Cubism 00

Cubism

Cubism (French: cubisme; according to Latin cubus-cube), is direction in painting, and then in sculpture, which developed around 1907 in France. The main and first representatives of cubism in painting are Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and right next to them are Juan Gris and Fernand Léger.

The name comes from the critic L. Vauxcelles who, on the occasion of Braque's exhibition in 1908, wrote about "cubist oddities". Launched as a joke, the name cubism became a term that characterized a completely new aesthetic outlook and with which a significant period in European fine art begun. At the time when Cubism appeared, art was in a state of creative exhaustion and saturation.

Classical illusionism was brought to its ultimate consequences by impressionism in the disintegration of forms. Van Gogh ignited the colors with the violence of his vision and strained the stroke to the limit, while Gauguin completely closed the surface with the process of synthesis. Only Cézanne, with the gradual and deliberate construction of canvases, offered the possibility to continue on the results of the Impressionists.

Cubists found in Cézanne a safe base for rational and methodical procedures. In 1906, Cézanne's statement was published, later often quoted, that order and regularity, which we sense in nature, are a consequence of the mutual relations of simple geometric bodies: a sphere, a cone, and a cylinder, to which all forms in nature can be reduced. The posthumous exhibition of Cézanne's works in 1907 had a turning point. That year, Picasso painted his "Ladies of Avignon," which is a historical document of the beginning of Cubism.

The period of so-called Analytical Cubism lasted from 1909 to 1912. Its principles were:

autonomy of the surface

rational analysis

 simultaneity of display

Color is relegated to a secondary or irrelevant role as form takes precedence, and the canvases are closed in monochromatic gray or brown surfaces. The traditional illusionism that painters aspired to since the Renaissance was definitively rejected. The object is not shown as the eye grasps it from a certain point of view, but is analyzed in the totality of its spatial existence and shown on a surface seen simultaneously from different sides.

The repertoire is limited thematically; they mostly paint still lifes with fruit, a pitcher, a bottle and some instrument, rarely a portrait or a human figure, and landscapes only in the first phase.

The group of cubists was composed, in addition to the four already mentioned painters, by M. Jacob, M. Raynal, A. Salmon, Gertrude Stein and G. Appolinaire, its most important theoretician. In 1909 and 1910, they were joined by A. Gleizes, J. Metzinger, A. Herbin, F. Picabia, H. Le Fauconier, M. Duchamp.

The once-accepted assumption that it is possible to create the object's new artistic existence by analyzing it led to an attempt to reverse the process: using free imagination to create a work with the characteristics of a new artistic reality and only later approaching the object's reality. This meant the beginning of a new phase, the so-called "synthetic cubism," which lasted from 1912 to 1915. The new vision was formulated by Braque: "The content is not an object, but a new unity, a lyricism that arises from the very means of painting."

Cubism emerges from the original monochrome; the surface becomes richer, the line softer, and the colors are arranged in highly colorful chords that finally turn into a flat decorative ornament. The start of experimenting with collages, which give a new tactile solution to the surface, is significant for this phase.

Later, the use of non-painting materials leads to Dadaist absurdity. Cubism's creative freedom inspired many other directions and speculations in contemporary art. Cubism also had a decisive influence on sculpture and architecture.

Lit.:

Bernard Dorival – Les etapes de la peinture francaise, II, Galimard Paris, 1944

History Of Art – H. W. Janson, 1967

Seeing Slowly: Looking at Modern Art by Michael Findlay, 2017

ArtintheFridge, September 2022

Links to other articles:

Modern Art

https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/modern-art-00

Impressionism

https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/impressionism-00

Post-Impressionism

https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/post-impressionism-00

Fauvism

https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/fauvism

Expressionism

Surrealism