Gardner’s Art Through the
Ages, 12e
Chapter 33
The Development of Modernist Art:
The Early 20th Century
Part 2
Colonial Empires About 1900
Cubism in Europe
• The most talked about “ism” of twentieth-century art, Cubism was the
joint invention of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
• The first branch of cubism, known as "Analytic Cubism", was both
radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement
between 1907 and 1911 in France. In its second phase, Synthetic
Cubism, (using synthetic materials in the art) the movement spread
and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement
gained popularity.
• 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 represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces
intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of
depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to
create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct
characteristics.
Picasso’ Early Art
• The Spanish born artist Pablo Picasso is generally seen as
the most important artist of the twentieth century. Trained
first in Barcelona, Picasso made frequent extended visits to
Paris in 1900 and moved there in early 1904.
• Picasso’s work is often categorized 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 (1905--1907), the
African-influenced Period (1908—1909), Analytic Cubism
(1909—1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912—1919).
• Most of the paintings from
Picasso’s Blue period are
sad, focusing on human
misery. He paints the blind,
beggars, alcoholics, and
prostitutes. One of Picasso’s
friends committed suicide
during this time, and it may
have been from this grief and
sadness that Picasso chose
such emotional subjects for
his paintings.
Pablo Picasso, The Tragedy, 1903
Stein, 1906–1907. Oil on
canvas.
Along with her brother Leo,
Gertrude Stein was among
the first Americans to
respond with enthusiasm to
the artistic revolution in
Europe in the early years of
the twentieth century.
Picasso's portrait of the
expatriate writer was begun
in 1905. Picasso actually
completed the head after a
trip to Spain in fall 1906. His
reduction of the figure to
simple masses and the face to
a mask with heavy lidded
eyes reflects his recent
encounter with African,
Roman, and Iberian sculpture
and foreshadows his
adoption of Cubism.
The Development of Cubism
• 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
artifacts. Formal ideas developed during this period lead
directly into the Cubist period that follows.
• Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso
developed along with Georges Braque using monochrome
brownish and neutral colors. Both artists took apart objects
and “analyzed” them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and
Braque’s paintings at this time have 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.
PABLO
PICASSO, Les
Demoiselles
d’Avignon,
June–July 1907.
Picasso was not
consciously
trying to break
with the western
pictorial
tradition that
dated back to
Giotto, but he
did. Braque
responded
eagerly to
Picasso’s formal
innovations.
GEORGES
BRAQUE,
The Portuguese, 1911.
In The Portuguese, an
example of Analytic
Cubism, Georges
Braque dissected the
form of the image (a
man and his guitar)
and placed it in
dynamic interaction
with the space around
it.
ROBERT
DELAUNAY,
Champs de Mars
or The Red Tower,
1911.
Illusion or reality?:
The second phase of Cubism is called Synthetic Cubism, in
which artists constructed paintings and drawings from
objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials to
represent parts of a subject. Picasso's Still Life with ChairCaning includes a piece of oilcloth pasted on the canvas
after it was imprinted with the photolithographed pattern of
a cane chair seat. The picture is framed with a piece of rope.
Georges Braque's Fruit Dish and Cards is a variant of
collage called papier collé (stuck paper) that involved
gluing assorted paper shapes to a drawing or painting.
PABLO PICASSO, Still Life with Chair-Caning, 1912.
GEORGES BRAQUE, Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe and Glass, 1913. Charcoal and various
papers pasted on paper
PABLO
PICASSO,
Maquette for
Guitar, 1912.
Cardboard, string,
and wire
(restored), 25 1/4”
x 13” x 7 1/2”.
Museum of
Modern Art, New
York.
Cubist Sculpture
• Cubist Sculpture brought the simplified shapes of Cubist
painting together with the three dimensional modeling
medium of sculpture. The first Cubist sculpture was made
by Picasso in 1909 and was titled 'Head of a Woman'.
However Picasso did experiment with abstract sculpture as
early as 1907 when he discovered, and was influenced by,
African masks. Cubist sculpture was mostly reminiscent of
Analytical Cubism in its stripping away of illusionist
details to reveal the fundamental form contained in each
individual subject, be it human or still-life.
• Sculptors like Jacques Lipschitz, Aleksandr Archipenko,
and Julio Gonzalez further developed these ideas.
JACQUES LIPCHITZ,
Bather, 1917. Bronze,
One of the most successful
sculptors to adapt into three
dimensions the planar,
fragmented dissolution of form
central to Analytic Cubist
painting was JAQUES
LIPCHITZ.
ALEKSANDR
ARCHIPENKO, Woman
Combing Her Hair, 1915.
Bronze, approx. 1’ 1 3/4”
high. Museum of Modern
Art, New York
In his quasi-representational
statuette Woman Combing Her
Hair, Aleksandr Archipenko shows
a complex interpenetration of space
and mass.
JULIO GONZÁLEZ,
Woman Combing Her
Hair, ca. 1930–1933. Iron,
4’ 9” high. Moderna
Museet, Stockholm.
In his almost completely abstract
welded iron sculpture Woman
Combing Her Hair, Julio
González reduced form to an
dynamic interplay of curves,
lines, and planes.