The Power of Three
By: Remy Dean
Tags: Art History, Painting, Art, Cubism, Modernism

In Braque’s 1907 painting of the viaduct across the valley of L’Estaque, the influence of Paul Cézanne is very clear — a flattened canvas where the rounded shapes of organic nature contrast with the angular shapes of stone and artificial structures. There is an effective sense of depth, though this is created purely by composition and not traditional perspective.

The following year, he returned to this subject and produced another painting of the same scene. Here, we can see the clear beginnings of Braque’s distinctive Cubist style including false perspective and a dynamic interplay of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines.

The use of planes that seem to pass through each other (en passage) is a method of creating a solidity and depth that Braque extended from the study of Cézanne’s ‘reductionist’ techniques. Braque used this approach to give his compositions an energy that directed the viewer’s eye to different parts of the canvas and gave the impression that some forms were rupturing the picture plane, jutting out of the canvas and into the space of the viewer. A sense of depth is achieved by this new approach.

The influence of Henri Matisse is also evident. Although when they were rejected by a Salon exhibition in 1908, it was Matisse who, reportedly, dismissed Braque’s paintings as no more than “little cubes”. This pejorative was repeated by critics in reviews of Braque’s work at later exhibitions and so a new art term was ‘coined’. That’s how George Braque became the first Cubist. What began as a derogatory description stuck and became a ‘rallying cry’ for a group of young revolutionary artists at the vanguard of Modernism.

Pablo Picasso was one of those young artists and is, for many, the first name that springs to mind when they think of what Cubism might be. He went on to become one of the most influential and well-known artists of the Twentieth Century. He had a talent for recognising the important innovations in the work of his contemporaries and distilling those developments into bold, sometimes confrontational paintings.

‘Dance of the Veils’ (1907) by Pablo Picasso *

His Dance of the Veils, painted in 1907, is aggressive and expressionistic. Picasso has utilised both positive and negative space to hold this dynamic piece together. Although his palette is subdued, he’s used line to ‘liberate colour from the duty of form’, proclaiming the influence of Matisse. He also added strong hatching to suggest some shadow and also movement.

Much of this approach was developed in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, who was also applying Cubist methodology to the figure and introducing elements of Dynamism to imply motion — particularly evident in the series of paintings of a Nude Descending Staircase that Duchamp produced a couple of years later.

There’s also a link to Aubrey Beardsley’s Salome illustrations: here we see Salome doing the ‘erotic’ dance, yet she appears far from seductive! The forms are sharp and angular. The veils are not diaphanous, suggesting instead a vortex of swirling blades. The hand is reduced to a hammer-like fist and the face seems ‘sly’. The influence of African art is evident in the design of the face that resembles a wooden tribal mask, which serves a narrative purpose, telling the viewer that the woman is masking her intentions. Picasso is portraying both the inner and outward appearance of the woman who performs the dance with scheming and murder in mind. So, this is a work of Expressionism as much as Cubism.

All these approaches were explored further in his famous painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, also produced in 1907, which is seen as one of the most important works in the development of several major Modern trends.

‘Composition With Skull’ (1908) by Pablo Picasso *

This still life featuring a skull is one of Picasso’s Fauvist paintings of a very traditional subject, and perhaps a homage to the early paintings of Cézanne, but its treatment has all the hallmarks that would become associated with Cubism such as distortion, false perspective, multiple viewpoints, structural use of negative and positive space, strong line enclosing blocks of bold colour.

Picasso also includes the tools of his trade, brushes, palette, other paintings in the studio, making a comment about the nature of art itself: these tools are simply objects like those others he has chosen to paint. They are as dead as the skull. It is the role of the artist to ‘bring them to life’ on the canvas and to imbue a picture with emotion, integrity and meaning.

Picasso became a friend of Braque and they developed the ground-rules of Cubism together. Reputedly, when dealers later presented Picasso with unsigned works for authentication, he sometimes signed ones he liked, even when he knew they were by Braque! Possibly apocryphal, but the anecdote helps to underline the parallel progression of their styles. Picasso’s early career was full of innovation and experiment, though he later became a ‘brand’ falling into a commercially successful, recognisable-though-repetitive, style that he himself felt trapped by.

‘Head of a Woman, Fernande’ (1909) by Pablo Picasso [view license]

Picasso’s 1909 sculptural bust, Head of a Woman, Fernade, is one of the radically Modern pieces of work that the Italian Futurist, Umberto Boccioni is known to have seen. Combined with his experience of works by Marcel Duchamp, this was the biggest aesthetic influence upon his own early sculptures such as Antigraceful and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (both 1913).

Apparently influenced by the caricature busts of Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), Picasso tackled the problem of expressing personality when only dealing with a physical surface by extending the plains of certain features, implying movement and also emphasizing how he saw the subject. Already, as Cubism was just finding its form in paintings, Picasso was lifting it back into 3D by using formal aspects of the approach in his sculptures. Again, something that his contemporary, Henri Matisse was exploring with his Blue Nude series of paintings and sculptures…

Around the same time, George Braque was interrogating representations of positive and negative forms where both the objects and the space surrounding them were indicated by paint on an equally solid surface… He realised that the tangible reality of the painted canvas meant that all the forms were, technically, of equal integrity…