Cubism & Abstraction (Monday 2Nd March & Tuesday 7Th April

Home , Der Blaue Reiter, Divisionism, Orphism (art), Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Robert Delaunay

Cubism & Abstraction (Monday 2nd March & Tuesday 7th April)

1. Georges Braque 1.1. Houses at L’Estaque 1908 2. Pablo Picasso 2.1. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 2.2. Still Life with Chair Caning 1912 3. Georges Bracque 3.1. Violin and Palette (1909). 4. Juan Gris 4.1. Fantômas 1915 Oil on canvas (60 X 73 cm) National Gallery of Art , Washington 5. Robert Delaunay 5.1. Homage to Bleriot (1914) 6. Fernand Leger 6.1. Soldiers Playing Cards 1917 Kröller-Müller Museum 7. Umberto Boccioni 7.1. Dynamism of a Cyclist 1913 Oil on canvas (70 X 95cm) Venice 8. Wassily Kandinsky 8.1. Landscape with Factory Chimney, oil on canvas, (66 x 82cm) Guggenheim Museum 8.2. Composition 6, 1913 Oil on canvas (77 X 118cm) Hermitage 9. Paul Klee 9.1. Moonshine 1919 gouache on linen 10. Piet Mondrian 10.1. Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930, oil on canvas, 46 x 46 cm (Kunsthaus Zürich) 10.2. Broadway Boogie Woogie 1942-3 Oil on canvas (127 X 127 cm) MoMA New York 11. Kazimar Malevich 11.1. White on White

Georges Braque, the ex-Fauve, often chose L’Estaque for his plein-aire paintings because it had been a favourite site for Cezanne. Both artists sacrificed details for overall design, but Braque ignored depth of field more than Cezanne. The houses have become geometric shapes, and when Braque submitted them the 1908 Salon d’Automne exhibition one juror commented that the artist had submitted a picture of small cubes; the label stuck.

Demoiselles d’Avignon is sometimes described as the most influential painting of the 20th Century. Picasso called it an ‘exorcism painting’ probably referring to the new direction his art was taking, but it also had a moralising element – the portrayal of a brothel with its risk of syphilis; original plans included a sailor and a medical student holding a skull. Matisse and other artists had already become interested in African masks, and Picasso famously became fascinated with those in the Trocadero Museum of Ethnography.

Braque painted Violin and Palette during the first year of his collaboration with Picasso on Analytical Cubism – named because of their analysis of the subjects and the space they occupy. Th paintings are not simulating a window on the world but are objects in their own right; the artists were attempting to present not just what they could see (sight), but also what they knew of objects in time and space (insight). The muted colours allowed them to blend multiple viewpoints onto the same canvas; straight lines marked a change of view and tonal shading a change of depth. Objects, such as the violin, are deconstructed then reassembled into a roughly violin shape. In a final ‘trick’, Braque highlights what he has attempted by including a trompe l’oeil style nail in the back wall.

In Still Life with Chair Caning, Picasso has included familiar elements of Cubism; but has also pasted on some cheap oil cloth (adapting an idea first used by Braque) and a piece of twisted cord. The use of real elements into painting was novel. The viewer can recognise the elements of a table top in a café with other familiar elements – a paper, a glass (in cubist style) and a pipe. When Braque and Picasso, in Synthetic Cubism placed industrially- produced objects ("low" commercial culture) into the realm of fine art ("high" culture) they changed the course of 20th century art.

One contemporary piece of low brow culture that fascinated several avant garde artists (Magritte and Apollinaire ) were the Fantômas crime novels. Juan Gris enthusiastically adopted the Synthetic Cubist style after 1911. His work was carefully planned and refined for maximum impact and unlike Braque & Picasso used bright colours.

By 1914, Robert Delauney (and others) were creating work in another variation of Cubism: Orphism. Analytical Cubism had attempted to break down form, Orphism (Orphic cubism) attempted to also decompose colour into its spectral constituents. I think this works particularly well in Homage to Bleriot where the concentric circles of colour reflect the pattern of a moving propeller. Technology fascinated many artists; Delaunay often included the epitome of the modern world -the Eiffel Tower.

Fernand Léger in his typically large painting, Soldiers Playing Cards, depicts objects in volumes – cones, spheres and cylinders. Using the aesthetics of machines, the soldiers become automatons, reminding us of the mechanisation of war. The men are deconstructed but we can determine that one wears a medal on his chest and the red hat of the French army, which Leger depicts simultaneously from two different viewpoints in Cubist style. The second card player (centre) is a sergeant, judging by the stripes on his uniform, and the third is represented in darker tones and wears a steel helmet instead of a cap.

In Italy a group of artists, led by the poet wanted to free the arts from what they perceived as the dead weight of the classical past, rather to celebrate the modern dynamic, technological world; their ideas on the cleansing power of war and suppression of women’s rights were proto-fascist. Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist incorporates a number of themes typical of Futurist paintings: speed, force lines, echoing curves, technology, fusion of the background, and divisionism.

Wassily Kandinski was born in Russia but produced his most creative work in Germany, most famously in the Der Blaue Reiter group and later teaching in the Bauhaus. In Landscape with Factory Chimney demonstrates how willing he was to sacrifice form for colour. Composition 6 is an abstract painting (there are few discernible features). There are references to music and many people believe Kandinsky experienced synaesthesia – in his case he probably would have ‘seen’ sounds and ‘heard’ colours. He certainly was fascinated by colour science.

The Swiss born Paul Klee was also associated with Der Blaue Reiter and also taught at the Bauhaus. One wonders if the Great War encouraged abstract artists like Klee to seek refuge in forms of expression divorced from the material world. Like Kandinsky, music played a significant part in his life. His best quote is “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”

Several artists in the early 20th Century were influenced by Theosophy – including Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. The artists were motivated to try and produced paintings with an immutable ‘reality’ – a spiritual vision; an unintended consequence was their work was open to widespread criticism from Christians and others opposed to the ‘occult’. Mondrian was an important contributor to the Dutch movement, De Stijl (the ‘style’) or Neo- Plasticism (“this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance”) that had a major effect of the development of abstraction in form and colour between 1917 and 1931. Works like Composition in Red Blue & Yellow were very carefully constructed, the colours and the width and positioning of the vertical and horizontal lines. He said: “I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.” In his last completed painting, Broadway Boogie- Woogie, he may have succeeded.

Kazimar Malevich painted White on White in Russia at a time of great optimism – at the dawn of what many believed was the beginning of a new age after the revolution. Even when we look at a totally abstract painting, we begin to ‘see’ hidden objects; MalHe wanted the squares to appear as if they were floating and he chose of the white colour to represent tranquility, infinity and timelessness. The painting is not connected to any place, or period in time; all the ‘bourgeois’ obsessions in art have been abandoned. When you quietly observe this painting, it is hard not to feel a sense of calm. Many have rejected it as not being art but, in my view, it satisfies most criteria and a bit of idealism (even if history shows it misplaced) is admirable.