FREE ESSAY ON CUBISM

CUBISM

Cubism is one of the first forms of abstract art. Cubism was a movement in painting that
sought to break down objects into basic shapes of cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones.
Cubism originated in France and was influenced by African sculptures and by Paul Cezanne.
The first cubist works were those in which objects, landscapes, and people are
represented as many-sided solids. This enables you to see various views of the object at
the same time. Later, cubism changed using a flatter type of abstraction, in which the
complete pattern, becomes more important, and the objects represented are largely
indecipherable. At first, most artists painted with little color. Most paintings were
either monochromatic or gray, blue, brown, and white." The final phase of cubism is
called synthetic. In this phase color reappears as a primary element in the artwork.
Cezanne was an artist who led the way to cubism or abstract art. Before Cezanne, artists
would portray the world realistically. It is above all Cezanne's obsession with formal
elements of composition and his use of color as tone rather than the Impressionist
pursuit of light on surface that makes his art so important to those who followed.
Cezanne's works made it possible for artists to start to question what they saw, the way
in which they saw it, and how they interpreted and represented what was in front of them.
Cezanne felt that paintings should reflect artist's sensations made into a pictorial form
by brush strokes, color, and lines. He was known to work slowly and use colors to build
shapes. In the still-life pictures that he made of fruits and bowls one can tell that he
worked slowly as there are different and contradicting shadows in his pictures. Early in
his career Cezanne loved to paint Sainte-Victoire (landscapes). Later he painted
portraits such as Woman with a Coffee Pot and The Card Players. When he began to paint
landscape again he used the bathers in his paintings. Later Cezanne would have a great
impact on Picasso's paintings. 
Pablo Picasso is one of the most famous cubists. As he grew up his father encouraged him
to become an artist. From 1901 to 1904 is called the Blue Period because Picasso used
blue tones when he painted and his paintings showed poverty, death, and blindness. The
Blue Period marks a deliberate step towards a plastic representation of form and
emotional subject matter." From 1904-1906, the Rose Period is when Picasso painted
circuses, actors, and harlequin. This is when he visits family in Barcelona, Spain, and
refreshes his memories of Romanesque and Gothic art. Even more important to him at this
time was the discovery of Iberian sculpture dating from pre-Roman times, examples of
which had been recently acquired by the Louvre. They attracted him by their unorthodox
proportions, their disregard for refinement, and their rude barbaric strength. These
influences rapidly gained an important place in his work, and lead to the sculptural
distortions of nudes painted on his return to Paris."
From 1907-1909 is called the Negro Period. The paintings of Cezanne became familiar to
Picasso. Picasso had also discovered the greatness of an obscure old man, Douanier
Rousseau. These were the years when the power of primitive art imported from Africa and
the South Seas was beginning to be noticed by certain painters in Paris, and styles which
had formally been despised as barbaric began to be recognized as possessing great emotive
strength." Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to recapture primitive art. The new
style depended in particular on a simplification of form and a clarification of the
methods by which it was depicted. With a disregard for classical tradition, distortions
were used freely to emphasize volume and convey emotional sensation. Picasso said I paint
objects as I think them, not as I see them. Picasso was increasingly drawn to making
creations according to his own internal vision. In African art he had found a conceptual
art which was not based on immediate visual reactions to a model. The original impact had
been violent. It had forged the first real link between African art and Western ideas and
it was followed during the two years that succeeded the painting of Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon.
At this point Braque and Picasso began to clarify and systematize a new conception of the
painters' experience. They felt that they should analyze an object, break it down shapes,
flatten them, change colors, and reassemble them so that they could be conceived from all
angles. This method was called analytical cubism. Synthetic cubism is seen in the
painting The Three Musicians at this point new technique of paper collage proved to be an
important discovery. There was a return to color, and texture became very important. The
difference between the two phases of cubism may also be defined in terms of picture
space: facet cubism retains a certain kind of depth, the painted surface acts as a window
through which we still perceive remnants of the familiar perspective space of the
Renaissance. This space lies behind the picture plane and has no visible limits; it may
contain objects that are hidden from our view. In collage cubism, on the contrary, the
picture space lies in front of the plane of the tray; Space is created not by
illusionistic devices such as modeling or foreshortening, but by actual overlapping of
layers of pasted materials.
Later Picasso made many paintings of female figures where he emphasized the fullness of
their form. During the war he painted Guernica which combines a violent surrealist
distortion and color. After the war he painted The Three Dancers which was the first
painting to show violent distortions in which the human form is torn apart, he invents
new anatomies incorporating the world of dreams mixed with reality. Picasso did
sculptures, lithographs, and ceramics. In many of his artworks you can see a bull. As
originally conceived by Picasso and Braque, Cubism offered a formal discipline of subtle
balance, used for traditional subjects- still life, portraiture, the nude. Other
painters, however, saw in the new style a special affinity with the geometric precision
of engineering that made it uniquely attuned to the dynamism of modern times.
Georges Braque led the development of Cubism with Picasso. The qualities which
distinguish his Cubist paintings from Picasso's- his fluent painterliness and his natural
ability as a rich but subtle colorist- predominant in a work like Guitar and Jug the
still life remained his principle theme from the Gueridon Series to the climatic Atelier
Series in which the scope of the still life extends to include the studio, the artist,
his model and even the painting itself." Many of his works portray geometric forms of the
subjects, yet the subjects in many of his paintings are unrecognizable.
There are two other cubists worth mentioning. Ferdinand Ledger uses modern technology in
his paintings. He uses machines, construction workers, and the workingman in many of his
paintings. Juan Gris uses Synthetic cubism and his paintings create their own reality
rather than imitating the reality of nature.
The art critics are correct when they say that Cubism changed art. The cubists Braque and
Picasso developed art independent of reality. They felt an artist could look beyond the
superficial appearance of what they painted. The artists became free from his traditional
obligation to paint natural appearances as illustrated in many of their paintings. An
artist was able to distort, invent, create, and put their dreams into their paintings.
Many people use the collage, which they developed, today. I feel that although the
paintings are broken up into geometric shapes one can see parts of the object that the
artists wanted them to represent. This indicates to me that their pictures were planned
rather than arbitrarily done.