|
|
|
 |
|
|
WD_230/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 3 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_0230 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be 'read' by anybody. If this hadn't been so, the Christian message wouldn't have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished.
-David Hockney/ www.painterskeys.com
Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view.
-Jacques Lipchitz/ www.painterskeys.com
The goal I proposed myself in making cubism? To paint and nothing more... with a method linked only to my thought... Neither the good nor the true; neither the useful nor the useless.
-Pablo Picasso/ www.painterskeys.com
CUBISM:
Cubism was a completely new, nonimitative style of painting and sculpture that was cofounded by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1908 and survived in its purest form until the mid-1920s. Cubism had an impact on art in general that extended far beyond the existence of the painting style itself; it paved the way for other art revolutions, such as Dada and surrealism, and was seminal to much of abstract art. It also fostered newer modes of art, such as Orphism and futurism, and even affected the formal structure of styles whose origins had predated cubism, such as expressionism.
Picasso and Braque found the precedents and initial concepts for cubism in two art sources. One was primitive art -- African tribal masks, Iberian sculpture, and Egyptian bas-reliefs. The other influence was the work of Paul Cézanne, especially his late still lifes and landscapes. Cézanne had introduced a new geometrization of forms as well as new spatial relationships that finally broke with the Renaissance traditions of perspective. In 1907, Picasso synthesized these two sources in his seminal painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906-07; Museum of Modern Art, New York). Braque, one of the few artists to see and understand Picasso's painting at the time, immediately transformed his style from a Fauvist (see Fauvism) to an early cubist idiom. In March 1909 the French critic Louis Vauxcelles, reviewing the Salon des Indépendants, referred disparagingly to Braque's style as one that "reduces everything to little cubes" -- hence, cubism.
Cubism developed from the early phase of 1908-09 to the more complex and systematic style of 1910-12, known as analytic cubism, implying intense analysis of all elements in a painting. It consisted of facets, or cubes, arranged in superimposed, transparent planes with clearly defined edges that established mass, space, and the implication of movement. During this period, Picasso and Braque employed a palette of muted greens, grays, browns, and ochers. Despite this radical method of painting, the subject matter consisted of traditional landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. Fragments of the faces, guitars, or wineglasses that were the subject of these works can be detected through the shifting facets or contours.
When Picasso and Braque invented collages and papiers colles in 1912, they initiated the study of color and light within a cubist oil painting, a stage known as synthetic cubism (1912-14). The introduction of bright color resulted in the further flattening of space and the elaboration of the picture surface with such decorative devices as the stippling technique derived from pointillism. Broken brush strokes, tone and shadow, and distance between denser planes introduced light. Synthetic cubism is the result of the desire to create or describe visual reality without resorting to illusionistic painting. The artist does this by synthesizing the object, even to the point of including real components of it in a collage, thus creating a new, separate reality for it.
By 1910 other painters had joined the cubist movement, including Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinger. Others, such as Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Amedee Ozenfant, moved through cubism into exceptionally personal styles. The individual styles of Marc Chagall and Piet Mondrian were somewhat affected by cubism, although neither was a cubist. The cubist fragmentation of form was employed by the Italian futurists, who found it useful in their concept of dynamic motion. Cubism was introduced to the United States with the Armory Show of 1913. Notable American cubists included Max Weber and Stuart Davis. In 1909, Picasso began to create a cubist sculpture. Other sculptors who followed in the cubist idiom were Aleksandr Archipenko, Henri Laurens, and Jacques Lipchitz.
A cubist painting of 1910 had the appearance of the box-kite construction of an early airplane or the steel-frame of a skyscraper. The dissolving, overlapping shapes of these paintings have suggested that the objects were seen from multiple viewpoints at the same time. Picasso and Braque, however, denied the notion of multiple viewpoints; they explained that the cubist structure was developed as a means of providing all the essential information regarding a three-dimensional object within a two-dimensional canvas. Nevertheless, one finds in cubist art an implication of the mechanical and scientific achievements of this century.
---------------------------------------------------
E. M. Plunkett, Art Historian.
Source: The Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, Release #9.01, ©1997.
Bibliography: Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (1974); John Golding, Cubism: A History and Analysis, 3d ed. (1988); G. Perry, et al., Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early 20th Century (1993); Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth Century Art (1976); William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (1993).
-www.discoverfrance.net/France/Art/cubism.shtml
Cubism or cubism - One of the most influential art movements (1907-1914) of the twentieth century, Cubism was begun by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1882-1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963) in 1907. They were greatly inspired by African sculpture, by painters Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) and Georges Seurat (French, 1859-1891), and by the Fauves.
In Cubism the subject matter is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form. Picasso and Braque initiated the movement when they followed the advice of Paul Cézanne, who in 1904 said artists should treat nature "in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone."
There were three phases in the development of Cubism: Facet Cubism, Analytic Cubism, and Synthetic Cubism.
After fauvist beginnings, Braque went with Raoul Dufy in 1908 on a trip to l'Estaque, a place often painted by Cézanne. They produced a series of landscapes with simplified forms and a limited variety of colors. The controversy surrounding their exhibition at the Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler Gallery brought Cubism its name. In effect, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles described the works in this way: "M. Braque scorns form and reduces everything, sites, figures and houses, to geometric schemas and cubes."
The break with homogeneous form was completed the following year. Braque and Picasso's similar compositions are broken into planes with open edges, sliding into each other while denying all depth. Color is reduced to a gray-tan cameo, applied uniformly in small brushstrokes creating vibrations of light. The interpenetration of the forms lends these paintings a previously unknown aspect of continuity and density. Withdrawing before the abstract and hermetic character of this new space, Braque and Picasso brought recognizable illusionistic features back into their paintings during their stay in Céret, from 1911 to 1913. They used letters, fragments of words, musical notes, then significant material elements: sand or sawdust which create relief, and tend to make the picture more physically an object.
Color returned in force in 1912, in parallel to the creation of the "papiers collés" — collages. Creating a simple geometric armature and pieces of glued paper with trompe l'oeil patterns imitating wood, marble or newsprint, then introducing "already made" elements (musical scores, tobacco packets or playing cards), the "papiers collés" definitively dissociate color and form. Picasso, then Henri Laurens would create construction pieces from ordinary materials, cut out and assembled into colored geometric planes, where empty and full spaces combine to sketch out the forms.
Although the war of 1914-19 ended Picasso and Braque's collaboration, the cubist core group remainedactive until the 1920s, through the explorations of Braque, Matisse, Laurens, Lipchitz and Fernand Léger, whose geometric world and abstractly organized canvases with their contrasting, dynamic forms owe almost everything to the pioneering breakthroughs of Cézanne, Braque and Picasso.
-www.artlex.com/ArtLex/c/cubism.html
| | | send price request |
|
|
|
|
|
Gallery opening
500 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1820 (Between 42nd and 43rd)
...
|
|
more
|
|
