a degenerate artist in 1933 confiscating his work from museums and galleries to have them destroyed. The trauma of this and the German occupation of Austria prior to the Second World War led to his suicide.



Church of St. Ursula. 1908. oil on canvas 68.8 x 49 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

WASSILY KANDINSKY 1866-1944

Kandinsky was a Russian painter and printmak-er who began by studying law and economics at the university of Moscow.

He was quite successful in this career and did not start to study drawing and painting until he was 30. He soon decided to give up a promising position teaching law at a university and instead moved to Munich in 1896 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Just before his move to Munich he saw an exhibition of works by Monet which had a power-ful effect on him. He became particularly interested in colour and what he perceived as its symbolic and psychological power.

Kandinsky was also greatly influenced by mu-sic, Wagner in particular, and the religion/philosophy of Theosophy. His early work shows the influence of both Pointillism and Fauvism and often concentrated on the landscape.



Composition VII. 1913. oil on canvas 200 x 300 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

THE ART OF KANDINSKY

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The paintings of the Blaue Reiter period were often large free form compositions of line and colour that did not try to illustrate anything other that a direct expression of the "inner feelings of the human soul".

Kandinsky was also a writer and art theorist and wrote his treatise "On the Spiritual in Art" at this time.



Fighting Forms. 1914. oil on canvas. 91 x 131 cm. Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich.

THE ART OF MARC

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FRANZ MARC 1880-1916Marc was a German artist whose father was a

landscape painter. He studied painting at the Acad-emy of Fine Arts in Munich then spent time in Paris where he was greatly influenced by the work of van Gogh.

He helped to form the Blaue Reiter group in 1911 and exhibited with them in 1911 and 1912. He was on a list of artists to be withdrawn from ac-tive combat during the First World War but he was killed in the Battle of Verdun before his orders came through.



The Tempest, Bride of the Wind. 1914. oil on canvas. 71 1/4" x 86 5/8". Kunstmuseun, Basel.

THE ART OF KOKOSCHKA

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OSKAR KOKOSCHKA 1886-1980Kokoschka was an Austrian painter, poet and

playwright. His early work were mostly portraits done of important people in Vienna. He served in the First World War until he was wounded.

He had a passionate love affair with Alma Mahler, the widow of composer Gustav Mahler and his early masterpiece "The Tempest" was a tribute to her.

He fled Austria in 1934 when the Nazis branded him a degenerate artist and eventually settled in England.



EDVARD MUNCH 1863-1944

The Scream. 1893. oil and tempera on cardboard. 91 x 73.5 cm. National Gallery, Oslo.

The Sick Child. 1907. oil on canvas. 118.7x121cm. The Tate Modern, London.

Munch was a Norwegian painter and printmaker in the Symbolist style who work is seen as an impor-tant forerunner to the expressionist work of the early 20th century.

His father was an important doctor in Oslo. A defining event in Munch's childhood was the death of his mother and sister as a result of contracting tu-berculosis. Munch was a sickly child often confined to his home in the winters.

He enrolled in a technical school to study engi-neering where he excelled but he later left to study at the Royal School of Art in Oslo.

He experimented with many styles of art includ-ing Impressionism and many of his early portraits are similar to Manet's.

Feeling that an Impressionistic style did not al-low him to adequately express emotional content he continued to develop his style of painting

His work did not receive critical acceptance in Norway and he left for Paris. There he was greatly influenced by the work of Gauguin, van Gogh and Lautrec.

After Paris Munch travelled to Berlin where his work caused a public commotion.



THE ART OF MUNCH

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The Dance of Life. 1899-1900. oil on canvas. 49 1/2" x 75". The National Gallery, Oslo.

Documents

PICASSO AND CUBISM - Mr. Sherwood's Blogmadill.typepad.com/mr_sherwoods_blog/files/avi4m/AVI4M-5_isms.pdf · Module: Art Theory and History for Senior Students Course Code: AVI 4M