Cubism. Guillaume Apollinaire
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conceive of a round form.
The geometrical aspect which so vividly impressed those who saw the first scientific canvases came from the fact that the essential reality was given with great purity and that the visual accidents and anecdotes had been eliminated.
Pablo Picasso, The Aficionado (The Bullfighter), 1912.
Oil on canvas, 135 × 82 cm.
Kunstmuseum, Basel.
Georges Braque, Still-Life with a Violin, 1911.
Oil on canvas, 130 × 89 cm.
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.
Robert Delaunay, Paris, 1910–1912.
Oil on canvas, 267 × 406 cm.
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.
Albert Gleizes, The Soccer Players, 1912–1913.
Oil on canvas, 225.4 × 183 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
The painters who follow this school are: Picasso (although his luminous art belongs also to the other pure tendency of Cubism), Georges Braque, Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Mlle. Laurencin, and Juan Gris.
Physical Cubism is the art of painting new ensembles, with elements borrowed mostly from the reality of vision. This art is derived, nevertheless, from the constructive discipline of Cubism. It has a great future in the history of painting. Its social role is well marked, but it is not a pure art. It confuses the subject with its aspects. Le Fauconnier is the physical Cubist painter who created this tendency.
Orphic Cubism is the other great tendency of Modern Painting.
The last pictures and aquarelles of Cézanne belong to Cubism, but Courbet is the father of the new painters, and André Derain to whom I shall presently return, was the eldest of this best beloved sons, for he originated the movement of the Fauves who were a sort of prelude to the Cubists, and he also led the great subjective movement.
It would be too difficult however to write clearly today of a man who voluntarily holds himself aloof from everybody and everything.
The Modern School seems to me the most audacious that has ever been. It has put the question of beauty to itself. It wishes to visualise beauty disengaged from the pleasure that man causes man and, since the dawn of historic times, no European artist has dared to do that. The new artists must have an ideal beauty which will no longer be merely the proud expression of the species, but the expression of the universe, in so far as it has been humanised in the light. It is the art of painting new ensembles with elements not borrowed from visual realities, but created entirely by the artist and endowed by him with a powerful reality.
The works of the Orphic artists must present simultaneously a pure aesthetic charm, a construction which strikes beneath the surface and a sublime significance – that is to say, the subject. It is pure art.
The light from the works of Picasso contains this art, which Robert Delaunay invents on his side and for which Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp also strive.
Instinctive Cubism, the art of painting new ensembles borrowed not from visual reality but from suggestions made to the artist by instinct and intuition, has long tended to orphism. The instinctive artists lack lucidity and artistic faith. Instinctive Cubism includes a very great number of artists. It sprang from French Impressionism, and now this movement extends all over Europe.
The art of today clothes its creations with an imposing and monumental aspect, which surpasses in this respect everything that has been conceived by the artists of our age. Ardent in pursuit of beauty, it is noble, energetic, and the reality which it brings us is marvellously clear.
I love the art of today because above all else I love the light, and all men love light – above all else Man invented fire.
Jean Metzinger, The Blue Bird, 1913.
Oil on canvas, 250 × 193 cm.
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris.
Pablo Picasso, Bust of a Woman (study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), 1907.
Oil on canvas, 66 × 59 cm.
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.
II. What Is Cubism?
Pablo Picasso, Head (study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), 1907.
Oil on canvas.
Barnes Foundation, Lincoln University, Merion, Pennsylvania.
The Analysis of Form
In 1907, one painting signalled the prelude to a change in painting: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. When Pablo Picasso first exhibited this bordello scene with five female figures, even the collector Sergei Shchukin and his friend Georges Braque considered the painting to be “a loss for French painting”. However, the significance of this new view of reality was not lost on Braque. In this work, Picasso crafted for the first time a clear and rational lens without any aesthetic allusions. Taking Cézanne’s analysis of shape further, Picasso fragmented the forms into small cubes. It was the task of the viewer, when standing before the canvas, to put this puzzle of various spatial views together into a whole. Moreover, the muted colours signalled another new direction for painting. However, most of the novelty lay in the independence of the painting from the preconditions given by nature. This was the artist’s response to the changed preconditions of science regarding space and time, using Cézanne’s demand that in nature one should seek out the sphere, the cone and the cylinder as the basis for his compositional ideas. At the 1909 Salon des Indépendants, the critic Louis de Vauxcelles spoke of cubes, and Cubism was born.
The movement underwent many evolutionary steps. Friends Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso said later: “We did not have the intention of creating Cubism. Moreover, we just wanted to express that which moved us… It almost seemed as if we were two mountain climbers who were hanging from a single rope.” Between 1909 and 1912, they separated their art from everything real without turning completely to abstraction, in a phase called Analytical Cubism. In particular, the artists now painted figures and still lifes. They no longer painted an object viewed from one perspective, but rather layered views from many angles in order to capture the subject from all sides. They analysed the object and brought it to the canvas as a fragmented picture. Shape and space melted into one another in one composition of enmeshed, intersected and dissected surfaces. Instead of creating volume, the painters focused on revealing facets and constructing surfaces. The situation captured in the painting became far more indefinite. Some surfaces became transparent, weightless or suddenly transformed themselves into a book or an instrument, something recognisable. With regard to colours, the paintings were dominated by brown, grey and blue hues. Additionally, artists no longer painted in the open air, but rather kept to their studios, where the arsenal for their subjects was already at hand. Later, they no longer arranged their still lifes so that they could paint from reality; rather, they created them out of the imagination, adding numbers and word fragments to the compositions.
Braque and Picasso’s artistic vision brought them to Synthetic Cubism, a movement in which they were joined by Juan Gris. Now, it was no longer about taking the objects apart; now artists set about creating new objects with new materials. One recognised new qualities for works of art, using the most varied materials, even items that were meant to be thrown away. During this period, the collage became a form of painting.
Picasso,