Pablo Picasso - Biography and Artwork - About.com Art History Expert By Shelley Esaak Pablo Picasso, also known as Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, was singular in the art world. Not only did he manage to become universally famous in his own lifetime, he was the first artist to successfully use mass media to further his name (and business empire). He also inspired or, in the notable case of Cubism, invented, nearly every art movement in the twentieth century. Movement, Style, School or Period: Several, but best known for (co-)inventing Cubism Date and Place of Birth: October 25, 1881, Málaga, Spain Early Life: Picasso's father, fortuitously, was an art teacher who quickly realized he had a boy genius on his hands and (almost as quickly) taught his son everything he knew. At the tender age of 14, Picasso passed the entrance exam to the Barcelona School of Fine Arts - in just one day. By the early 1900s, Picasso had moved to Paris, the "capital of the arts". There he found friends in Henri Matisse , Joan Miró and George Braque , and a burgeoning reputation as a painter of note.

continue reading below our video Quick Tip: Guide to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Body of Work: Before, and shortly after, moving to Paris, Picasso's painting was in its "Blue Period" (1900-1904), which eventually gave way to his "Rose Period" (1905-1906). It wasn't until 1907, though, that Picasso really raised a commotion in the art world. His painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon marked the beginning of Cubism . Having caused such a stir, Picasso spent the next fifteen years seeing what, exactly, could be done with Cubism (such as putting paper and bits of string in a painting, thus inventing the collage). The Three Musicians (1921), pretty much summed up Cubism for Picasso. For the rest of his days, no one style could maintain a hold on Picasso. In fact, he was known to use two or more different styles, side by side, within a single painting. One notable exception is his Surrealistic painting Guernica (1937), arguably one of the greatest pieces of social protest ever created.

Picasso lived long and, indeed, prospered. He grew fabulously wealthy from his phenomenal output (including erotically themed ceramics), took up with younger and younger women, entertained the world with his outspoken remarks, and painted almost right up until he died at the age of 91. Date and Place of Death: April 8, 1973, Mougins, France Quote: Pablo Picasso's Cubism Period Biography Pablo Picasso's Cubism Period - 1909 to 1912 Analytical Cubism is one of the two major branches of the artistic movement of Cubism and was developed between 1908 and 1912. In contrast to Synthetic cubism, Analytic cubists "analyzed" natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the two-dimensional picture plane. Color was almost non-existent except for the use of a monochromatic scheme that often included grey, blue and ochre. Instead of an emphasis on color, Analytic cubists focused on forms like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent the natural world. During this movement, the works produced by Picasso and Braque shared stylistic similarities.

Both Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque moved toward abstraction, leaving only enough signs of the real world to supply a tension between the reality outside the painting and the complicated meditations on visual language within the frame, exemplified through their paintings Ma Jolie (1911), by Picasso and The Portuguese (1911), by Braque. The technique of faceting originated from Georges Braques - it was his way to depict a natural object. Picasso didn't so much facet natural objects, but used the geometry of Braques' faceted paintings to create a style that was abstract in essence, almost pure abstract art. So cubism refers to the styles of both Braques and Picasso, although Braques' cubism has a recognizable figurative objective, while Picasso's cubism served as the link between Braques' style and pure the abstract art that followed from cubism. Noteworthy is the work of Piet Mondrian , who linearized cubism in his 1912 Apple Tree painting, a process which ultimately led to the first really non-figurative paintings (or pure abstract art), from 1914 on. An important difference between Picasso and the cubist Mondrian was that Picasso never really gave up the third dimension.

He played with dimensions, flirted with removing the third, but never became a pure abstract painter. So deeply his figurative upbringing was engrained (he was an artistic prodigy and well-rounded figurative painter at 15), that one of the main creators of abstract art never made it to this development's ultimate consequence: pure abstract art. In that sense Picasso wasn't the radical and revolutionary that, during his cubist period he appeared to become; his cubist period was followed (leaving his cubist converts bewildered) by his neo-classicism, a return to tradition. From there on his recognition and wealth grew and his role as a bringer of fundamental change in the art of painting was over. MOST POPULAR PAINTINGS Pablo Picasso Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story Web Services & Hosting by The Computer Studio | Designed by DesArtLab Cubism Cubism Cubism was developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1907-1911, and it continued to be highly influential long after its decline.

This classic phase has two stages: 'Analytic', in which forms seem to be 'analyzed' and fragmented; and 'Synthetic', in which pre-existing materials such as newspaper and wood veneer are collaged to the surface of the canvas. Georges Braque Georges Braque Georges Braque was a modern French painter who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed analytic Cubism and Cubist collage in the early twentieth century. Collage Collage Collage was first employed in fine art in the context of Cubism, and involved the introduction of pre-existing materials into new designs, often to produce a playful ambiguity between art and reality. It has since been enormously influential, impacting not only drawing and painting but also attitudes to sculpture. Symbolism Symbolism Symbolism is an artistic and literary movement that first emerged in France in the 1880s. In the visual arts it is often considered part of Post-Impressionism. It is characterized by an emphasis on the mystical, romantic and expressive, and often by the use of symbolic figures.

Surrealism Surrealism Perhaps the most influential avant-garde movement of the century, Surrealism was founded in Paris in 1924 by a small group of writers and artists who sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Much influenced by Freud, they believed that the conscious mind repressed the power of the imagination. Influenced also by Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution. Paul Cézanne Paul Cézanne Paul Cézanne was an influential French Post-Impressionist painter whose depictions of the natural world, based on internal geometric planes, paved the way for Cubism and later modern art movements. Henri Rousseau Henri Rousseau Henri Rousseau was a French self-taught painter. His most famous works, done in his characteristic flat figurative style, show surreal and dream-like scenes in primitive or natural settings. Ingres Ingres Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter.

Although he considered himself to be a history painter in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy. Diego Velazquez Diego Velazquez Diego Velazquez was a Spanish artist, court painter for King Philip IV, and one of the leading figures in the Baroque period. Known as a master of detail and light, Velazquez's work has been a significant influence on generations of artists and movements, from Realism to Surrealism. Francisco Goya Francisco Goya Francisco Goya was an eighteenth-century Spanish painter, and is considered by many to be "the father of modern painting." Informed by the Baroque style and the Classicists, Goya's art bridged the gap between Realism and Romanticism, but also contained provocative elements such as nudes, war, and allegories of death. He is considered a major influence on the works of Manet and Picasso. Rembrandt Rembrandt Known throughout history simply as Rembrandt, the seventeenth-century Dutch artist is among the premier master painters in Western civilization.

Working during the time historians have dubbed the Dutch Golden Age (or the Dutch Baroque period), Rembrandt's art was characterized by his sweeping Biblical narratives, stunning attention to detail, and masterful use of chiaroscuro, the painterly application of light and shadow. In this respect, he remains one of the most influential painters of all time. Art Nouveau Art Nouveau Art Nouveau was a movement that swept through the decorative arts and architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Generating enthusiasts throughout Europe, it was aimed at modernizing design and escaping the eclectic historical styles that had previously been popular. It drew inspiration from both organic and geometric forms, evolving elegant designs that united flowing, natural forms with more angular contours. Fauvism Fauvism Fauvism was an early twentieth-century art movement founded by Henri Matisse and André Derain. Labeled as "wild beasts", Fauve artists favored vibrant colors and winding gestural strokes across the canvas. Jean Cocteau Jean Cocteau Jean Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist, and filmmaker.

Along with other avant-garde artists of his generation Cocteau grappled to define the paradox of classical avant-garde. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, and Coco Chanel. Sergei Diaghilev Sergei Diaghilev Sergei Diaghilev was a Russian art critic, patron, ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, from which many famous dancers and choreographers would rise. The end of the nineteenth century brought changes in harmonic and metric devices. They became either more rigid, or much more unpredictable, and each approach had a liberating effect on rhythm, which also affected ballet. Diaghilev was a pioneer in adapting these new musical styles to modern ballet. Julio Gonzalez Julio Gonzalez Julio Gonzalez was a Catalan-Spanish sculptor and painter. His best known early works were Synthetic Cubist paintings, and later in life turned to bronze and iron welding, creating many famous abstract sculptures. In 1927 he introduced Picasso to oxy-fuel welding and cutting techniques, and became one of the artist's closest confidantes. Nicolas Poussin Nicolas Poussin Nicolas Poussin was a French painter in the classical style.

His work predominantly features clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. It served as an alternative to the dominant Baroque style of the seventeenth century. He inspired such classically-oriented artists as Jacques-Louis David and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. El Greco El Greco El Greco was a sixteenth-century Greek-born painter, sculptor and architect, most often associated with the Spanish Renaissace and Mannerism of the Ventian Renaissance. As a master artist who employed highly expressive techniques, El Greco's paintings both confounded his contemporaries and influenced later movements like Expressionism and Cubism. Abstract Expressionism Abstract Expressionism A tendency among New York painters of the late 1940s and '50s, all of whom were committed to an expressive art of profound emotion and universal themes. The movement embraced the gestural abstraction of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, and the color field painting of Mark Rothko and others. It blended elements of Surrealism and abstract art in an effort to create a new style fitted to the postwar mood of anxiety and trauma.

Museum of Modern Art Museum of Modern Art The Museum has become the home for some of the greatest works of avant-garde painting, sculpture, film and multi-media art in the world. While MoMA remains true to its roots as a place where new styles of art can circulate, its permanent collection is widely considered the most impressive and diverse assortment of Modern art to ever exist, ranging from late-nineteenth-century van Goghs, Monets and Gauguins to works produced in the present day. Paul Gauguin Paul Gauguin Paul Gauguin was a French Post-Impressionist artist who employed color fields and painterly strokes in his work. He is best known for his primitivist depictions of native life in Tahiti and Polynesia. Henri Matisse Henri Matisse Henri Matisse was a French painter and sculptor who helped forge modern art. From his early Fauvist works to his late cutouts, he emphasized expansive fields of color, the expressive potential of gesture, and the sensuality inherent in art-making.

Guillaume Apollinaire Guillaume Apollinaire Guillaume Apollinaire was a French writer and art critic who in the early twentieth century was a member of the avant-garde group of artists based in the Montparnasse community of Paris, which included Picasso, André Breton and Henri Rousseau. He is credited with coining the term "Surrealism." Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein was an American writer and supporter of the arts whose Paris salons were key sites for avant-garde art in the early twentieth century. She built one of the earliest collections of modern art, including works by Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and others. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was a German art dealer, gallery owner and champion of Cubism. Kahnweiler is credited as one of the first people to truly appreciate the early works of Picasso, Braque, Léger and other experimental Cubist painters. The success of such artists is in large part due to Kahnweiler's purchase and promotion of these works.

Ambroise Vollard Ambroise Vollard Ambroise Vollard was an important dealer, collector, and arts patron in late nineteenth-centry and early twentieth-century Paris. His interests were diverse, spanning Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, and modernism, and included such artists as Renoir, Cézanne, Gaugin, Matisse, and Picasso. Impressionism Impressionism A movement in painting that first surfaced in France in the 1860s, it sought new ways to describe effects of light and movement, often using rich colors. The Impressionists were drawn to modern life and often painted the city, but they also captured landscapes and scenes of middle-class leisure-taking in the suburbs. Post-Impressionism Post-Impressionism Post-Impressionism refers to a number of styles that emerged in reaction to Impressionism in the 1880s. The movement encompassed Symbolism and Neo-Impressionism before ceding to Fauvism around 1905. Its artists turned away from effects of light and atmosphere to explore new avenues such as color theory and personal feeling, often using colors and forms in intense and expressive ways.

Expressionism Expressionism Expressionism is a broad term for a host of movements in early twentieth-century Germany and beyond, from Die Brücke (1905) and Der Blaue Reiter (1911) to the early Neue Sachlichkeit painters in the 1920s and '30s. Many Expressionists used vivid colors and abstracted forms to create spiritually or psychologically intense works, while others focused on depictions of war, alienation, and the modern city. African Art African Art Beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, traditional African art, often seen through a primitivizing eye, began to exert a strong influence on modern Western artists. Artists were influenced by the emphasis on ritual and spiritualism, and the stylistic conventions of flattened planes and mask-like faces. Amedeo Modigliani Amedeo Modigliani Amedeo Modigliani was a Jewish-Itailan painter working in Paris from 1906 onwards. His unique style was influenced by Post-Impressionism, Brancusi and Cézanne, and featured ovaloid faces, elongated forms, and the use of brushed, modulated color fields.

Arshile Gorky Arshile Gorky Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-born American painter and a major influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism. In his own art he fused elements of Cubism, Surrealism and Expressionism, and was close with key figures central to New York's burgeoning abstrct art scene, such as John Graham, Stuart Davis and Willem de Kooning. Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning, a Dutch immigrant to New York, was one of the foremost Abstract Expressionist painters. His abstract compositions drew on Surrealist and figurative traditions, and typified the expressionistic 'gestural' style of the New York School. Jasper Johns Jasper Johns Jasper Johns is an American artist who rose to prominence in the late 1950s for his multi-media constructions, dubbed by critics as Neo-Dada. Johns' work, including his world-famous targets and American flags series, were important predecessors to Pop art. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

was an American art historian, collector, and the first director of The Museum of Modern Art. Barr was very influential in MoMA's early years, arranging seminal exhibitions of works by Van Gogh, Léger, the Post-Impressionists and the Cubists. Clement Greenberg Clement Greenberg Clement Greenberg was one the leading American art critics during the twentieth century. Best known as the ideological counterpart to Harold Rosenberg, Greenberg was a formalist who coined the terms "American-type painting" and 'Post-painterly abstraction.' He was a staunch champion of pure abstraction, including the work of Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still and Hans Hofmann. Meyer Schapiro Meyer Schapiro Meyer Schapiro was an important art historian and theorist who wrote on the social and political dimensions of art and its historiography. He made seminal contributions to the fields of Romanesque and medieval art as well as to theories of modernism, abstraction, and Abstract Expressionism. Robert Rosenblum Robert Rosenblum Robert Rosenblum was an American art critic, curator and historian.

His greatest contribution to the modern canon was his redefinition of Modern art history, offering that the era began not with Impressionism but with Neo-Classicists of the late eighteenth century. Leo Steinberg Leo Steinberg Leo Steinberg is one the twentieth century's foremost historians and scholars on the works of Michelangelo, Leonardo and other Italian Renaissance artists. In addition to his scholarly work on Renaissance art, Steinberg is also a significant authority on twentieth-century modern art, including the paintings and sculptures of Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns's Flag series, and Willem de Kooning's Woman series. Abstract Art Abstract Art Abstraction from nature, objects, or figures has been common throughout the history of art, but it was not until the early twentieth century that abstraction was pursued for its own sake. From about 1913 it became a central characteristic of modernist art, and it continues to an important part of contemporary artists' repertoire. Pop Art Pop Art British artists of the 1950s were the first to make popular culture the dominant subject of their art, and this idea became an international phenomenon in the 1960s.

But the Pop art movement is most associated with New York, and artists such as Andy Warhol, who broke with the private concerns of the Abstract Expressionists, and turned to themes which touched on public life and mass society. Conceptual Art Conceptual Art Conceptual art describes an influential movement that first emerged in the mid-1960s and prized ideas over the formal or visual components of traditional works of art. The artists often challenged old concepts such as beauty and quality; they also questioned the conventional means by which the public consumed art; and they rejected the conventional art object in favor of diverse mediums, ranging from maps and diagrams to texts and videos. Picasso’s legacy - Arts and Entertainment - NorthJersey.com © 2017 North Jersey Media Group October 25, 2009 Picasso’s legacy The Record Today is the birthday of Pablo Picasso, one of the 20th century’s most influential artists and one of the co-founders of the important Cubist movement. Picasso was born Oct. 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain. His father was a professor of drawing and raised Picasso as an artist, though Picasso would later quit art school to pursue experimental modern art styles.

Picasso had his first Paris exhibition in 1901 at the age of 19 and would soon enter his "blue period," which featured a number of paintings in blue tones to evoke the sadness of poverty. His next stage is known as the "rose period," characterized by a series of circus scenes. In 1907, Picasso created "Les Demoiselles d’Avignon," which depicts five female figures in distorted form. The piece is widely seen as a precursor to Cubism, the art movement that Picasso founded with the French painter Georges Braque two years later. The avant-garde movement firmly established the idea that important artwork did not have to represent reality. In cubist art, objects are fragmented and reassembled in abstract form in order to show multiple viewpoints at once. Cubism gave rise to new techniques, including collage, a term Picasso and Braque coined from the French word for glue. In addition to his lasting impact on the art world, Picasso was amazingly prolific, producing more than 50,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, engravings and ceramics until his death in 1973. — Joseph Ax Pablo Picasso. Art, life, and world of modern.

Pablo Picasso Introduction Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish painter, who is widely acknowledged to be the most important artist of the 20th century. A long-lived and highly prolific artist, he experimented with a wide range of styles and themes throughout his career. Among Picasso's many contributions to the history of art, his most important include pioneering the modern art movement called Cubism, inventing collage as an artistic technique, and developing assemblage (constructions of various materials) in sculpture. Picasso was born Pablo Ruiz in Malaga, Spain. He later adopted his mother's more distinguished maiden name-Picasso-as his own. Though Spanish by birth, Picasso lived most of his life in France. Formative Work (1893-1900) Picasso's father, who was an art teacher, quickly recognized that his child Pablo was a prodigy. Picasso studied art first privately with his father and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in La Coruna, Spain, where his father taught.

Picasso's early drawings, such as Study of a Torso, After a Plaster Cast (1894-1895), demonstrate the high level of technical proficiency he had achieved by 14 years of age. In 1895 his family moved to Barcelona, Spain, after his father obtained a teaching post at that city's Academy of Fine Arts. Picasso was admitted to advanced classes at the academy after he completed in a single day the entrance examination that applicants traditionally were given a month to finish. In 1897 Picasso left Barcelona to study at the Madrid Academy in the Spanish capital. Dissatisfied with the training, he quit and returned to Barcelona. After Picasso visited Paris in October 1900, he moved back and forth between France and Spain until 1904, when he settled in the French capital. In Paris he encountered, and experimented with, a number of modern artistic styles. Picasso's painting Le Moulin de la Galette (1900) revealed his interest in the subject matter of Parisian nightlife and in the style of French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a style that verged on caricature.

In addition to cafe scenes, Picasso painted landscapes, still lifes, and portraits of friends and performers. Blue Period (1901-1903) From 1901 to 1903 Picasso initiated his first truly original style, which is known as the blue period. Restricting his color scheme to blue, Picasso depicted emaciated and forlorn figures whose body language and clothing bespeak the lowliness of their social status. In The Old Guitarist (1903), Picasso emphasized the guitarist's poverty and position as a social outcast, which he reinforced by surrounding the figure with a black outline, as if to cut him off from his environment. The guitarist is compressed within the canvas (no room is left in the painting for the guitarist to raise his lowered head), suggesting his helplessness: The guitarist is trapped within the frame just as he is trapped by his poverty. Although Picasso underscored the squalor of his figures during this period, neither their clothing nor their environment conveys a specific time or place. This lack of specificity suggests that Picasso intended to make a general statement about human alienation rather than a particular statement about the lower class in Paris.

Why blue dominated Picasso's paintings during this period remains unexplained. Possible influences include photographs with a bluish tinge popular at the time, poetry that stressed the color blue in its imagery, or the paintings of French artists such as Eugene Carriere or Monet , who based many of their works around this time on variations on a single color. Another explanation is that Picasso found blue particularly appropriate for his subject matter because it is a color associated with melancholy. Rose Period (1904-1905) In 1904 Picasso's style shifted, inaugurating the rose period, sometimes referred to as the circus period. Although Picasso still focused on social outcasts-especially circus performers-his color scheme lightened, featuring warmer, reddish hues, and the thick outlines of the blue period disappeared. Picasso maintained his interest in the theme of alienation, however. In Two Acrobats and a Dog (1905), he represented two young acrobats before an undefined, barren landscape. Although the acrobats are physically close, they gaze in different directions and do not interact, and the reason for their presence is not made clear.

Differences in the acrobats' height also exaggerate their disconnection from each other and from the empty landscape. The dog was a frequent presence in Picasso's work and may have been a reference to death as dogs appear at the feet of figures in many Spanish funerary monuments. Picasso may have felt an especially deep sympathy for circus performers. Like artists, they were paid to entertain society, but their itinerant lifestyle and status as outsiders prevented them from becoming an integral part of the social fabric. It was this situation that made the sad clown an important figure in the popular imagination: Paid to make people laugh, he must keep hidden his real existence and true feelings. Living a life of financial insecurity himself, Picasso no doubt empathized with these performers. During this period Picasso met Fernande Olivier, the first of several women who shared his life and provided inspiration for his art. Olivier's features appear in many of the female figures in his paintings over the next several years. Classical Period (1905) and Iberian Period (1906) Experimentation and rapid style changes mark the years from late 1905 on.

Picasso's paintings from late 1905 are more emotionally detached than those of the blue or rose periods. The color scheme lightens-beiges and light browns predominate-and melancholy and alienation give way to a more reasoned approach. Picasso's increasing interest in form is apparent in his references to classical sculpture. The figure of a seated boy in Two Youths (1905, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), for example, recalls an ancient Greek sculpture of a boy removing a thorn from his foot. By 1906 Picasso had become interested in sculptures from the Iberian peninsula dating from about the 6th to the 3rd century bc. Picasso must have found them of particular interest both because they are native to Spain and because they display remarkable simplification of form. The Iberian influence is immediately visible in Self-Portrait (1906), in which Picasso reduced the image of his head to an oval and his eyes to almond shapes, thus revealing his increasing fascination with geometric simplification of form.

African Period (1907) Picasso's predilection for experimentation and for drawing inspiration from outside the accepted artistic sources led to his most radical and revolutionary painting yet in 1907: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). The painting's theme-the female nude-could not be more traditional, but Picasso's treatment of it is revolutionary. Picasso took even greater liberties here with human anatomy than in his 1906 Self-Portrait . The figures on the left in the painting look flat, as if they have no skeletal or muscular structure. Faces seen from the front have noses in profile. The eyes are asymmetrical and radically simplified. Contour lines are incomplete. Color juxtapositions-between blue and orange, for instance-are intentionally strident and unharmonious. The representation of space is fragmented and discontinuous. While the left side of the canvas is largely Iberian-influenced, the right side is inspired by African masks, especially in its striped patterns and oval forms. Such borrowings, which led to great simplification, distortion, and visual incongruities, were considered extremely daring in 1907.

The head of the figure at the bottom right, for example, turns in an anatomically impossible way. These discrepancies proved so shocking that even Picasso's fellow painters reacted negatively to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. French painter Matisse allegedly told Picasso that he was trying to ridicule the modern movement. Cubism (1908-1917) For many scholars, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon-with its fragmented planes, flattened figures, and borrowings from African masks-marks the beginning of the new visual language, known as cubism. Other scholars believe that French painter Cezanne provided the primary catalyst for this change in style. Cezanne's work of the 1890s and early 1900s was noted both for its simplification and flattening of form and for the introduction of what art historians call passage, the interpenetration of one physical object by another. For example, in Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-1906), Cezanne left the outer edge of the mountain open, allowing the blue area of the sky and the gray area of the mountain to merge.

This innovation-air and rock interpenetrating-was a crucial precedent for Picasso's invention of cubism. First, it defied the laws of our physical experience, and second, it indicated that artists were viewing paintings as having a logic of their own that functioned independently of, or even contrary to, the logic of everyday experience. Scholars generally divide the cubist innovations of Picasso and French painter Georges Braque into two stages. In the first stage, analytical cubism, the artists fragmented three-dimensional shapes into multiple geometric planes. In the second stage, synthetic cubism, they reversed the process, putting abstract planes together to represent human figures, still lifes, and other recognizable shapes. Analytical Cubism (1908-1912) Profoundly influenced by Cezanne's later work, Picasso and Braque initiated a series of landscape paintings in 1908. These paintings approximated Cezanne's both in their color scheme (dark greens and light browns) and in their drastic simplification of nature to geometric shapes. Upon seeing these paintings, French critic Louis Vauxelles coined the term cubism.

In Picasso's Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro (1909), he gave architectural structures a three-dimensional, cubic quality, but he abandoned conventional three-dimensional perspective: Instead of being depicted one behind the other, buildings appear one on top of the other. Moreover, he simplified every aspect of the painting according to a vocabulary of cubic shapes-not just the houses but the sky as well. By neutralizing differences between earth and sky, Picasso made the canvas appear more unified, but he also introduced ambiguity by not differentiating solid from void. In addition, Picasso often used inconsistent light sources. In some parts of a painting, light appears to come from the left; in other parts, it comes from the right, the top, or even the bottom. Spatial planes intersect in ways that leave the spectator guessing whether angles are concave or convex. Delight in confusing the viewer is a regular feature of cubism. By 1910, it had become evident that cubism no longer had any cubes and that the illusion of three-dimensional space, or volume, was gone.

Picasso seemed to have dismantled the very idea of solid form, not only by fragmenting the human figure and other shapes, but also by using Cezanne's concept of passage to merge figure and environment, solid and void, background and foreground. In this way he created a visually consistent painting, yet the consistency does not conform to the physical consistency of the natural world as we experience it. Picasso's decision to limit his color scheme to dark browns and grays also suggests that his paintings have initiated a radical departure from nature, rather than attempted to copy it. The year 1912 marks another major development in the cubist language: the invention of collage. In Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), Picasso attached a piece of oilcloth (that depicts woven caning) to his work. With this action Picasso not only violated the integrity of the medium-oil painting on canvas-but also included a material that had no previous connection with high art. Art could now be created, Picasso seems to imply, with scissors and glue as well as with paint and canvas.

By including pieces of cloth, newspaper, wallpaper, advertising, and other materials in his work, Picasso opened the door for any object or material, however ordinary, to be included in (or even replace) a work of art. This innovation had important consequences for later 20th-century art. Another innovation was including the letters JOU in the painting, possibly referring to the beginning of the word journal (French for "newspaper") or to the French word jouer, meaning "to play," as Picasso is playing with forms. These combinations reveal that cubism includes both visual and verbal references, and merges high art with popular culture. Synthetic Cubism (1912-1917) By inventing collage and by introducing elements from the real world in his canvases, Picasso avoided taking cubism to the level of complete abstraction and remained in the domain of tangible objects. Collage also initiated the synthetic phase of cubism. Whereas analytical cubism fragmented figures into geometric planes, synthetic cubism synthesized (combined) near-abstract shapes to create representational forms, such as a human figure or still life. Synthetic cubism also tended toward multiplicity.

In Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass (1912), for instance, Picasso combined a drawing of a glass, several spots of color, sheet music, newspaper, a wallpaper pattern, and a cloth that has a wood-grain pattern. Synthetic cubism may also combine different textures, such as wood grain, sand, and printed matter. Sometimes Picasso applied these textures as collage, by gluing textured papers on the canvas. In other cases the artist painted an area to look like wood or wallpaper, fooling the spectator by means of visual puns. Construction and After (1912-1920) In 1912 Picasso instigated another important innovation: construction, or assemblage, in sculpture. Before this innovation, sculpture, at least in the West, was primarily created in one of two ways: by carving a block of stone or wood or by modeling-shaping a form in clay and casting that form in a more durable material, such as bronze. In Guitar (1912), Picasso used a new additive process. He cut various shapes out of sheet metal and wire, and then reassembled those materials into a cubist construction.

In other constructions, Picasso used wood, cardboard, string, and other everyday objects, not only inventing a new technique for sculpture but also expanding the definition of art by blurring the distinction between artistic and nonartistic materials. From World War I (1914-1918) onward, Picasso moved from style to style. In 1915, for instance, Picasso painted the highly abstract Harlequin and drew the highly realistic portrait of Ambroise Vollard. During and after the war he also worked on stage design and costume design for the Ballets Russes, a modern Russian ballet company launched by the impresario Sergey Diaghilev. Inspired by his direct experience of the theater, Picasso also produced representations of performers, such as French clowns called Pierrot and Harlequin, and scenes of ballerinas. Picasso separated from Olivier in 1912, after meeting Eva Gouel. Gouel died in 1915, and in 1918 Picasso married Olga Koklova, one of the dancers in Diaghilev's company.

Picasso created a number of portraits of her, and their son, Paulo, appears in works such as Paulo as Harlequin (1924). Classical Period (1920-1925) After World War I, a strain of conservatism spread through a number of art forms. A motto popular among traditionalists was "the return to order." For Picasso the years 1920 to 1925 were marked by close attention to three-dimensional form and to classical themes: bathers, centaurs (mythical creatures half-man and half horse), and women in classical drapery. He depicted many of these figures as massive, dense, and weighty, an effect intensified by strong contrasts of light and dark. But even as he moved toward greater realism, Picasso continued to play games with the viewer. In the classical and carefully composed The Pipes of Pan (1923), for example, he painted an area of the architectural framework in the foreground (which should be grayish) with the same color as the sea in the background, revealing again his pleasure in ambiguity.

Cubism and Surrealism (1925-1936) From 1925 to 1936 Picasso again worked in a number of styles. He composed some paintings of tightly structured geometric shapes, limiting his color scheme to primary colors (red, blue, yellow), as in The Studio (1928). In other paintings, such as Nude in an Armchair (1929), he depicted contorted female figures whose open mouths and menacing teeth reveal a more emotional, less reasoned attitude. Picasso's marriage broke up during this time, and some of the menacing female figures in his art of this period may represent Koklova. The same diversity is visible in Picasso's sculpture during this period. Bather (Metamorphosis II) (1928) represents the human body as a massive spherical shape with protruding limbs, whereas Wire Construction (1928) depicts it as a rigid, geometric configuration of thin wires. Picasso also experimented with welding in sculpture of this period and explored a variety of themes, including the female head, the sleeping woman, and the Crucifixion.

The model for many of his sleeping women was Marie Therese Walter, a new love who had entered his life. Their daughter, Maia, was born in 1935. In the early 1930s Picasso had increasing contact with the members of the surrealist movement and became fascinated with the classical myth of the Minotaur. This creature, which has the head of a man and the body of a bull, appears in a study by Picasso for the cover of the surrealist journal Minotaure (1933). Here Picasso affixed a classical drawing of a Minotaur to a collage of abstracted forms and debris. The Minotaur has numerous incarnations in Picasso's work, both as an aggressor and a victim, as a violent character and a friendly one. It may represent the artist himself and frequently appears in the context of a bullfight, a typically Spanish scene close to Picasso's heart. Guernica (1937) In 1937 the Spanish government commissioned Picasso to create a mural for Spain's pavilion at an international exposition in Paris. Unsure about the subject, Picasso procrastinated.

But he set to work almost immediately after hearing that the Spanish town of Guernica had been bombed by Nazi warplanes in support of Spanish general Francisco Franco's plot to overthrow the Spanish republic. Guernica (1937, Prado, Madrid) was Picasso's response to, and condemnation of, that event. He executed the painting in black and white-in keeping with the seriousness of the subject-and transfigured the event according to his fascination with the bullfight theme. At the extreme left is a bull, which symbolizes brutality and darkness, according to Picasso. At the center, a horse wounded by a spear most likely represents the Spanish people. At the center on top, an exploding light bulb possibly refers to air warfare or to evil coming from above (and putting out the light of reason). Corpses and dying figures fill the foreground: a woman with a dead child at the left, a dead warrior with a broken sword (from which a flower sprouts) at the center, a weeping woman and a figure falling through a burning building at the right. The distortion of these figures expresses the inhumanity of the event.

To suggest the screaming of the horse and of the mother with the dead child, Picasso transformed their tongues into daggers. In the upper center, a tormented female figure holds an oil lamp that sheds light upon the scene, possibly symbolizing the light of truth revealing the brutality of the event to the outside world. In 1936 Picasso met Dora Maar, an artist who photographed Guernica as he painted it. She soon became his companion and the subject of his paintings, although he remained involved with Walter. World War II (1939-1945) Picasso, unlike many artists, stayed in Paris during the German occupation of World War II. Some of his paintings from this time reveal the anxiety of the war years, as does the menacing Still Life with Steer's Skull (1942, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany). Other works, such as his sculpture Head of a Bull (1943), are more playful and whimsical. In this sculpture Picasso combined a bicycle seat and handlebars to represent the bull's head.

Upon receiving news of the Nazi death camps, Picasso also painted, although he did not finish, an homage to the victims of the Holocaust (mass murder of European Jews during the war). In this painting, called The Charnel House (1945), he restricted the color scheme to black and white (as in Guernica) and depicted an accumulation of distorted, mangled bodies. During the war Picasso joined the Communist Party, and after the war he attended several peace conferences. Late Work (1945-1973) Picasso remained a prolific artist until late in his life, although this later period has not received universal acclaim from historians or critics. He made variations on motifs that had fascinated him throughout his career, such as the bullfight and the painter and his model, the latter a theme that celebrated creativity. And he continued to paint portraits and landscapes. Picasso also experimented with ceramics, creating figurines, plates, and jugs, and he thereby blurred an existing distinction between fine art and craft. Picasso's emotional life became more complicated after he met French painter Francoise Gilot in the 1940s, while he was still involved with Maar.

He and Gilot had a son, Claude, and a daughter, Paloma, and both appear in many of his late works. Picasso and Gilot parted in 1953. Jacqueline Roque, whom Picasso married in 1961, became his next companion. They spent most of their time in the south of France. Another new direction in Picasso's work came from variations on well-known works by older artists that he recast in his own style. Among these works are Women on the Banks of the Seine, after Courbet (1950) and Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe after Manet (1960). What makes these works particularly significant is that they run counter to a basic premise of modern art, Picasso's included: namely, originality. Although many modern painters were influenced by earlier artists, they rarely made such direct and obvious references to each other's work because they deemed such references unoriginal. In the postmodern period, which began in the 1970s, artists and critics began to question the modernist directive to be original.

In acts of deliberate defiance, many postmodern artists have appropriated (taken for their own use) well-known images from their predecessors or contemporaries. Seen against this context, Picasso's later variations on paintings by earlier masters hardly seem out of place; on the contrary, they anticipate a key aspect of art in the 1980s. One of Picasso's late works, Head of a Woman (1967), was a gift to the city of Chicago. This sculpture of welded steel, 15 m (50 ft) tall, stands in front of Chicago's Civic Center. Although its semiabstract form proved controversial at first, the sculpture soon became a city landmark. Because of his many innovations, Picasso is widely considered to be the most influential artist of the 20th century. The cubist movement, which he and Braque inspired, had a number of followers. Its innovations gave rise to a host of other 20th-century art movements, including futurism in Italy, suprematism and constructivism in Russia, de Stijl in the Netherlands, and vorticism in England.

Cubism also influenced German expressionism, dada, and other movements as well as early work of the surrealists and abstract expressionists. In addition, collage and construction became key aspects of 20th-century art. © C. C. Pablo Picasso Art Pablo Picasso is considered to be the most important artist of the 20th century. Both the quality and quantity of Picasso's modern art is unrivalled... More... 175 pictures for only $29. Cubism | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art Works of Art (11) Essay Cubism was one of the most influential visual art styles of the early twentieth century. It was created by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963) in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The French art critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism after seeing the landscapes Braque had painted in 1908 at L’Estaque in emulation of Cézanne .

Vauxcelles called the geometric forms in the highly abstracted works “cubes.” Other influences on early Cubism have been linked to Primitivism and non-Western sources. The stylization and distortion of Picasso’s ground-breaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ( Museum of Modern Art, New York ), painted in 1907, came from African art. Picasso had first seen African art when, in May or June 1907, he visited the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris. The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points. In Cubist work up to 1910, the subject of a picture was usually discernible. Although figures and objects were dissected or “analyzed” into a multitude of small facets, these were then reassembled, after a fashion, to evoke those same figures or objects.

During “high” Analytic Cubism (1910–12), also called “hermetic,” Picasso and Braque so abstracted their works that they were reduced to just a series of overlapping planes and facets mostly in near-monochromatic browns, grays, or blacks. In their work from this period, Picasso and Braque frequently combined representational motifs with letters ( 1999.363.63 ; 1999.363.11 ). Their favorite motifs were still lifes with musical instruments, bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, playing cards ( 1997.149.12 ), and the human face and figure. Landscapes were rare. During the winter of 1912–13, Picasso executed a great number of papiers collés ( 1999.363.64 ). With this new technique of pasting colored or printed pieces of paper in their compositions, Picasso and Braque swept away the last vestiges of three-dimensional space (illusionism) that still remained in their “high” Analytic work.

Whereas, in Analytic Cubism, the small facets of a dissected or “analyzed” object are reassembled to evoke that same object, in the shallow space of Synthetic Cubism—initiated by the papiers collés–large pieces of neutral or colored paper themselves allude to a particular object, either because they are often cut out in the desired shape or else sometimes bear a graphic element that clarifies the association. While Picasso and Braque are credited with creating this new visual language, it was adopted and further developed by many painters, including Fernand Léger ( 1999.363.35 ), Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris ( 1996.403.14 ), Roger de la Fresnaye ( 1991.397 ), Marcel Duchamp , Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger ( 59.86 ), and even Diego Rivera ( 49.70.51 ). Though primarily associated with painting, Cubism also exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century sculpture and architecture. The major Cubist sculptors were Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Lipchitz.

The liberating formal concepts initiated by Cubism also had far-reaching consequences for Dada and Surrealism , as well as for all artists pursuing abstraction in Germany, Holland, Italy, England, America, and Russia. Sabine Rewald Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 2004 Citation Rewald, Sabine. “Cubism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (October 2004) Further Reading Cooper, Douglas, and Gary Tinterow. The Essential Cubism, 1907–1920: Braque, Picasso & Their Friends. Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Gallery, 1983. Rubin, William, ed. Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980. Additional Essays by Sabine Rewald Rewald, Sabine. “ Fauvism .” (October 2004) Rewald, Sabine.

“ Paul Klee (1879–1940) .” (October 2004) Related Cubism Movement, Artists and Major Works | The Art Story Resources Quotes "Cubism is not a reality you can take in your hand. It's more like a perfume, in front of you, behind you, to the sides, the scent is everywhere but you don't quite know where it comes from." Pablo Picasso "The goal I proposed myself in making cubism? To paint and nothing more... with a method linked only to my thought.. Neither the good nor the true; neither the useful nor the useless." Pablo Picasso "What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space." Georges Braque "If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas...

One cannot escape from one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be." Georges Braque "Cubism is moving around an object to seize several successive appearances, which fused in a single image, reconstitute it in time." Juan Gris "It was a tradition to represent a dancer frozen in a chosen position, like a snapshot.

I broke away from this tradition by superimposing postures, blending light and motion and scrambling the planes." Sonia Delaunay "Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power." Fernand Léger "Let the picture imitate nothing; let it nakedly present its raison d'etre." Jean Metzinger "Whether it is Juan Gris taking objects apart, Picasso replacing them with objects of his own invention, or another who replaces conical perspective by a system based on the relations between perpendiculars, all that only goes to show that Cubism was not at all born out of an authoritative theory [mot d'ordre]; that it only marked among a few painters the will to be finished with an art that never ought to have survived the condemnation pronounced upon it by Pascal." Jean Metzinger "Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change.

It confused people: they said, 'Things don't look like that!'" David Hockney "He commenced the long struggle not to express what he could see but not to express the things he did not see, that is to say the things everybody is certain of seeing but which they do not really see." Gertrude Stein, on Picasso's early art "I have transformed myself in the zero of form and fished myself out of the rubbishy slough of Academic Art. I have destroyed the circle of the horizon and escaped from the circle of objects, the horizon-ring that has imprisoned the artist and the forms from nature. The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. The face of the new art. The square is the living, royal infant. It is the first step of pure creation in art." Kazimir Malevich Like The Art Story on Facebook Beginnings A watershed moment for the development of Cubism was the posthumous retrospective of Paul Cézanne's work at the Salon d'Automne in 1907. Cézanne's use of generic forms to simplify nature was incredibly influential to both Picasso and Braque.

In the previous year, Picasso was also introduced to non-Western art: seeing Iberian art in Spain, and African-influenced art by Matisse, and at the Trocadero anthropological museum. What drew Picasso to these artistic traditions was their use of an abstract or simplified representation of the human body rather than the naturalistic forms of the European Renaissance tradition. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Breakthrough: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon These varying influences can be seen in Picasso's groundbreaking work of 1907, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which is considered a work of proto or pre-Cubism. In its radical distortion of figures, its rendering of volumes as fragmented planes, and its subdued palette, this work predicted some of the key characteristics of later Cubism. Braque, on seeing Picasso's Les Demoiselles at his studio, intensified his similar explorations in simplification of form.

He made a series of landscape paintings in the summer of 1908, including Houses at L'Estaque in which trees and mountains were rendered as shaded cubes and pyramids, resembling architectural forms. Cubism was introduced to the public with Braque's one-man exhibition at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's gallery on the rue Vignon in November 1908. It was this exhibit that led French art critic Louis Vauxcelles to describe them as "bizarreries cubiques," thus giving the movement its name. The experiments of Picasso and Braque owe much to Kahnweiler, who was the major supporter of their work. Picasso and Braque were both quite poor in 1907 and Kahnweiler offered to buy their works as they painted them, thus freeing the artists from worrying about pleasing patrons or receiving negative reviews. After the 1908 exhibit, with few exceptions, the two artists exhibited only in Kahnweiler's gallery. The Cubism of Picasso and Braque The close collaboration between Picasso and Braque beginning in 1909 was crucial to the style's genesis.

The two artists met regularly to discuss their progress, and at times it became hard to distinguish the work of one artist from another (as they liked it). Both were living in the bohemian Montmartre section of Paris in the years before and during World War I, making their collaboration easy. In 1912, Kahnweiler gave his first public interview on Cubism, no doubt in response to growing public interest in (and some recognition of) the movement. When World War I began, Kahnweiler, as a German, was exiled from France. During the war, Léonce Rosenberg became the main dealer for Cubist art in Paris (including those of the Salon Cubists) with his brother Paul Rosenberg serving as Picasso's dealer during the interwar years. Though Picasso and Braque returned to Cubist forms periodically throughout their careers and there were some exhibitions of work up until 1925, the two-man movement did not last much beyond World War I. Salon or Section d'Or Cubism The Salon Cubists, so-called because they showed their works at public exhibits such as the Salon d'Automne, did not work closely with Picasso and Braque but were influenced by their experiments.

It was through the work of the Salon Cubists that the movement became widely known to the public in the early 1910s. These artists included Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert de La Fresnaye, and Jean Metzinger. Metzinger and Delaunay, who had been friends at least since 1906, began collaborating with Gleizes as a result of the yearly Salon d'Automne. It was through Gleizes that they met Le Fauconnier who had published Note sur la peinture (1910) in which he praised Picasso and Braque for their "total emancipation" of painting. These artists exhibited together at the 1911 Salon des Independants, introducing Cubism to the general public. The Independants was a non-juried exhibition where public reaction depended on how and where paintings were hung. The Cubists got control of the hanging committee from the Neo-Impressionists so that their works could be hung together in one room as a coherent school.

The paintings created a stir, as Gleizes noted: "While the newspapers sounded the alarm to alert people to the danger, and while appeals were made to the public authorities to do something about it, song writers, satirists and other men of wit and spirit provoked great pleasure among the leisured classes by playing with the word 'cube', discovering that it was a very suitable vehicle for inducing laughter which, as we all know, is the principle characteristic that distinguishes man from the animals." In addition to showing their works in large exhibitions, the Salon Cubists were also distinct from Picasso and Braque in that they often worked on a large scale, leading one art historian to coin the term 'Epic Cubism' to distinguish their work from the more intimate paintings of Picasso and Braque. While they broke apart objects and bodies into geometric forms like those of Picasso and Braque, the Salon Cubists did not challenge Renaissance conceptions of space to the same extent nor did they embrace the monochromatic color of Analytic Cubism or the collage elements of Synthetic Cubism.

At the end of 1911 Gleizes and Metzinger, who lived closely together in the Parisian suburbs, and others in the group began meeting in Puteaux, a suburb where the painter and engraver Jacques Villon and his brother, the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon had their studios (leading to them sometimes being called the Puteaux group). It is likely as a result of these meetings that the main ideas for Metzinger and Gleizes' On Cubism (1912) were formalized; it was the first published statement about the style. The next year the group also planned the launch of the Salon de la Section d'Or (1912) that would bring together the most radical currents in painting. The term Section d'Or was a name the Salon Cubists adopted to show their attachment to the golden mean, i.e. the belief in order and the importance of mathematical proportions in their works that reflected those in nature. The Section d'Or exhibit was held after the 1912 Salon d'Automne at the Galerie La Boetie.

It was at this exhibit that the art critic Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term Orphism to refer to the work of Delaunay. The next year Apollinaire published Aesthetic Meditations: The Cubist Painters (1913). These many exhibits and publications were calculated to make an impact, both in Paris and abroad. As with the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, the Salon or Section d'Or group did not continue coherently after WWI, having only sporadic exhibits between 1918 and 1925. Styles The various stages of development in the Cubist style are based on the work of Picasso and Braque rather than on those of the Salon Cubists. The exact names and dates of the stages are debated and continually reframed to this day.

Cezannian Cubism (1908 -1909) This early phase of the movement came in the wake of the Paul Cézanne retrospective in 1907 when many artists were reintroduced or introduced for the first time to the work of Cézanne, who had been living in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France before his death and had not exhibited in Paris for many years. Several artists who saw the retrospective were influenced by his lack of three-dimensionality, the material quality of his brushwork, and his use of uniform brushstrokes. Braque's Houses at L'Estaque (1908) is a good example of this type of Cubism. Analytic Cubism (1910- 1912) In this phase, Cubism developed in a highly systematic fashion. Later to be known as the Analytic period of the style, it was based on close observation of objects in their background contexts, often showing them from various vantage points.

Picasso and Braque restricted their subject matter to the traditional genres of portraiture and still life and also limited their palette to earth tones and muted grays in order to lessen the clarity between the fragmented shapes of figures and objects. Although their works were often similar in appearance, their separate interests showed through over time. Braque tended to show objects exploding out or pulled apart into fragments, while Picasso rendered them magnetized, with attracting forces compelling elements of the pictorial space into the center of the composition. Works in this style include Braque's Violin and Palette (1909) and Picasso's Ma Jolie (1911-12). Towards the end of this stage of Cubism, Juan Gris began to make contributions to the style: he maintained a sharp clarity to his forms, provided suggestions of a compositional grid, and introduced more color to what had been an austere, monochromatic style. Synthetic Cubism (c. 1912 - c. 1914) In 1912 both Picasso and Braque began to introduce foreign elements into their compositions, continuing their experiments with multiple perspectives.

Picasso incorporated wall paper that imitated chair caning into Still Life with Chair-Caning (1912), thus initiating Cubist collage, and Braque began to glue newspaper to his canvases, beginning the movement's exploration of papier-colle. In part this may have resulted from the artists' growing discomfort with the radical abstraction of Analytic Cubism, though it could also be argued that these Synthetic experiments touched off an even more radical turn away from Renaissance depictions of space, and towards a more conceptual rendering of objects and figures. Picasso's experiments with sculpture are also included as part of the Synthetic Cubist style as they employ collaged elements. Crystal Cubism (1915 -1922) As a response to the chaos of war, there was a tendency among many French artists to pull back from radical experimentation; this inclination was not unique to Cubism. One art historian has described this stage of Cubism as the "end product of a progressive closing down of possibilities." In Léger's Three Women (1921), for example, the depicted subjects are hard-edged rather than resembling overlapping bits of low-relief sculpture; Léger also did not attempt to show objects from various angles.

Crystal Cubism is associated with Salon Cubism as well as with the works of Picasso and Braque. Crystal Cubism is part of the larger trend known as a "Return to Order" that was associated with artists in the School of Paris. Further Developments Cubism spread quickly throughout Europe in the 1910s, as much because of its systematic approach to rendering imagery as for the openness it offered in depicting objects in new ways. Critics were split over whether Cubists were concerned with representing imagery in a more objective manner - revealing more of its essential character - or whether they were principally interested in distortion and abstraction. The movement lies at the root of a host of early twentieth styles including Constructivism, Futurism, Suprematism, Orphism, and De Stijl. Many important artists went through a Cubist phase in their development, perhaps the most notable of whom was Marcel Duchamp whose notorious Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) garnered much attention and many negative reviews at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City. The ideas in the movement also fed into more popular phenomena, like Art Deco design and architecture.

Later movements such as Minimalism were also influenced by the Cubist use of the grid, and it is difficult to imagine the development of non-representational art without the experiments of the Cubists. Like other paradigm changing artistic movements of twentieth-century art, like Dada and Pop, Cubism shook the foundations of traditional artmaking by turning the Renaissance tradition on its head and changing the course of art history with reverberations that continue into the postmodern era. Pablo Picasso and Cubism | Masterworks Fine Art Pablo Picasso and Cubism Picasso, “Three Musicians” 1921 From c. 1907-1917, Pablo Picasso pioneered the Cubism movement, a revolutionary style of modern art that Picasso formed in response to the rapidly changing modern world. In collaboration with his friend and fellow artist Georges Braque , Picasso challenged conventional, realistic forms of art through the establishment of Cubism. Picasso wanted to develop a new way of seeing that reflected the modern age, and he achieved this goal with Cubism. Georges Braque, “Hommage à J. S. Bach” 1956 Picasso did not feel that art should copy nature.

He felt no obligation to remain tied to the more traditional artistic techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening and felt two-dimensional object. Picasso wanted to emphasize the difference between a painting and reality.Cubism involves different ways of seeing, or perceiving, the world around us. Picasso believed in the concept of relativity – he took into account both his observations and his memories when creating a Cubist image. He felt that we do not see an object from one angle or perspective, but rather from many angles selected by sight and movement. As a result of this belief, Cubism became about how to see an object or figure rather than what the artist was looking at. Picasso “Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, 1953 Picasso, “Girl with Mandolin” 1910 African art and the modern, urban street life of Paris greatly influenced Picasso’s conception of Cubism. In addition, Picasso became fascinated with the process of construction and deconstruction, a fascination that is evident in his Cubist works. When creating these Cubist pieces, Picasso would simplify objects into geometric components and planes that may or may not add up to the whole object as it would appear in the natural world.

He would distort figures and forms and simultaneously depict different points of view on one plane. Léger, “Three Women” 1921-22 Picasso actively created works of Cubist art for around ten years. Within this time span, his Cubist style subtly evolved from Analytical Cubism (1907-1912) to Synthetic Cubism (1913-1917). With Analytical Cubism, Picasso utilized a muted color palette of monochromatic browns, grays, and blacks and chose to convey relatively unemotional subject matters such as still lifes and landscapes. He placed an emphasis on open figuration and abstraction, but did not yet incorporate elements of texture and collage. With Synthetic Cubism, Picasso incorporated texture, patterning, text, and newspaper scraps into his Cubist works. While he still portrayed relatively neutral subjects such as musical instruments, bottles, glasses, pitchers, newspapers, playing cards, and human faces and figures, his technique had progressed to the point where he was consistently including elements of collage, a technique that his is often credited with inventing.

With Synthetic Cubism, Picasso redefined the visual effect of his original Cubist technique and incorporated new materials, paving the way for the artistic avant-garde movement to ignite throughout Europe. Cubism is renowned as a groundbreaking artistic movement in and of its own right, yet it also influenced generations of artists to follow, shaping the very history of art. Pablo Picasso, “Jacqueline at the Easel, 1956”. Color Lithograph with Pochoir. While the majority of Picasso’s works of Cubism are paintings, he also created stunning prints; etchings, lithographs and linocuts in the style of Cubism. Such Cubist prints are exceedingly rare and are often created after the image of renowned Picasso Cubist paintings such as Still Life with a Bottle of Rum (1911). Picasso also incorporated pochoir, or hand-applied watercolor, to the majority of his Cubist prints, further contributing a sense of texture and color. As Picasso is credited with establishing and spearheading Cubism, these Cubists prints are iconic, they remain amongst his most collectible and treasured graphic works to date.

Picasso, “Still Life with a Bottle of Rum'” 1965 REFERENCES: Museum of Modern Art(2014). Cubism. Miami Dade College (2014). Cubism: A New Vision. Rewald, S. (2000). Cubism. Pablo Picasso | VKS ART Pablo Picasso Biography Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) Picasso was born the son of an artist in Malaga, Spain, in 1881. At first trained by his father, he studied art in Madrid and Barcelona, and moved to Paris in 1904. He lived and worked in France for most of is life. Picasso’s artistic genius impacted every major movement in early 20th century art: Realism, Abstraction, Cubism, Neoclassicism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. His earliest paintings of the so-called ‘Blue Period’ (1901-04) are characterized by simple outlines, a melancholic mood, and a blue tonality. Works of the subsequent ‘Rose period’ focus on acrobats and other circus performers, and feel more optimistic.

Primitive art, especially African masks, strongly influenced his iconic painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1906/7, MOMA, New York). Along with Georges Braque, Picasso is responsible for the development of Analytic Cubism in the early 1910s. After a visit of Rome and Naples in 1917, mythological figures such as Minotaurs, nymphs, and fauns inspired his ‘Neoclassical period’. Picasso’s artistic output was enormous and never decreased, even in old age. During his lifetime, he produced more than 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets and costumes. He died at age 91 in the south of France. Picasso is without doubt the most famous and influential artist of the 20th century. © 2013 VKS Art. All rights reserved. | Site design & development by LeverageIT P: 613-761-1114 x224 | E: info@vksart.com

Question: Pablo Picasso is one of the co-founders of what artistic movement?
Answer: Cubism