Blog post Number 3

1910-1950

     Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and stage designer.  He was a very influential artist of the 20th century and known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and many other styles that he helped to develop. Cubism is a method of portraying multiple dimensions onto a two dimensional canvas.

     Pablo Picasso's Cubism period lasted from 1907-1915.  Cubism was a revolutionary style of modern art and the first style of abstract art.  It was developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.  The Cubists challenged conventional forms of representation, such as perspective, which had been the rule since the Renaissance.  The Cubists proposed that your sight of an object is the sum of different views and your memory of that object isn't constructed from just one angle, as in perspective, but from several different angles selected by your sight and movement.  Cubist painting was an attempt at a more realistic way of seeing.  The whole idea of space is reconfigured.  The front, back, and sides of the subject become more interchangeable elements in the design of the work.

"Still Life with Chair Caning" oil on canvas 1912

Pablo Picasso began to glue printed images from the "real world" onto the surface of his still lifes.  This painting was the first example of the collage technique and it opened the door for other artists to the second phase of the Cubist style, Synthetic Cubism. 

"Still Life with Mandolin and Guitar" oil on canvas 1924

Synthetic Cubism has a more decorative and colorful style as you can see in the painting above.  Interchanging lines, colors, patterns, and textures switch from geometric to freehand, dark to light, positive to negative, and plain to patterned, advance and recede in rhythms across the picture plain. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907 

The Demoiselles was a very big first step towards Cubism.  The Demoiselles is the logical picture to take as the starting point for Cubism because it marks the birth of a new genre of art.

"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, and an English book is a blank to me.  This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?"-Pablo Picasso