question
Jim Jimmery
Dan (spoongoon)
Well the best way to describe it would be...
There is no need to repeat here that Cubism which began in France early in
this century played an extremely important role in the development of modern
art.This innovative movement started by Picasso and Braque aimed at
establishing a new plastic order completely different from the one which had
existed up to that time,and it brought about a great revolution in visual
representation.Cubism had a widespread,tremendous influence on art following
it,but of course Cubism did not appear by itself suddenly out of
nowhere.Early 20th century Europe was in many senses at a great turining
point,and in art as well innovative art movements were appearing one after
another all over the continent such as Fauvism in France,a forerunner of
Cubism,expressionists such as the Brucke and the Blaue Reiter in Germany,and
Futurism in Italy. It is needless to say that this spirit of innovation had
gradually been evolving since the Inter half of the 19th century.
There are several opinions concerning when cubism began,but I feel it rather
appropriate to regard the year 1907 as its starting point.This was the year
in which the poet Apollinaire introduced Picasso to Braque who was almost as
old as Picasso.It is widely known that at that time both Picasso and Braque
were influenced greatly by Cezanne.
It need hardly be mentioned that Cezanne stood at the juncture.of the 19th
and 20th centuries,and solidly constructed an ordered and ballanced world of
art. He surpassed the visual realism of the Impressionists,ignored the
traditional roles of perspective,and effectively used a self-controlling
function in form and color.Cezanne remark that "Nature should be handled
with the cylinder,sphere and cone" is famous,but Picasso and Braque followed
Cezanne's lead,and up to that time had searched separately for new plastic
forms by their own respective means apart from each other.But after this
encounter, Cubism advanced rapidly.Also in the same year, a retrospective
exhibition of Cezanne was held at the salon d'Automne.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,1907
Oil, 96 x 92in.
It was also in the same year that Picasso completed "Les Demoiselles
d'Aviginion" in the atelier of his Monmartre apartment house that was called
the"Bateau Lavoir"a little while before meeting Braque.This is an important
work which foretold the future development of Cubism,and along with
Cezanne's influence a new search appeared due to suggestions from African
negro sculpture.Gaugin first found new value in the primitive,but in those
days it was not just he and Picasso who had an interest in negro sculpture;
Fauvists such as Matisse,Vlaminck,and Derain also had strong interest in
negro sculpture and even collected it. Nevertheless,PicassoÅfs interest was
different from the others.Picasso used negro sculpture as a clue to part
from traditional anatomical human physical structure,and derived a form
which combined elements seen from many different angles.Leaving the
tradition of seizing natural objects from.single.angle under the laws of
perspective,a tradition which had existed since the Renaissance,and while
shifting the viewing point of the object to different positions,at the same
time dividing it into many fragments seen from various angles,and
rearranging these fragments later became an important characteristics of
Cubism.
In 1908,Braque in Estaque in Southern France and Picasso at La Ruedes-Bois
attempted constructing a spatial order,by the use of restrained colors and
by reducing natural forms.Some people even regard the works of this period
as Cubism in the style of Cezanne.In the same year,Braque held a one-man
show at the Kahnweiler Gallery,and it is said that the word"cube"used in a
review by Louis Vauxcelles at that time was the origin of the term
"Cubism".From 1909 to 1910 both Picasso and Braque advanced even further in
dismantling the object through Cubism,which tried to depict the reality of
an object without using the traditional laws of perspective or shading.What
we may term"Analytic Cubism"reached its peak at around 1911;objects which
did not even have clear outlines appeared and the object became remarkably
different from what it looked like in nature.Cubism began to paint,as
Apollinaire said,"not from visual reality but from the reality of the
concept."It is because of this that Cubism is said to be conceptual and
intellectual,in contrast to the phenomenalistic and sensualistic tendencies
of its precessor,Fauvism."He(the viewer)is delighted by the intellectual and
sensuous appeal of an internally consistent pictorial structure".(Edward
Fry)In fact,on seeing Picasso's"Portrait of Vollard"(1909-10),we may say
that"if social and historical factors can for a moment be forgotten,a
portrait by Renoir will seem closer to a portrait by Raphael than it does to
a Cubist portrait by Picasso"(Golding)
Given impetus,by Picasso and Braque,Cubism violently shocked art circles,and
its influence spread rapidly after that.In the salon des Independants of
spring,1911,works of GIeizes,Metzinger,Legr,Andre Lhote,La Fresnaye,La
Fauconnier,and Delaunay,and others were collected and exhibited in the 41st
Room,and this became the first great group exhibition of Cubism.Again in the
same year Gleizes,Leger,Metzinger,Lhote,Jacques Villon,Marcel Duchamp,La
Fresnaye,Le Fauconnier exhibited their works at the salon
d'Automne,embroiling positive and negative opinions in fervent debate.Since
Braque and Picasso did not participate greatly in the Salons of Paris,the
tern Cubism came into general use through these great group
exhibitions.People like Apollinaire played a large hand in this spread of
Cubism,and Gleizes and Metzinger's book"On Cubism"(1912)exerted a great deal
of influence on a theoretical level.Nevertheless,this book instead that
Cubist paintings must be nonÅ]decorative and selfÅ]controlled,and that form
in Cubism was the expression of an idea.There are considerable differences
in nuance between Braque and Picasso on one hand and the other artists on
the other,but each artist sought through his own individual method for a new
order in plastic art,by departing from traditional visual senses,and by
overlapping planes,piling and dividing them into massive,multi surfaced
fragments.
On the other hand,Picasso and Braque began to enter a new phase from around
1912.The extremely suppressed colors began to regain their richness,and the
shape of objects became somewhat easier to recognize.Braque painted the
grain of wood in the trope-l' oeil style,and both Braque and Picasso began
each in his turn to experiment with the papier colleby pasting already
printed paper on canvas.Thus,the stage of Picasso and Braque,Synthetic
Cubism was arrived at.The invention of papier colleseems to have been in
order to introduced a new sense of material into Cubist paintings,but the
collage developed from papier colle caused the introduction of various
concrete items onto the surface of the canvas,and opened a completely new
realm in art.Needless to say "tableau-object",or "the painting as object"
meant a departure from the traditional concept of space in painting.And it
is also well known that collage,via Dada and Surrealism,is broadly and
profoundly linked with contemporary art.
Paralleling the change of Picasso and Braque's Cubism to the stage of
Synthetic Cubism,various differentiated processes began to appear in the
rapidly developed Cubism.A Cubist-group exhibit even appeared in the Salon
des Independants of 1912,and the section d'or exhibition held in the Boetie
Gallery in October of the same year is regarded as another important
demonstration.This exhibition was held with Jacques Villon as its central
figure, and his brothers, Ducham = Villon and Marcel
Duchamp,Gleizes,Metzinger,Picabia,Lhote,La Fresnaye,Leger,Marcoussis and
Gris also participated.Apollinaire made a lecture at this exhibit which was
later recorded in his book"Cubist Painters",published the following year.It
has been said with regard to this exhibition,that"the differences between
Metzinger and Picasso are clearer than those which separated Renior and
Cezanne,moreover the differences between Fernand Leger and Marcel
Duchamp,Picabia and La Fresnaye,or A.Gleizes and Juan Gris are even more
conspicuous"(Maurice Raynal)Thus an evident differentiation due to the
individuality of each individual artist had clearly appeared.This fact can
also be understood as an attempt to strike off in a new direction by those
who felt that Synthetic Cubism a kind of fallÅ]back whose from had begun to
revive.
Juan Gris who is regarded as the proto type Cubist following to Picasso and
Braque adopted ,collage very early and developed a unique dense Cubist
style.Gris preserved the original form of the object more strictly combined
varied,complex planes and introduced fine portions of section d'or into his
composition.Fernand Leger studied Cezanne from a different angle than
Picasso and Braque and tried to express modern rhythms and mechanisms by a
fundamental use of cylindrical forms,and by contrasts of color and of
straight and curved lines: this was also referred, to as"Cubism
mechanics".Robert Delaunay touched upon Cubism in his series of refracted
works entitled"Effel Tower".He sought for a brilliant intercourse of light
and colors,and for musical rhythms,and set off in the non-figurative
direction named"Orphism"by Apollinaire in 1913.While Picasso and Braque
consistently treated a static world as their object,Duchamp and La Fresnaye
aimed at the expression of everyday dynamics,but a pursuit of dynamics to
reflect the machine civilization could also be seen in Italian Futurism of
the same period.
"During 1913 and 1914 so many artists in Paris had turned to Cubism that it
temporarily became the universal language of avant-garde painting"(Fry)It is
also quite clear that Cubism exerted a widespread,tremendous influence as it
was introduced to various areas of Europe and to New York,and from the
examples of Paul Klee of Blaue Reiter,Severing of Futurism,MaIevitch of
Suprematism and from one period of Chagall's,work.
Originally Cubism arose from the problems in the two dimensional world of
painting,and it also influenced sculpture by
Archipenko,Lipchitz,Laurens,Zadkine and others.But in sculpture,essentially
a concrete three dimensional form,Cubism did not present as innovative a
sense as it did in painting,yet nevertheless it had great significance as
being the predecessor of antiÅ]naturalistic sculpture.
With such wide diversification in Cubism,it is far more difficult to decide
how far we may apply the term Cubism than to think about its starting
point.John Golding,widely known as author of the book "Cubism", stops his
history and analysts of cubism, at 1914,the year when World War I started.
Braque. Le Portugais (the Emigrant).
Ceret [and Paris],autumn 1911-early 1912
Oil on canvas,46X32"(117X81cm)
Certainly Picasso and Gris were not mobilized but Braque and many other
artists responded to the call and were rushed to the front.The Cubist
movement inevitably had to undergo a great stagnation and change.After
that,however,Picasso,while on the one hand showing a new-classical
metamorphosis,created such typical works of Synthetic Cubism as"The Three
Musicians"(1921).Braque,Leger and Gris in their turn also developed
individually mature Synthetic Cubism.Ozenfant and Jeanneret(Le
Corbusier)published"After Cubism"(1918)and advocated a theoretical and
functional Purism as a newly developed form of Cubism to make the structure
follow a pure order. Consequently if we consider Cubism to be an extensive
general term,we may regard it as a wideÅ]ranging art movement that lasted
from 1907 until the middle of the 1920Åfs.There we can see various
individual developments,each fairly different from the others the others,but
in general,we can say that it was a departure from traditional, visual
realism, and an autonomous establishment of painting based on new principles
of form. Braque's famous saying,"Senses deform,and the spirit
forms"expresses this directly.At the same time,Cubism is a new form of
realism from the standpoint of its attempt from the reality of the object
within the mind,and its distinction from the abstract art also lies in this
point.Furthermore,Cubism has an even closer relationship with contemporary
art through the collage,which started from papier colle. lifted shamlessly
form http://www.cubism-asada.com/what_cubism.html
OR see www.oxo.com
--
Colonel SG agvngc
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hello? **Harmonix**
http://listen.to/sear
Jim Jimmery
type of modern art huh??
Dan (spoongoon)
Dan (spoongoon)
> thank you........ i think........ now i wish i never asked..... i was
kinda looking for a one line answer - but never mind......
I was taking the piss but never mind ;-)