Cubism

Pablo Picasso

I have a strong pull towards the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who were founders of cubism. Pablo Picasso’s work in particular stands out for me. I love his style with the distortion of the figure and faces but also for the sheer amount of emotion and feeling he can make the viewer feel. Picasso and Braque took the realistic world and deconstructed it into geometric shapes. They were no longer copying or illustrating the real world but adding to it and giving it something new. Picasso never went on to create purely abstract art and he shocked many people when he made the move back to a more conventional form of painting. He worked with many different styles, some of which no artist has ever tried but I feel his most successful and capturing pieces are his paintings done in the cubist style.

Picasso’s les damaselles d’Avignon, 1907, is a wonderful example of his ground breaking work. It is clearly a start to cubism and is very Avant-Garde. It is a painting of 5 female classical nudes that looks as I’d the have been bathing and enjoying some fruit. The angles are sharp although you can still tell that you are viewing the female form. The colours are of a warm palate that compliments each other, even the blue is warm and provides a suitable background for the figures. The image at first doesn’t make sense as the figures are abstract and slightly contorted as the planes are broken up and he has used multiple viewpoints. It reflects a complex reality and challenges the concepts of time and space.

“When he laid down his brushes, Picasso could claim to have painted a truly modern work, in the sense that predecessors like Gauguin or Rimbaud gave to the term. He had freed paining from the trammels of academic tradition, religious lies, and social respectability and opened it to a new beginning which derived from primitivism and magic.”

Pierrre Daix, Picasso: Life and art, 1987

Picasso was influenced greatly by the African masks and I feel this can be seen clearly in his weeping woman.

There is so much raw emotion in this piece that I can almost feel her suffering for myself. The sharp angles in which she has been broken up into reminds me of shards of glass. This in turn has connotations of sharp, cuts and pain. I cannot begin to guess at her reason for her pain and sadness but I do not need to because Picasso has so effectively portrayed her suffering that it no longer matters why just that she is. She tentatively holds a tissue to her face to wipe her tears but it does little to help. We can see this because it is see through, not exactly substantial for drying tears. We also get the sense that she may be praying as she has both hands brought together in front of her. The one thing that truly makes me connect with this image is the woman’s eyes. They are simply done but are framed by heavy eye lashes that reminds me of tear clogged eyelashes and running mascara. The eyebrows are what finishes the eyes and truly makes them look sad and emotional. This show of emotion humanizes the woman and makes her relatable. The colours are bright and bold, almost contrasting the woman’s emotional state if it weren’t for the garishness of them. The yellows start pure but are mixed with browns and greens, tarnishing the vibrancy.

Another one of his pieces that astounds me every time I see it is his Guernica. There is so much pain and anguish in his depiction of the Nazi attack on Guernica that I am drawn to the image, even though it’s a sad and hurtful scene. He successfully conveys his thoughts on what happened at Guernica and he has easily drawn the viewer into this hell. The painting is on a massive scale which helps to engulf its audience and taking them into the war zone.

You can practically hear the people and animals screaming, particularly the woman who has just lost her child. It shows deaths and destruction in striking contrast of black and shades of grey. The figures stand out in starkness against the dark background. The main feature of this piece is the mesh of overlying figures in the middle of the painting. They are transparent which gives the whole painting a ghostly feel as well as building up texture and depth. The different shapes of the figures are distinguished by strong black lines are their strong geometric shapes. These shapes look like shattered glass of shards of shrapnel from a bomb again giving reference to sharp cutting pain. This can also be seen and even heard by the sharp tongues of the woman and horse.

Picasso has depicted a horse and bull in Guernica to represent agriculture and to help the viewer understand that the attack was on a village during a busy market day. The horse and bull also represent Spain and the Spanish culture. Picasso has used a lot of symbolism to convey his message and he has effectively communicated the feelings and the devastation caused in Guernica. It is a moving piece that speaks volumes.

http://www.pablopicasso.org/index.jsp

Picasso: life and art, Pierre Diax, 1994

Picasso’s war, Russel Martin, 2003