Artists by Movement:Cubism

Europe, 1908-1920

Cubism was developed between about 1908 and 1912 in a

collaboration between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Their
main influences are said to have been Tribal Art (although Braque
later disputed this) and the work of Paul Cezanne. The movement
itself was not long-lived or widespread, but it began an immense
creative explosion which resonated through all of 20th century art.

The key concept underlying Cubism is that the essence of an object

can only be captured by showing it from multiple points of view
simultaneously.

Cubism had run its course by the end of World War I, but among the
movements directly influenced by it were Orphism, Precisionism,
Futurism, Purism, Constructivism, and, to some degree,
Expressionism.

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Cubism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Georges Braque, Woman with a guitar, 1913

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related
movements in music and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism,
was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1908
and 1911 in France. In its second phase, Synthetic Cubism, the movement spread and
remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity.

English art historian Douglas Cooper describes three phases of Cubism in his seminal book
The Cubist Epoch. According to Cooper there was Early Cubism, (from 1906-1908) during
which time the movement was initially developed in the studios of Picasso and Braque; the
second phase being called High Cubism, (from 1909 to 1914) during which time Juan Gris
emerged as an important exponent; and finally Cooper referred to Late Cubism (from 1914 to
1921) as the last phase of Cubism as a radical avant-garde movement.[1]

In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form
—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a
multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces
intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background
and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of
cubism's distinct characteristics.

[edit]
Conception and origins

Pablo Picasso, Le guitariste, 1910

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite were discovering
African, Micronesian and Native American art for the first time. Artists such as Paul Gauguin,
Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and
simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures. Around 1904, Picasso met Matisse through
Gertrude Stein, at a time when both artists had recently acquired an interest in African art and
African tribal masks. They became friendly rivals and competed with each other throughout
their careers, perhaps leading to Picasso entering a new period in his work by 1907, marked
by the influence of Greek, Iberian and African art. Picasso's paintings of 1907 have been
characterized as Protocubism, as notably seen in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the antecedent
of Cubism.

Some believe that the roots of cubism are to be found in the two distinct tendencies of Paul
Cézanne's later work: firstly to break the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of
paint, thereby emphasizing the plural viewpoint given by binocular vision, and secondly his
interest in the simplification of natural forms into cylinders, spheres, and cones.

However, the cubists explored this concept further than Cézanne; they represented all the
surfaces of depicted objects in a single picture plane, as if the objects had had all their faces
visible at the same time. This new kind of depiction revolutionized the way in which objects
could be visualized in painting and art.

The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of
Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the movement's main innovators. A later active
participant was the Spaniard Juan Gris. After meeting in 1907 Braque and Picasso in
particular began working on the development of Cubism. Picasso was initially the force and
influence that persuaded Braque by 1908 to move away from Fauvism. The two artists began
working closely together in late 1908 - early 1909 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
The movement spread quickly throughout Paris and Europe.

French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term "cubism", or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908
after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term
quickly gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it. Art historian Ernst
Gombrich described cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to
enforce one reading of the picture - that of a man-made construction, a coloured canvas."[2]

Juan Gris, Portrait of Picasso, 1912, oil on canvas

Cubism was taken up by many artists in Montparnasse and promoted by art dealer Daniel-
Henry Kahnweiler, becoming popular so quickly that by 1911 critics were referring to a "cubist
school" of artists. However, many of the artists who thought of themselves as cubists went in
directions quite different from Braque and Picasso. The Puteaux Group was a significant
offshoot of the Cubist movement; it included Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, Marcel
Duchamp, his brothers Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Villon, and Fernand Léger,
and Francis Picabia. Other important artists associated with cubism include: Albert Gleizes,
Jean Metzinger, Marie Laurencin, Diego Rivera, Marie Vorobieff, Louis Marcoussis, Jeanne
Rij-Rousseau, Roger de La Fresnaye, Henri Le Fauconnier, Alexander Archipenko, František
Kupka, Amédée Ozenfant, Léopold Survage, Patrick Henry Bruce among others. Section d'Or
is another name for a related group of many of the same artists associated with cubism and
orphism.
In 1913 the United States was exposed to cubism and modern European art when Jacques
Villon exhibited seven important and large drypoints at the famous Armory Show in New York
City. Braque and Picasso themselves went through several distinct phases before 1920, and
some of these works had been seen in New York prior to the Armory Show, at Alfred
Stieglitz's "291" gallery. Czech artists who realized the epochal significance of cubism of
Picasso and Braque attempted to extract its components for their own work in all branches of
artistic creativity - especially painting and architecture. This developed into Czech Cubism
which was an avant-garde art movement of Czech proponents of cubism active mostly in
Prague from 1910 to 1914.

Op Art - A twentieth century art movement and style in which artists

sought to create an impression of movement on the picture surface by
means of optical illusion. It is derived from, and is also known as Optical
Art and Perceptual Abstraction. In the 1960s art world, some critics
faulted Op Art's persistent involvement with optical illusion at a time when
"the flatness of the picture plane" was the mantra on either side of the
Color Field - Minimalist aisle. Clement Greenberg saw flatness as
painting's essence. Donald Judd saw it as an escape route into three
dimensions.
Suprematism ( Russian: Супрематизм): is an art movement focused on
fundamental geometric forms (in particular the square and circle) which formed in
Russia in 1915-1916.

When Kasimir Malevich originated Suprematism in 1915 he was an established

painter having exhibited in the Donkey's Tail and the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue
Rider) exhibitions of 1912 with cubo-futurist works. The proliferation of new artistic
forms in painting, poetry and theatre as well as a revival of interest in the traditional
folk art of Russia were a rich environment in which a Modernist culture was being
born.

In his book The Non-Objective World, which was published abroad as a Bauhaus
Book in 1927, Malevich described the inspiration which brought about the powerful
image of the black square on a white ground:

'I felt only night within me and it was then that I conceived the new art, which I called
Suprematism'.
Malevich also ascribed the birth of Suprematism to Victory Over the Sun,
Kruchenykh's Futurist opera production for which he designed the sets and costumes
in 1913. One of the drawings for the backcloth shows a black square divided
diagonally into a black and a white triangle. Because of the simplicity of these basic
forms they were able to signify a new beginning.

He created a Suprematist 'grammar' based on fundamental geometric forms; in

particular, the square and the circle. In the 0.10 Exhibition in 1915, Malevich
exhibited his early experiments in Suprematist painting. The centerpiece of his show
was the Black square on white, placed in what is called the red/beautiful corner in
Russian Orthodox tradition ; the place of the main icon in a house.

Another important influence on Malevich were the ideas of the Russian mystic-
mathematician, philosopher, and disciple of Georges Gurdjieff; P. D. Ouspensky who
wrote of

'a fourth dimension or a Fourth Way beyond the three to which our ordinary senses
have access',[1].

1916 Suprematism (Supremus No. 58) Museum of Art, Kasimir Malevich

Some of the titles to paintings in 1915 express the concept of a non-euclidian
geometry which imagined forms in movement, or through time; titles such as: Two
dimensional painted masses in the state of movement. These give some indications
towards an understanding of the Suprematic compositions produced between 1915
and 1918.

The Supremus group which, in addition to Malevich included Aleksandra Ekster,

Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Anna Kagan, Ivan Kliun, Liubov Popova,
Nikolai Suetin, Ilya Chashnik, Lazar Khidekel, Nina Genke-Meller, Ivan Puni and
Ksenia Boguslavskaya met from 1915 onwards to discuss the philosophy of
Suprematism and its development into other areas of intellectual life. There was
some crossover with Constructivism, with Suprematists such as Popova and
especially El Lissitzky working on propaganda and industrial design. Lissitzky spread
Suprematist ideas abroad in the early 1920s. In addition, Nikolai Suetin used
Suprematist motifs on works at the St Petersburg Lomonosov Porcelain Factory,
where Malevich and Chashnik were also employed, with Malevich designing a
Suprematist teapot. The Suprematists also made architectural models in the 1920s,
which offered a different conception of socialist buildings to those developed in
Constructivist architecture.
This development in artistic expression came about when Russia was in a
revolutionary state, when ideas were in ferment and the old order was being swept
away. As the new order became established, and Stalinism took hold from 1924 on,
the state began limiting the freedom of artists

The name given by the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich to the abstract art
he developed from 1913. The first actual exhibition of Suprematist
paintings was in December 1915 in St Petersburg, at an exhibition called
O.10. The exhibition included thirty-five abstract paintings by Malevich,
among them the famous black square on a white ground (Russian
Museum, St Petersburg) which headed the list of his works in the
catalogue. In 1927 Malevich published his book The Non-Objective World,
one of the most important theoretical documents of abstract art. In it he
wrote: 'In the year 1913, trying desperately to free art from the dead
weight of the real world, I took refuge in the form of the square.' Out of
the 'Suprematist square' as he called it, Malevich developed a whole range
of forms including rectangles, triangles and circles often in intense and
beautiful colours. These forms are floated against a usually white ground,
and the feeling of colour in space in Suprematist painting is a crucial
aspect of it. Suprematism was one of the key movements of modern art in
Russia and was particularly closely associated with the Revolution. After
the rise of Stalin from 1924 and the imposition of Socialist Realism,
Malevich's career languished. In his last years before his death in 1935 he
painted realist pictures. In 1919 the Russian artist El Lissitsky met
Malevich and was strongly influenced by Suprematism, as was the
Hungarian born Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

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