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THE REVOLUTION IN ART AFTER WORLD WAR I
Between 1908 and 1914, two young artists—Frenchman Georges Braque (1882–1963) and expatriate Spaniard Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973)—began a series of artistic experiments in Paris that revolutionized the direction of Western painting. For nearly five hundred years, painting in the West had attempted a reconstruction on canvas of a real or ideal world “out there” by the use of three-dimensional perspective and the rules of geometry. This artistic tradition, rooted in the ideas of the Italian Renaissance, created the expectation that when one looked at a painting one would see the immediate figures more clearly and proportionally larger while the background figures and the background in general would be smaller and less clearly defined. After all, it was reasoned, that is how the eye sees the real world. Braque and Picasso challenged that view as radically as Einstein, a decade before, had challenged all of the Classical assumptions we had made about the physical world around us.
ANALYTICAL CUBISM
To Braque and Picasso, paint on an essentially two dimensional and flat canvas represented a challenge: how could one be faithful to a medium that by its very nature was not three-dimensional while still portraying objects that by their very nature are three-dimensional? Part of their answer came from a study of Paul Cezanne’s many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire executed the century before. Cezanne saw and emphasized the geometric characteristics of nature; his representations of the mountain broke it down into a series of geometrical planes. With the example of Cezanne and their own native genius, Braque and Picasso began a series of paintings to put this new way of “seeing” into practice. These experiments in painting began an era called analytical Cubism because the artists were most concerned with exploring the geometric qualities of objects seen without reference to linear perspective.
Picasso
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
Between 1908 and 1914, two young artists—Frenchman Georges Braque (1882–1963) and expatriate Spaniard Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973)—began a series of artistic experiments in Paris that revolutionized the direction of Western painting. For nearly five hundred years, painting in the West had attempted a reconstruction on canvas of a real or ideal world “out there” by the use of three-dimensional perspective and the rules of geometry. This artistic tradition, rooted in the ideas of the Italian Renaissance, created the expectation that when one looked at a painting one would see the immediate figures more clearly and proportionally larger while the background figures and the background in general would be smaller and less clearly defined. After all, it was reasoned, that is how the eye sees the real world. Braque and Picasso challenged that view as radically as Einstein, a decade before, had challenged all of the Classical assumptions we had made about the physical world around us.
ANALYTICAL CUBISM
To Braque and Picasso, paint on an essentially two dimensional and flat canvas represented a challenge: how could one be faithful to a medium that by its very nature was not three-dimensional while still portraying objects that by their very nature are three-dimensional? Part of their answer came from a study of Paul Cezanne’s many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire executed the century before. Cezanne saw and emphasized the geometric characteristics of nature; his representations of the mountain broke it down into a series of geometrical planes. With the example of Cezanne and their own native genius, Braque and Picasso began a series of paintings to put this new way of “seeing” into practice. These experiments in painting began an era called analytical Cubism because the artists were most concerned with exploring the geometric qualities of objects seen without reference to linear perspective.
Picasso
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles