Reflecting?

After annihilating TMA02, or maybe it annihilated me! I'm sitting here surrounded by opened books, highlighted passages, scrappy notes, and crumpled papers! But what does this tell me? Well, that I've spent the last two or three weeks with the Cubists, particularly Braque and Picasso. I've never really understood all those little boxes that seem to make up a Cubist painting, so this has been an interesting insight into the works, the artists and the times in which they painted in this style.

Cubism really emerged in about 1907 following Picasso's famous painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. It's all about flattening the picture and taking out any depth, (analytic Cubism). There is no clear lighting and perspective disappears, the key word is flatness. That's why the modernist loves them, concentrating on the pure aesthetic pleasure of the object. But all those little facet-planes? In 1914 Fernand Léger wrote this:

'If pictorial expression has changed, it is because modern life has necessitated it ... When one crosses a landscape by automobile or express train, it becomes fragmented ... The view through the door of the railroad car or the automobile windshield, in combination with the speed, has altered the habitual look of things. A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist'.

France was involved in African colonialism and lots of masks and objects were to be found in Paris at that time, primitive art. The flip side to the modernists will point to the similarities between this primitive tribal art and the Cubists. Don't forget those masks on the faces of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Of course the Cubists also worked in collage (synthetic Cubism) sticking all those unconnected pieces of paper, music, newsprint, bits of wood, rope, tickets, handbills...whatever, on their canvases. The modernists would say it was restoring a certain amount of pictorial depth to the work and that it all comes together in a monumental unity!!! But society in Paris at the time was fractured by high and low culture and the economy delivered 'capitilist commodity production'! Disjointed and materialistic society found many implausible adjacencies and social art historians claim that those collages direct the viewer outwards and away from any internal unity of the work. So... what do I reckon? It seems to me that these artists were young, probably drunk a lot and had a good time straddling the 'high' and 'low' culture of the city, and they picked up ideas from everywhere and created original art, because they liked it and they could sell it!!
Above image Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass after 18 November 1912, pasted paper, gouache and charcoal, 48x37cm.
Thanks for the pic!
Great article from 'Facets of Cubism' from Museum of Fine Art, Boston.
View here.
Link to MFA.
Nice quote from Picasso (1881-1973)
'Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. The same principles and the same elements are common to all. The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anybody else but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?'. 'Picasso Speaks' AiT p.216