Cubism

Definition

Cubism is a style of painting and sculpture developed in early 20th century characterized by an emphasis on formal structure the reduction of natural forms to their geometrical equivalents and the organization of the plans of a represented object independently of representational requirements.


History

Basically cubism was divided into two movements:

Analytical cubism. This was the early stage in which only Picasso led the movement. [1907-1912]

Synthetic cubism. At this time a lot more people like Braque etc joined Picasso. [1912 – 1915]

Cubism was the movement developed by Pablo Picasso jointly with Georges Braque in France between 1908 end 1914 which offered a radically new way of looking at the world. These six years of cubism was divided into two parts between 1908-1911 and 1911-1914,which are discussed below:

ANALYTICAL CUBISM

Picasso had evolved a new form by examining the idiom that had prevailed in European art since the renaissance, dismantling its rules, and reapplying its mechanisms. In doing so he transcended that idiom and - logically –the principles underlying it. This was his declared aim and he succeeded in achieving it.
Since the renaissance, art had been of functional, content – oriented nature, serving to convey messages in visual form. The imitation of nature and illusionistic reproduction of the appearance of things was a way of making the world comprehensible. Paintings could tell the stories by showing narrative actions, representing emotions, and expressing the movements of the soul.
In 18th century this changed significantly. The frontiers of painting were defined a new and it was stripped of arts narrative side; now it could only represent. This was a fundamental change. Where once the content and form message had needed to harmonize, now became dominant, and cognition were to be considered inseparable, then the cognitive content of painting must logically enough be purely a matter of how the observer looked at it. Random changes of natural form and colour, such as the impressionists and fauves used in their different ways, were psychologically prompted, and aimed at establishing moods. The natural original, which the painting represented, remained unaffected. Deviations were merely shifts in expressive emphasis.

PICASSO STARTED NOT FROM THE COLOUR BUT FROM FORM AND FORM ALONE .

At this stage there was also the discovery of unfamiliar modes of expression – the contemporary enthusiasm for what was considered primitive or exotic art. We need only recall the influence Japanese woodcuts had on van Gogh and Toulouse – lautrec, and the interest in archaic art which Picasso himself had recently demonstrated. This all resulted from the quest for new ways of creating visual images, traditional methods no longer seeming adequate to the needs of the age.
Cubism became established, slowly but surely: the first major peak that it reached is generally known as ANALYTICAL CUBISM. Picasso’s famous portrait of art dealer ambroise vollard is an arresting example. Amidst the complex criss-cross of lines and overlapping colour zones were immediately struck by the head . it is done entirely in shades of yellow; and it also strikes us because ,unlike the composition as whole it clearly represents the outline , structure and features of human head. The oval broadens at the jowls. About the middle there are lines to denote eyebrows and the bridge of the nose.
Picasso’s paintings fulfill the requirements of a portrait: it represents the outer appearance of a certain individual in a recognizable way. The lines are continued at the random , no longer restricted to define an available form. They have the life of their own. So do the colours :lighter and darker shades, with little regard for the subject, obey the curious rules of the composition instead. The subject is dissected, as it were, or analyzed. And hence this kind of cubism has become known as ANALYTICAL CUBISM.
Now the perspective has been exploded, so that various points of view are at work in the same composition. The light and shade are not juxtaposed in a spatial relation; yet spaces and areas derived from the construction of form evolve a spatial presence.
At this time, a young French painter Braque had arrived at the similar position. During two stays in southern France in summer 1908, painting the landscape near L’Estaque, Braque deconstr4ucted the representational and spatial values.
At first glance the motifs look like cubes - which is why the term “cubism” was coined in the first place. in autumn 1908 , Braque unsuccessfully submitted his new work for the Paris autumn salon.
Matisse, who was a member of the jury, observed to the critic Louis Vauxcelles that the pictures consisted of lots of little cubes.Vauxcelles adopted the phrase in a review he wrote in the magazine “Gil blas” when Braque showed the paintings at the gallery in November. And thus a misunderstanding produced a label; and by 1911 everyone was using the term “cubism”.
The most conspicuous stylistic feature in this movement came the spatial extension of lines to include the figures in a veritable scaffolding of major diagonals and the curves that dominated the entire picture. Picasso also bunched the lines together, and made visible progress in the deconstruction of form. The motifs and directional movements assembled into geometrical figures- trapeziums, rhombuses – which, taken individually, had already become completely non representational. Light and shadow like wise acquired a life of there own, appearing in contrastive shades of lighter and darker.
It is the characteristic of Picasso, that he never saw cubism purely in the terms of painting. He tackled spatial values and planes in various media, using various motifs. Braque at that time restricted himself to relatively few kinds of picture, preferring those such as landscapes or still life’s that were conducive to abstracted formal games, and in his work he experimented with the manifold opportunities that monochrome painting afforded. Picasso for his part, stuck to his usual repertoire of subjects. He tried to introduce them into his experiments and did not flinch from strong colour contrasts
Cubism entered a somewhat different phase in 1911 and led the following year to new visual forms different in structure and principle. Braque, who had already used single letters of the alphabet in cubist paintings of 1909, now took to using entire words. It was not anew idea; but in painting it had been restricted to producing the illusion of real lettering actually before the beholder.


SYNTHETIC CUBISM
From 1908 to 1911, together with Braque, he developed cubism, and moved on to the frontiers of abstraction. Cubism was no longer the property of experts, a style hidden away in a handful of galleries, but rather the new sensational talking point among all who had an interest in contemporary art.
The most important artists of cubist group were Albert Gleizes , Jean Metzinger, Henri le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, rRoger de la Fresnaye and Fernard Leger. If we compare their works with what Picasso and Braque had just been doing, the fuss is difficult to understand. The cubism that caught the eyes of the public was by no means revolutionary, innovative art. Almost all the pictures on show can be seen pleasing variants on what the two revolutionaries had been painting earlier, around 1908 – 1909. Only Delaney and Leger had ideas of their own about abstraction from the representational.
In 1912 Braque was continually trying to adapt craft techniques to cubism, to put it on anew footing. He tested materials and methods familiar to the house decorator but new to art. Along with templates and other illusionist tricks, he mixed his paint with sand or plaster to create a new rough, textured surface like that of a relief. In place of the two- dimensional, surface mimesis on canvas or panel. Braque now used material textures of various kinds as an expressive value in itself. The next step was to redefine the visual function of technique and of the material’s used.
In early 1912 when Braque showed Picasso his new work, it was three-dimensional. He had been cutting sculptural objects together, using paper and cardboard, and then painting or drawing over them. He then applied the same techniques to the two dimensional work, retaining paper and cardboard as materials; and a new kind of work, papiers colles, was born. Subsequently he varied the textural effects and tried out further ways of developing them. In particular he used pre – formed printed, coloured and structured pieces of paper.this provided the occasion to extend cubism visual systems. Paintings such as “Ma Jolie”, personal in the allusive range, were the result. In these works, Picasso used letters and words as graphic, indeed iconic signs. The conventional meaning remain, since the letters can still be read, but the statement is puzzling. Thus in “Ma Jolie” the guitar, the make - believe music, the pipe, glass, playing card, dice, and the word “bass”, implying drink, all provide ready associations with the cafe interior.
In 1912 Picasso produced a number of striking economy of means, one of the finest of them being the “violin”. Two scraps of newspaper, a few lines and charcoal hatchings – and picture is finished. It is one of the loveliest and most intelligent examples of cubist pictures.
In this period Picasso also used other patterned materials such as wallpaper, advertisements, cloth and packaging, to good visual effect. Though unfamiliar materials were being introduced into the pictures, the iconic quality of presentation remained. During this phase of cubism, using new materials and techniques, Picasso was exploring the problem of spatial values in the illusion established by pictures. Many of his works therefore started from three – dimensional work. But inappropriate materials are used too, and spatial values subverted. The lid, bottom and sidewalls of cardboard boxes in the guitar painting are flattened to equal status. The basic cubist rule of combining the representational and the random applies to these works too. But in contrast to analytical cubism, which dissected objects, here they are re- assembled. And for this reason a different term called synthetic cubism came into picture.
Following this line, Picasso devised another new form, the assemblage. Basically it transposes the methods and effects of collage into three dimensions. Two still-life works from 1913 are good examples: “guitar and the bottle of bass”, and the “ mandolin and clarinet”. The vehicle structurally and visually, is wood. Picasso uses its tactile and visual properties, such as the graining and colour. By adding extra colour and drawing, he intensifies the effect, levels out spatial qualities, covers textures – but also contrasts his materials and techniques.
All that really matters, in terms of the principles of synthetic cubism, is the contrast between conventionally faithful representation and the cubist methods. In all the paintings this contrast is observed. The various paintings merely served purposes of accentuation.
Thus the processes underlying the art of illusion are excellently displayed in the assemblages and sculptures of synthetic cubism.

INFERENCES
Thus, cubism was a determining factor for many different kinds of modernist art, as model and catalyst. Encouraged by cubism, wassily kandinsky – precursor of total abstraction in art – was able to pursue his course. Yet cubism did not directly initiate all of modernism’s artistic styles; abstract art in a particular drew upon a complex variety of sources, including the decorative style of art nouveau.
Although Cubism was never itself an abstract style, but the many varieties of nonobjective art it helped usher in throughout Europe ,but the legacy of this movement was not exhausted in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Its lingering influence can be felt in much art after world war 2, in works of Willem de Kooning, the works of David Smith, the multimedia constructions of Robert Rauschenberg, photographs of David Hockney, and architecture of Frank Gehry.
Cubism altered forever the renaissance conception of painting as a window into a world where three-dimensional space is projected onto the flat picture plane by a way of illusionistic drawing and one point perspective.
Cubists concluded that reality has many definitions, and that their fore objects in space-and indeed, space itself-have no fixed or absolute form. The English critic Roger Fry once said about the cubists “they do not seek to imitate form, but to create form, not to imitate life but to find an equivalent for life”.


INFERENCES WHICH ALTERED ARCHITECTURE
Cubism forged a vital link between avant –garde practices in early 20th century painting and architecture. It examines historical, theoretical and sociopolitical relationships between architecture, paintings and other cultural forms.
The motifs in the cubist paintings looked like cubes, which were in turn used in architecture later. These can be seen in the works of Frank O. Gehry , Charles Correa , Frank Lloyd Wright , in there early works in 20th century and even later.
Picasso started his paintings from form and form alone and this was the case in the structures in the early 20th century , basically the structures were mostly in the geometrical form. Famous example of using the geometrical form is the “aerospace museum of California” by Frank O. Gehry.
At first the forms used in buildings were mostly cubes but later the forms changed into other geometrical forms like rhombuses, curves, lines, bunching of lines together, trapeziums. With these forms the architects also started playing with the shades, light and shadows, which was practiced in the middle of the movement of cubism. Now the architects started playing with spaces and also the colours, textures, finishes which was done in the later, to be more appropriate in synthetic cubism.
Nowadays we see all the buildings are having geometrical forms, but we can’t say that now also they have some influence of cubism. But the influence of the great movement cannot be denied which made many architects to alter their thinking criteria along with the movement.