CUBISM
Pablo Picasso
ART LESSON 16: You will be asked to provide additional information while describing the works of a multifaceted painter.
Reproduce the following piece of information with good pronunciation, style and intonation. Look up and speak.
In the year 1907 Picasso was only twenty-five. Yet, despite his youth he already had behind him a considerable body of artistic achievement – more than two hundred paintings, several thousand drawings, numerous gouaches, pastels, watercolours and engravings, and a few sculptures. Up till then his work had fallen into two main categories: the paintings of the “blue” period and those of the “pink” period, with perhaps a third – the “negro” period – which began at the end of 1906 but was to last only a few months.
2. Describe a picture belonging to the “blue” or “pink” period. Your choice.
3. … Then, however, the expressionistic realism and the warm-hearted mannerist tendency of the two earlier cycles gave way to a markedly constructive attitude in his work. The change may possibly have been due to the influence of African art, but it seems more likely to have sprung from an acquaintance with the wood-carving of Gauguin and the ancient art of the Iberian peninsula. Driven on by his thirst for the creative absolute – that quest which was to be at the origin both of every revolutionary decision, whim and volte-face of his career, and of his most vigorous and original creative efforts – Picasso felt a compelling need to attain to a new vision of the universe and a new conception of artistic form. In his Nude Women Arm-in-Arm, painted in late 1906 when he was already working on the sketches for the Demoiselles d’Avignon, there are already intimations of this new concern. The studies which followed – of the so-called “negro” period – are indicative of the abstract plastic approach and the audacious diagrammatical manner which were to become fully evident in the Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), that great painting whose fame was to be heightened by the claim that it was the first clear assertion of the principles of Cubism.
Describe Les Demoiselles d’Avignon explaining how the painting obliterated the vestiges of the nineteenth-century painting still operative in Fauvism. Oral with discussion.
From the outset Picasso and Braque were the indisputable masters of Cubism. “When we created Cubism,” declared Picasso, “we had no intention of creating Cubism, but simply of expressing what we felt within ourselves.” Braque’s words in this connection were almost identical. The truth is that for both of them the new aesthetic approach was an obligation imposed upon them by the trend of the times. The instinctive desire for a new order, for a new cosmogony, for a deeper understanding of form – these were the real originators of Cubism.
The first attempts of Picasso and Braque were in fact no more than the strict application of Cézanne’s theory, with this one difference that volumes were not only geometrically defined and heightened; they were also arranged, not according to the vanishing lines of conventional perspective, but to create a new perspective originating on the surface and moving towards the eye of the observer. It was in 1910 that the full force and novelty of Cubism really became evident.
Never in the history of painting had such humble, familiar and prosaic things been subjected systematically to such daring experimental treatment with such authoritative intelligence. What then were the promptings of Picasso’s mind, or rather of his intuition? What he was striving after was the total and simultaneous representation, on the two-dimensional surface of the canvas, of solid three-dimensional bodies – in other words to give the effect of volume on a flat ground – without however having recourse to optional deception, foreshortening, modelling, chiaroscuro or any other of the tricks used with such wearing monotony since the Renaissance. The destiny of Cubism was an amalgam of the solutions put forward by painters to this problem of major importance.
After the “Cézannian” phase Picasso carried his investigations into a realm far beyond that of outward appearances. In order to appreciate better the structural aspects of form he broke it into slight tenuous figures only very sparingly coloured, thus displaying several aspects of the one model. Imagine an object of which the various planes could be unfolded so as to reveal at the one time its surface, its upper side, its inside and its under side. Such an object is no longer an object as perceived by the eye, no longer an ephemeral and contingent fragment of external nature, but the absolute, the essential object as it really exists in our minds, the object in all its indestructible wholeness and lastingness. This fundamentally realist attitude is extraordinarily well expressed, for example, in the Portrait of Henry Kahnweiler (1910), The Accordionist (1911) or The Aficionado (1912). In these singular works the decomposition of mass, the division of form into a multitude of overlaid or juxtaposed graphic components, confront the observer, it must be admitted, with a series of indecipherable puzzles, the hermetic effect of which is accentuated by the deliberate poverty of the colours used, the use of single colours unrelieved and the absence of light. Fortunately Picasso quickly became aware of the dangers of a discipline which carried the analysis of the real to the borders of the conceptual. In reaction he turned to the use of “papiers collés” which, from being a kind of private amusement or a gesture of self-defiance, turned out to be a discovery of incalculable consequences. Although Picasso’s first “papier collé” dates from 1911, it was in the following year that he regularly adopted the technique of including naturalistic elements into his Cubistic compositions. And since the piece of paper or of cloth, the cardboard packet, the sand or the tuft of tow incorporated into a drawing or a painting are compact and consistent materials which resist analytical fragmentation, and since also an excess of intellectualism loses touch with the reality of the object, the “papier collé” technique showed itself a natural corrective orienting Cubism to a less dissipated, less arid form of expression, and rendering it more supple, more colourful, more spontaneous and much more living. It almost seemed a new language which began to gain increasing ascendancy over the whole of painting, with profound effect upon its design, colour and rhythm. Line became more readily apprehensible, expanses of colour became broader, shapes more identifiable and spatial arrangement more intelligible. Cubism was then entering what has been called its “synthetic” phase. This period was the period of the Violins, the Card-Players, the Harlequins and the still-life imitations of “papiers collés”. The outbreak of war found Picasso at Avignon where he was spending a holiday with Braque and Derain. The mobilisation of the majority of the Cubists put an end to the experiment which had begun seven years earlier. Picasso remained alone to bear the brunt of criticism and sarcasm which quickly increased in virulence. However, in his mind he knew that Cubism was doomed already. His costumes for the ballet Parade in 1917 were still Cubist in manner. If not within the pure tradition of the movement, at least of Cubist inspiration were his Three Musicians of 1921, Still-Life with Guitar of 1922 and Guitar with Fruit-Dish and Grapes of 1923. From then on the echoes of Cubist vocabulary and syntax became less and less frequent, although they are to be found in the pitcher in Guitar, Glass and Fruit-Dish, in the musical instruments of Still-Life with Mandolin and in his Still-Life with Bust and Palette. These works already belong to a style that is quite different – less restrained and more carefree. The resurgences of Cubism that can be detected in them should not be misinterpreted. However many followers of Picasso may be numbered among painters, architects and decorators, the Cubist movement is dead; and the final decisive blow was struck by the greatest of his instigators.
Describe and compare two pictures side by side, belonging to different phases of the Cubistic period in Picasso’s career. your choice.
5. Render the piece into English and then describe a picture by Picasso that will illustrate the ideas expressed: teacher’s choice.
Если Матисса пленяла умудрённая вековым опытом русская иконопись, то Пикассо увлекает элементарная брутальность негритянской скульптуры. Вместе с превращённым в самостоятельную логическую задачу геометрическим анализом формы, предложенным в своё время Сезанном, эта “дикая” пластика составила один из источников кубизма, доктрина которого получила быстрое развитие. В первой его программной картине “Авиньонские девицы”, в фигурных композициях, пейзажах, натюрмортах 1907-1909 годов органические природные мотивы подвергаются геометризированной деформации. Рассечённые крупными плоскими гранями, оттенёнными движением цвета, они образуют тяжеловесный жёсткий рельеф. Землистый красноватый колорит сообщает ему особую весомость; выявлению этого рельефа служат и сине-зелёные тона. Составивший вторую фазу “аналитический кубизм” как раз утрачивает пафос аналитического вторжения в природу и превращает картину в дробный узор мелких геометрических элементов, сквозь который проглядывает изобразительный мотив – например, лицо человека в портрете А. Воллара. Большое значение здесь получает декоративная выразительность такого узора и градаций света, тяготеющего к однообразному серому тону. Для третьей фазы – “синтетического кубизма”, к которому переходит Пикассо в 1912-1913 годах, - характерны многоцветные живописные композиции, образованные плоскими фрагментами каких-либо предметов. Излюбленными у Пикассо становятся детали музыкальных инструментов – скрипок и гитар.