Cubism examples
Facet Cubism
Girl with the Mandolin
Girl with a Mandolin is not only one of the most beautiful, lyrical and accessible of all
Cubist paintings, but is also a valuable document of the period. For the fact that at the time
Picasso saw the work as unfinished, allows us an insight into his aesthetic intentions and his
technical procedure.
In the first place, the legibility of this canvas demonstrates conclusively that although Cubist
paintings were becoming more abstract in appearance, the artists were still deeply
conditioned, at least in the early stages of their works, by the material existence and
the physical appearance of their subjects. Then again the painting illustrates in a very
concrete fashion the pull Picasso felt between the desire to give forms an explicit,
volumetrical treatment, and the need to flatten them up onto the picture plane (compare,
for example, the almost sculptural treatment of the breasts and the arms with that of the
head, which is rendered in terms of two flat planes). Had the painting reached completion,
it would have become simultaneously more elaborate, more abstract and more consistent in
styleˇK
Paintings executed during this period showed the breaking down, or analysis, of form.
Right-angle and straight-line construction were favoured, though occasionally some areas
of the painting appeared sculptural, as in Picasso's "Girl with a Mandolin" (1910).
Analytical Cubism
Portrait of Ambroise Vollard
Analytical cubism is generally considered the early phase of cubism. During this time, about
1908 to 1911, the cubist quality of fragmentation -- overlapping planes- was heightened, and
an objects depiction moved even further away from physical reality. Unconventional shading
also added to the distorted appearance of an object. By the end of the analytical phase even
an objects outlines were beginning to fade, making objects even less identifiable. One of the
best examples of the analytical phase is Portrait of Ambroise Vollard. In this painting the
layered planes, or faceted shapes, take on a prism like form. The fading away of Ambroise
outline and the introduction unconventional shading and of bland color are also aspects of
analytic cubism that are evident in the work. It is also worth noting that while many of the
traditions set forth by the Renaissance period are left behind, the Renaissance idea of a
painting being a window into another world that is receding is maintained.
Colour schemes were simplified, tending to be nearly monochromatic (hues of tan, brown,
gray, cream, green, or blue preferred) in order not to distract the viewer from the artist's
primary interest--the structure of form itself. The monochromatic colour scheme was suited
to the presentation of complex, multiple views of the object, which was now reduced to
overlapping opaque and transparent planes. These planes appear to ascend the surface of
the canvas rather than to recede in depth. Forms are generally compact and dense in the
centre of the Analytical Cubist painting, growing larger as they diffuse toward the edges of the
canvas, as in Picasso's "Portrait of Ambroise Vollard".
Hermetic Cubism
Le Portugais (The Emigrant)
In 1911, Braque stenciled letters into "The Portuguese" and thus significantly strengthened
the idea, full of consequences for the future of art, that a picture was not a representation but
an autonomous object.
Across a painting entitled Le Portugais Braque stencilled the letters BAL, and under them
numerals. Braque had first introduced letters into a still life, probably of early 1910, but they
are blended into the composition and have no function other than that of identifying as a
newpaper the object over which they are painted...
The stencilled letters and numbers are assertions of the realistic intentions of Cubism - 'as
part of a desire to come as close as possible to a certain kind of reality, in 1911 I introduced
letters into my paintings', Braque has said - but the implications are wider. In Le Portugais
they fulfill several obvious functions. In the first place, in a style in which one of the
fundamental problems had always been the reconciliation of solid form with the picture
plane, the letters written or stenciled across the surface are the most conclusive way of
emphasizing its two-dimensional character; Braque has stressed this when he said of the
letters: 'they were forms which could not be distorted because, being quite flat, the letters
existed outside space and their presence in the painting, by contrast, enabled one to
distinguish between objects situated in space and those outside it.' In other words,
Braque is in effect saying 'My picture is an object, a flat surface, and the spatial sensations
it evokes are a painter's space which is intended to inform and not deceive.' Secondly, the
letters in Cubist painting always have some associative value; here the letters D and BAL
(the D must be the last letter of the word GRAND) were probably suggested by a dance hall
poster hanging in a bar, and help to convey a 'cafe' atmosphere. Then, in the Portugais the
letters have a purely compositional value, providing a terminal note for a system of
ascending horizontal elements. Fourthly, they have a certain decorative value.
But the stencilled letters and numbers have yet another effect on the paintings in that they
serve to stress their quality as objects. For in the same way in which the number or title of a
painting in an exhibition catalogue gives it an identity as a material object different from all
others of the same type, so the letters and numbers on a Cubist painting serve to indiviualize
it, to isolate it from all other paintings. Then, again, and in this they point ahead to the
invention of collage, the letters and numerals stress the material existence of the painting
in another way: by applying to a canvas or sheet of paper letters, other pieces of paper or
fragments of glass or tin - elements generally considered to be foreign to the technique of
painting or drawing - the artist makes the spectator conscious of the canvas, panel or paper
as a material object capable of receiving and supporting other objects.
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