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Collage

By 1912 Picasso and Braque were gluing real paper (papier collé) and other materials (collage) onto their canvases, taking a stage further the Cubist conception of a work as a self-contained, constructed object. This Synthetic phase (1912–14) saw the reintroduction of colour, while the actual materials often had an industrial reference (e.g., sand or printed wallpaper). Still lifes and, occasionally, heads were the principal subjects for both artists. And in Picasso's works the multiple references inherent in his Synthetic compositions—curves that refer to guitars and at the same time to ears, for instance—introduce an element of play that is characteristic of so much of his work (Student with a Pipe, 1913) and lead to the suggestion that one thing becomes transformed intoanother. Absinthe Glass (1914; six versions), for example, is in part sculpture (cast bronze), in part collage (a real silver sugar strainer is welded onto the top), and in part painting (Neo-Impressionist brushstrokes cover planes of white paint). But the work is neither sculpture, nor collage, nor painting; planes refer to two-dimensionality, while the object indeed possesses three dimensions. The work of art thus hovers between reality and illusion.

By 1915 Picasso's life had changed and so, in a sense, had the direction of his art. At the end of that year his beloved Eva died, and the painting he had worked on during her illness (Harlequin, 1915; Museum of Modern Art, New York City) gives testimony to his grief—a half-Harlequin, half-Pierrot artist before an easel holds an unfinished canvas against a black background.

Parade

World War I dispersed Picasso's circle; Apollinaire, Braque, and othersleft for the front, while most of Picasso's Spanish compatriots returned to their neutral homeland. Picasso stayed in France, and from 1916 his friendship with the composer Erik Satie took him into a new avant-garde circle that remained active during the war. The self-appointed leader of this nucleus of talents who frequented the Café de la Rotonde was the young poet Jean Cocteau. His idea to stage a wartime theatrical event in collaboration with Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes resulted in the production of Parade , a work about a circus sideshow that incorporated imagery of the new century, such as skyscrapers and airplanes. Cocteau went to Satie for the music and then to Picasso for the sets and costumes. Work began in 1917, and although Picasso intensely disliked travel, he agreed to go with Cocteau to Rome where they joined Diaghilev and the choreographer of Parade, Léonide Massine. It was on this occasion that Picasso also met his future wife, Olga Kokhlova, among the dancers.

Parade was first performed in May 1917 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, where it was considered no less than an attempt to undermine the solidarity of French culture. Satie seems to have been the principal target of abuse (partly because of his inclusion of airplane propellers and typewriters in the score), while Picasso disarmed the public with the contrast between his basically realistic stage curtain and the startling Synthetic Cubist constructions worn by the characters, the sideshow managers, in the ballet.

New Mediterraneanism

Picasso's paintings and drawings of the late teens often seem unexpectedly naturalistic in contrast to the Cubist works that preceded or sometimes coincided with them (Passeig de Colom, 1917). After his travels to Italy and a return to Barcelona in 1917 (Parade was performed there in November), a new spirit of Mediterraneanism made itself felt in his work, especially in the use of classical forms and drawing techniques. This was reinforced by a conscious looking back to Ingres (for example, in Picasso's portrait drawings of Jacob and Vollard, 1915) and to late Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Even the direction of Picasso's Cubist work was affected. By clarifying planes, forms, and colour, the artist imparted to his Cubist paintings a classical expression (Saint-Raphaël still lifes, 1919; two versions of the Three Musicians, 1921).

Picasso's only legitimate child, Paulo, was born in 1921. As part of his new status as darling of the socialites (encouraged particularly by his wife and Jean Cocteau) Picasso continued his collaborations with the Ballets Russes and produced designs for Manuel de Falla's Three-Cornered Hat (1919); Igor Stravinsky's Pulcinella (1920); De Falla's Cuadro Flamenco (1921); and Satie's ballet Mercure (1924). André Breton called Picasso's designs for this ballet “tragic toys for adults” created in the spirit of Surrealism.

Surrealism

Although Picasso never became an official member of the group, he had intimate connections with the most important art movement between the two world wars, Surrealism. The Surrealist establishment, including its main propagandist, André Breton, claimed him as one of their own, and Picasso's art gained a new dimension from contact with his Surrealist friends, particularly the writers. Inherent in Picasso's work since the Demoiselles were many elements that the official circle advocated. The creation of monsters,for instance, could certainly be perceived in the disturbing juxtapositions and broken contours of the human figure in Cubist works; Breton specifically pointed to the strange Woman in a Chemise (1913). Moreover, the idea of reading one thing for another, an idea implicit in Synthetic Cubism, seemed to coincide with the dreamlike imagery the Surrealists championed.

What the Surrealist movement gave to Picasso were new subjects—especially erotic ones—as well as a reinforcement of disturbing elements already in his work. The many variations on the subject of bathers with their overtly sexual and contorted forms (Dinard series, 1929) show clearly the impact of Surrealism, while in other works the effect of distortion on the emotions of the spectator can also be interpreted as fulfilling one of the psychological aims of Surrealism (drawings and paintings of the Crucifixion , 1930–35). In the 1930s Picasso, like many of the Surrealist writers, often played with the idea of metamorphosis. For example, the image of the minotaur, the monster of Greek mythology—half bull and half human—that traditionally has been seen as the embodiment of the struggle between the human and the bestial, becomes in Picasso's work not only an evocation of that idea but also a kind of self-portrait.

Finally, Picasso's own brand of Surrealism found its strongest expression in poetry. He began writing poetry in 1934, and during one year, from February 1935 to the spring of 1936, Picasso virtually gave up painting. Collections of poems were published in Cahiers d'Art (1935) and in La Gaceta de Arte (1936, Tenerife), and some years later he wrote the Surrealist play Le Désir attrapé par la queue (1941, Desire Caught by the Tail).

Sculpture

Picasso's reputation as a major 20th-century sculptor came only afterhis death, because he had kept much of his sculpture in his own collection. Beginning in 1928, Picasso began to work in iron and sheet metal in Julio González's studio in Paris. Then, in 1931, with his new mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, he left his wife and moved to a country home at Boisgeloup, where he had room for sculpture studios. There, with Marie-Thérèse as his muse, Picasso began working on large-scale plaster heads. He also began to make constructions incorporating found objects, and until the end of his life Picasso continued working in sculpture in a variety of materials.

The 1930s

The privacy of his life with the undemanding Marie-Thérèse formed a contrast to the hectic pace of life kept by Olga and her bourgeois circle of society friends. Once in Boisgeloup, Picasso lived openly withMarie-Thérèse (with whom he had a child, Maya, in 1935), and she became the subject of his often lyrical, sometimes erotic paintings, in which he combined intense colour with flowing forms (Girl Before a Mirror, 1932).

Picasso never completely dissociated himself from the women who had shared his life once a new lover occupied his attention. This is evident in his work, in which one mistress often turns into another; for instance, in a private sketchbook (number 99, 1929) Picasso's portrait drawings betray his double life, for the pictures of his then secret mistress evolve into horrific images of screaming Olgas. And in1936, while money and a certain amount of attention were given to both Olga and Marie-Thérèse, Picasso moved back to Paris and beganto live with the Yugoslav photographer Dora Maar. This change in his own life coincided with a period of personal preoccupation with the Spanish Civil War, which had begun in that year.

Although Picasso never returned to his native country after a visit in 1934, his sympathies always lay with Spain (the short-lived Republican government named him honorary director of the Prado),and in early 1937 he produced a series of etchings and aquatints (Dream and Lie of Franco) to be sold in support of the Republican cause. His major contribution, of course, was the mural painting Guernica (named for the Basque town bombed in 1937 by the Fascists) commissioned by the Republican government for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. As compensationPicasso was provided with a studio in Paris on rue des Grands Augustins large enough to accommodate the enormous canvas (11.5 × 25.5 feet; 3.49 × 7.77 metres). Dora Maar worked with him to complete the final work, which was realized in just over three weeks. The imagery in Guernica—the gored horse, the fallen soldier, and screaming mothers with dead babies (representing the bullfight, war, and female victims, respectively)—was employed to condemn theuseless destruction of life, while at the same time the bull represented the hope of overcoming theunseen aggressor, Fascism.

World War II and after

The expressive quality of both the forms and gestures in the basically monochromatic composition of Guernica found its way into Picasso's other work, especially in the intensely coloured versions of Weeping Woman (1937) as well as in related prints and drawings, in portraits of Dora Maar and Nusch Éluard (wife of Picasso's friend, the French poet Paul Éluard), and in still lifes (Still Life with Red Bull's Head, 1938). These works led to the claustrophobic interiors and skull-like drawings (sketchbook number 110, 1940) of the war years,which Picasso spent in France with Dora Maar as well as with Jaime Sabartés, a friend of his student days in Barcelona. Thereafter Sabartés shared Picasso's life as secretary, biographer, and companion, and more often than not as the butt of endless jokes (Portrait of Jaime Sabartés, 1939; Retour de Bruxelles, sketchbook number 137, 1956).

After the war Picasso resumed exhibiting his work, which included painting and sculpture as well as work in lithography and ceramics. At the Autumn Salon of 1944 (“Salon de la Liberation”) Picasso's canvases and sculpture of the preceding five years were received as a shock. This plus the announcement that Picasso had just joined the Communist Party led to demonstrations against his political views in the gallery itself. At the same time Picasso opened up his studio to both new and old writer and artist friends, includingJean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Reverdy, Éluard, the photographer Brassaï, the English artist Roland Penrose, and the American photographer Lee Miller, as well as many American GI's.

Already in 1943 a young painter, Françoise Gilot, had presented herself at the studio, and within months she became the successor to Dora Maar. In 1946 Picasso moved to the Mediterranean withGilot (with whom he was to have two children, Claude in 1947 and Paloma in 1949). First they moved to Antibes, where Picasso spent four months painting at the Château Grimaldi (Joie de Vivre, 1946). The paintings of this time and the ceramics he decorated at the studio in nearby Vallauris, beginning in 1947, vividly express Picasso's sense of identification with the classical tradition and with his Mediterranean origins. They also celebrate his new-found happiness with Gilot, who in works of this period is often nymph to Picasso's fauns and centaurs.

The Picasso myth

After World War II an aura of myth grew up around the name of Picasso, and in the last decades of his life his work had, in a sense, moved beyond criticism. Although there were few critics able to keep pace with his latest work, there were few who attacked him. One exception was the British critic John Berger (The Success and Failure of Picasso, 1965), who raised questions about Picasso's economic motives and speculated about his inflated public reputation. Picasso's enormous output (especially in printing and drawing) kept his name before the public, even though his work seemed at the time to be far from mainstream, nonfigurative imagery. For example, in the series that characterized the working methods of his late years he used figurative imagery to weave a kind of narrative within each series' numerous variations.

In 1953 Françoise Gilot with their two children left Picasso, and he spent several years as a bachelor, dividing his time between Paris and his home at La Californie, near Cannes. In 1954 he had met Jacqueline Roque, who worked in the pottery shop in Vallauris, and they married in 1961; she not only became his steadfast companion, but also, as his muse, she became the principal image and source of inspiration for practically all of the late work. They are both buried in the castle at Vauvenargues, which Picasso purchased in 1958. But the years from their marriage to Picasso's death they spent at Mougins.

History of art

In his late work Picasso repeatedly turned toward the history of art for his themes. He seemed at times obsessed with the need to create variations on the works of earlier artists; thus in his many prints, drawings, and paintings of that period, reference is made to artists such as Altdorfer, Manet, Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Courbet. Repeatedly Picasso did a complete series of variations on one particular work, the most famous being perhaps the series on Las Meninas of Velázquez consisting of 58 discrete pictures. At times Picasso reworked a specific work because he identified personally with it. For example, he was attracted to Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger because the figure on the right bore resemblance to his wife. More often he seemed moved by the challenge to rework in his own way the complex pictorial and narrative problems the older artists had originally posed for themselves. In a sense Picasso was writing himself into the history of art by virtue of such an association with a number of his predecessors.

There is a renewed sense of play in the work of Picasso's later years. He transformed paper cutouts into monumental sculptures, and in Henri-Georges Clouzot's film Le Mystère Picasso (1955), the artist, the sole star, behaves like a conjurer, performing tricks with light as well as with his brush. And finally, just as he turned to the paintings of earlier masters, redoing their works in many variations, so he turned to his own earlier oeuvre, prompted by the same impulse. The circus and the artist's studio became once again the stage for his characters, among whom he often placed himself portrayed as an old acrobat or king.

Assessment

Because Picasso's art from the time of the Demoiselles was radical in nature, virtually no 20th-century artist could escape his influence. Moreover, while other masters such as Matisse or Braque tended to stay within the bounds of a style they had developed in their youth, Picasso continued to be an innovator into the last decade of his life. This led to misunderstanding and criticism both in his lifetime and since, and it was only in the 1980s that his last paintings began to be appreciated both in themselves and for their profound influence on the rising generation of young painters. Since Picasso was able from the 1920s to sell works at very high prices, he could keep most of his oeuvre in his own collection. At the time of his death he owned some 50,000 works in various media from every period of his career, which passed into possession of the French state and his heirs. Their exhibition and publication has served to reinforce the highest estimates of Picasso's astonishing powers of invention and execution over a span of more than 80 years

ORPHISM

French Orphisme, trend in Cubist painting that gave priority to colour. The movement was named in 1912 by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, whose use of the word Orphic recalls both the Symbolist painters' use of the term Orphic art in reference to Paul Gauguin's orchestration of colour and the poetry of Orpheus, the legendary poet and singer. Among the painters working in this style, Apollinaire noted Robert Delaunay (q.v.), Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. In the attempt to approximate music, Delaunay and hiswife, Sonia, led the way in transforming the visual into abstract colour harmonies.

One of the resources Delaunay used to arrive at away of integrating colour and Cubism was a book on simultaneous contrasts (De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs, 1839), by the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul. Unlike the Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat, who had employed these theories during the 1880s, Delaunay was interested in applying them in an abstract way, exploring the effects of colour and light when they are not bound to an object. In his abstract work “Simultaneous Composition: Sun Disks” (1912–13; Museum of Modern Art, New York City), superimposed circles of colour have their own rhythm and movement.

Another painter associated with Orphism was František Kupka, a Czech who lived in Paris. Possibly Kupka was aware of Delaunay's disk paintings when he painted his “Disks of Newton (Study for Fugue in Two Colors)” in 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). As the musical analogy implicit in the title suggests, the vibrating colour orchestrations on the canvas seem to create visual music.

It was Delaunay's canvases, however, that deeply impressed August Macke, Franz Marc, and Paul Klee, who visited his Paris studio in 1912; this exposure had a decisive influence on their subsequent work. Orphism also exerted an influence on the development of German Cubism.

FUTURISM

Italian Futurismo, Russian Futurizm, early 20th-century artistic movement that centred in Italy and emphasized the dynamism, speed, energy, and power of the machine and the vitality, change, andrestlessness of modern life in general. The most significant results of the movement were in the visual arts and poetry.

Futurism was first announced on Feb. 20, 1909, when the Paris newspaper Le Figaro published a manifesto by the Italian poet and editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (q.v.). The name Futurism, coined by Marinetti, reflected his emphasis on discarding what he conceived to be the static and irrelevant art of the past and celebrating change, originality, and innovation in culture and society. Marinetti's manifesto glorified the new technology of the automobile and the beauty of its speed, power, and movement. He exalted violence and conflict and called for the sweeping repudiation of traditional cultural, social, and political values and the destruction of such cultural institutions as museums and libraries. The manifesto's rhetoric was passionately bombastic; its tone was aggressive and inflammatory and was purposely intended to inspire public anger and amazement, to arouse controversy, and to attract widespread attention.

Painting and sculpture

With the support of Marinetti, the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini published several manifestos on painting in 1910. Like Marinetti, they glorified originality for its own sake and despised inherited traditions of art. Although they were not as yet working in what was to become the Futurist style, they began to emphasize an emotional involvement in the dynamics of modern life, and toward this end they called for rendering the perception of movement and communicating to the viewer the sensations of speed and change. To achieve this, the Futurist painters adopted the Cubist technique of depicting several sides and views of an object simultaneously by means of fragmentedand interpenetrating plane surfaces and outlines. But the Futurists additionally sought to portray the object's movement in space, and they tried to achieve this goal by rhythmic spatial repetitions of the object's outlines during its transit, producing an effect akin rchitect Le Corbusier is reflected in the shapes of the houses he designed during the 1920s.

EXPRESSIONISM

artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic and Nordic art from at least the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or spiritual crisis, and in this sense it forms the converse of the rationalist and classicizing tendencies of Italy and later of France.

More specifically, Expressionism as a distinct style or movement refers to a number of German artists, as well as Austrian, French, and Russian ones, who became active in the years before World War I and remained so throughout much of the interwar period.

The roots of the German Expressionist school lay in the works of Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, each of whom in the period 1885–1900 evolved a highly personal painting style. These artists used the expressive possibilities of colour and line to explore dramatic and emotion-laden themes, to convey the qualities of fear, horror, and the grotesque, or simply to celebrate nature with hallucinatory intensity. They broke away from the literal representation of nature in order to express more subjective outlooks or states of mind.

The second and principal wave of Expressionism began about 1905, when a group of German artists led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner formed a loose association called Die Brücke (see Brücke, Die). The group included Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl. These painters were in revolt against what they saw as the superficial naturalism of academic Impressionism. They wanted to reinfuse German art with a spiritual vigour they felt it lacked, and they sought to do this through an elemental, primitive, highly personal and spontaneous expression. Die Brücke's original members were soon joined by the Germans Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Otto Müller. The Expressionists were influenced by their predecessors of the 1890s and were also interested in African wood carvings and the works of such Northern European medieval and Renaissance artists as Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and Albrecht Altdorfer. They were also aware of Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, and other recent movements.

The German Expressionists soon developed a style notable for its harshness, boldness, and visual intensity. They used jagged, distorted lines; crude, rapid brushwork; and jarring colours to depict urban street scenes and other contemporary subjects in crowded, agitated compositions notable for their instability and their emotionally charged atmosphere. Many of their works express frustration, anxiety, disgust, discontent, violence, and generally a sort of frenetic intensity of feeling in response to the ugliness, the crude banality, and the possibilities and contradictions that they discerned in modern life. Woodcuts, with their thick jagged lined and harsh tonal contrasts, were one of the favourite media of the German Expressionists.

The works of Die Brücke artists stimulated Expressionism in other parts of Europe. Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele of Austria adopted their tortured brushwork and angular lines, and Georges Rouault and Chaim Soutine in France each developed painting styles marked by intense emotional expression and the violent distortion of figural subject matter. The painter Max Beckmann, the graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz, and the sculptors Ernst Barlach and Wilhelm Lehmbruck, all of Germany, also worked in Expressionist modes. The artists belonging to the group known as Der Blaue Reiter are sometimes regarded as Expressionists, although their art is generally lyrical and abstract, less overtly emotional, more harmonious, and more concerned with formal and pictorial problems than that of Die Brücke artists.

Expressionism was a dominant style in Germany in the years immediately following World War I, where it suited the postwar atmosphere of cynicism, alienation, and disillusionment. Some of the movement's later practitioners, such as George Grosz and Otto Dix, developed a more pointed, socially critical blend of Expressionism and realism known as the Neue Sachlichkeit. Ascan be seen from such labels as Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism, the spontaneous, instinctive, and highly emotional qualities of Expressionism have been shared by several subsequent art movements in the 20th century.

The decline of Expressionism was hastened by the vagueness of its longing for a better world, by its use of highly poetic language, and in general the intensely personal and inaccessible nature of its mode of presentation. The partial reestablishment ofstability in Germany after 1924 and the growth of more overtly political styles of social realism hastened the movement's declinein the late 1920s. Expressionism was definitively killed by the advent of the Nazis to power in 1933. They branded the work of almost all Expressionists as degenerate and forbade them to exhibit or publish and eventually even to work. Many Expressionists went into exile in the United States and other countries.

SUPREMATISM

Russian Suprematism, first movement of pure geometrical abstraction in painting, originated by Kazimir S. Malevich in Russia in about 1913. In his first Suprematist work, a pencil drawing of a black square on a white field, all the elements of objective representation that had characterized his earlier, Cubist-Futurist style, had been eliminated. Malevich explained that “the appropriatemeans of representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects.” Referring to his first Suprematist work, he identified the black square with feeling and the white background with expressing “the void beyond this feeling.”

Although his early Suprematist compositions most likely date from 1913, they were not exhibited until 1915, the year he edited the Suprematist manifesto, with the assistance of several writers, most notably the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In these first Suprematist works—consisting of simple geometrical forms such as squares, circles, and crosses—he limited his palette to black, white, red, green, and blue. By 1916–17 he was presenting more complex shapes (fragments of circles, tiny triangles); extending his colour range to include brown, pink, and mauve; increasing the complexity of spatial relationships; and introducing the illusion of the three-dimensional into his painting. His experiments culminated in the “White on White” paintings of 1917–18, in which colour was eliminated, and the faintly outlined square barely emerged from its background. Finally, at a one-man exhibition of his work in 1919, Malevich announced the end of the Suprematist movement.

Suprematism had a few adherents among lesser known artists, such as Ivan Kliun, Ivan Puni, and Olga Rosanova. While not affiliated with the movement, the distinguished Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky showed the influence of Suprematism in the geometrization of his forms after 1920. This geometrical style, together with other abstract trends in Russian art, was transmitted by way of Kandinsky and the Russian artist El Lissitzky to Germany, particularly to the Bauhaus (q.v.), in the early 1920s.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 958