Les DeMoiselles D'Avigon c.1907. 8' x 7'8"

Fauvism and Expressionism found their roots in Romanticism and the emotional expressionistic work of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Edvard Munch.

Cubism can trace its roots back to Neoclassicism and the analytical and intellectual work of Cezanne. The Cubist, like Cezanne, realized that our visual comprehension of objects consists of many views that we perceive almost at once and they tried to render this visual "information gathering".... ie. the visual process.

But how do we gather visual information? And what do we mean by seeing? Is it really as simple as seeing what is in front of us? Do we actually see like a camera? Well, not quite. I want you to try a little experiment.

Hold a finger (one) about six inches from your nose and stare at it (no joke). You want to read through this so you know where we're going with this. Okay now. Notice that when you focus on your finger your eyes blur the background into a relatively flat patterns of color shapes. Now keep your finger six inches from your nose but pick out one object in the back ground and focus on it. What happens to your view of your finger? Notice that when we focus on one form/object we "blur" out another. If we didn', we would be so inundated with visual input we wouldn't be able to function. So how do we see? Certainly not like the camera/photograph, a one eyed man frozen in space, or as in a traditional Renaissance painting where everything can be seen in conjunction with everything else. A nice picture, but certainly not a very accurate representation of what or how an individual actually "sees". So what is the "process of seeing"?

To the Cubist reality involved consolidating a series of optical vignettes (multiple views of the subject), rather than reproducing fixed images with photographic accuracy... If I asked you to describe your car, you might talk about how it looks from the side and then from the front or back and probably describe the inside or even that dent by the left tail light. Your reality of the car goes way beyound the flat, one sided view that a photograph would show. So how do you compress all that into one flat image with sticky stuff like paint?

The Portuguese by Georges Braque c.1911

Analytical Cubism. A "montage"... We see it used everyday in movies or television. A series of vignettes flashing or tumbling over one another, usually reenforced by music, of the mean streets of New York or the excitement of a basket ball game. Now guess where all that go started.

By eleminating color constrasts and using a monochromatic color scheme the Cubists tried to avoid creating an illusion of depth in the painting... at least most of it.

The problem of course was that by eleminating color and reducing everthing to visual "sound bites" everything started to look the same. You couldn't tell a Braque from a Picasso or one painting from another. Dead End.

But why bother in the first place? Cubism was a "child of its time" -- radical posturing and disregard for the established truths were part and parcel of the general cultural and intellectural over haul taking place in the early 1900's. Epitomized not only by Cubist art but also by Einstein's relativity theories -- relativiety was all, the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote:

"The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature througout the centuries, is the notion of independent existence. There is no such mode of existence. Every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the universe."

The world was changing fast, Einstein's relativity, Lenin's Communist idea's were attacking traditional polictical theories and Henry Ford's assembly-line production was changing the face of industry.

Paul Cezanne, despite the radical quality of his work ("This is what I see into Is this what I see?), still adhered to the principles of observation, affirming the notion that painting was about repesentation. Taking Cezanne as their starting point, Picasso and Braque began seriously question the "legitimacy" of such claims and sought to replace the old "system" of painting with a revitalized new vision. They wanted an art that reflected their world; for the Cubists that was the hard world of "facts" -- that empirical materialistic "modern" world. If the canvas was a flat two dimensional surface then it should be treated as such: flat. If our preseptions of reality are made up fragments of input and our reality is conditional on how we "infer" those fragments then to be honest in our painting we will paint it that way.

Portrait Of Daniel Henry Kahnweiker Pablo Picasso c.1910

By eleminating color constrasts and using a monochromatic color scheme they attempted to avoid inadvertinly creating an illusion of depth in the painting... at least most of it.

The problem of course was that by eleminating color and reducing everthing to visual "sound bites" everything started to look the same. You couldn't tell a Braque from a Picasso or one painting from another.

But then in an attempt to reinforce the 'flatness' of the canvas, first Braque and later Picasso, started to include precisely printed words and numbers into their work. This led to the gluing of actual objects... characters cut from newspapers and magazines, pieces of paper, labels from wine bottled, tickets, etc. to the canvas. A technique they called papier colle ... what we call collage. The use of collage marked the beginning of Synthetic Cubism, the second phase of Cubism and its most influencial manifestation.

In contrast to Analytic Cubism the emphasis is on the form of the object and on construction instead of disintegrating form. Color reentered the compositions and emphasis was placed on texture, design and movement.

Synthetic Cubism The Table Georges Braque c.1928

Synthetic Cubism Three Musician Pablo Picasso. c.1921

The influences of Cubism are legion, almost from it's inception it produced progeny. And that, especially for Analytical Cubism, is its "claim to fame" for it opened up a a whole new way of thinking for the modern artist who was confronted with a new dynamic age... An age of accelerated change as Europe went from the "horse and buggy" into the modern world in a head spinning 30 years.


Automobiles running on internal combustion engines, planes, trains and Electricity..Cities illuminated at night, radio and telephones, movies, magazines and posters... The world had become Industrialized and the mass production techniques of Henry Ford was flooding the cities with an abundance of new products now affordable to everyone.

Society itself was changing just as fast, as people moved into the cities to work at the new factories and become part of the new urban life The new technology would set man free from drudgery and menial labor and help create a paradise on earth. The most vocal in their praise of the new technology was the Italian Futurists who saw the new industrialization as a solvent of all social ills and war as the world's only hygiene... Of course no one had experienced total mechanized war.


Cubist Derived Styles

Study for Dynamic of a Cyclist Umberto Boccioni c.1913

Composition With Red, Yellow, And Blue Piet Mondrian c.1930

De Stijl (The Style) was a small group of Dutch artists led by Piet Mondrian... their goal was the creation of a world of universal harmony.

Working to free painting completely from both the depiction of namable objects and the expression of personal feelings.

Mondrian believed that the most powerful of all abstract figures was the correspondence of the vertical and the horizontal line, particularly in the right angle. He believed this convergence embodied the unity of all opposites in the universe--male and female, plus and minus, good and evil, heaven and earth, and so on.

In a way we end up the Cubistic section where we ended up the Expressionistic section -- in a search for universal world harmony.

Now before we take a look at the next section a few notes. When we look at European art from the early 1900's to the 1940's there are three main trends. We have looked at the first two: Expressionistic and Cubistic. Our third trend emereges during and after the First World War. A responce to the atrociity of the first mechanized war and a lose of faith in the rationality of mankind.