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TEACHING RESOURCES AND MATERIALS
THE FIRST PHASE OF CUBISM
Cubist art is considered to be an artistic movement that was present between 1907 and 1914. Cubism is considered a pioneering avant-garde movement because it was responsible for breaking with perspective, the last Renaissance principle that was still in force at the beginning of the century. Cubism was centred on the city of Paris, and the leaders and masters of the movement were the Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris and the Frenchmen Georges Braque and Fernand Léger, but the artist Cézanne had already blazed the trail, who, influenced by Impressionism, reacted against it, rejecting print in favour of a deeper understanding of reality. Cézanne believed that nature is not drawn, but manifests itself through colour, his painting not being drawn, but a painting of volumes, of forms, relating them to each other once they have been created. This is where the problem of planes arose, which led him to look at objects from various points of view. It originated in France and was made famous by the artists belonging to this style, among whom we can highlight Pablo Picasso. This style of art was an essential kind of art as it gave rise to the other avant-gardes in Europe in the 20th century. Therefore, it is the nal break that art had with traditional painting. Cubism had as its ideological basis the notion that an image is always observed from dierent points of view, as it is three-dimensional. This led the artists who developed this movement to seek new forms of pictorial representation, among which the break with the real image was made present through the formation of cubes and other geometric forms. The presence of numerous and certainly chaotic geometric gures gave the image a unique complexity that aimed to represent the very complexity of everyday life. The concept of Cubism was created by the critic Louis Vauxcelles, the same man who baptised the Fauves. This term originated from a critique he made of an artistic work which he called "cubes" , and since then the concept of cubism was born.
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Cubist art would not have been possible without the advent of photography, which, by representing visual reality more accurately than painting, freed the laer from the obligation to represent things as they appear before our eyes and forced artists to seek a meaning other than the mere transcription of the external appearance of things in two dimensions.
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The appearance of Cubism has also been linked to two other developments in the same decade, namely psychoanalysis, which showed that there may be deeper motivations for human thoughts and actions, and the theory of relativity, which revealed that the world is not exactly in its deep structure.
Main features of Cubism
The disconnection with nature is achieved through the decomposition of the gure into its minimal parts, into planes, which will be studied in themselves and not in the global vision of volume. Cubism is a mental art, the work having value in itself, expressing ideas. Cubism was the denitive break with the Renaissance style. In Cubist works of art, therefore, the traditional view of art disappears completely. This style of art is mainly based on nature represented by geometric gures or shapes and by fragmenting surfaces and lines, in a simplied form, into cubes, cylinders and spheres. A new concept called "multiple perspective" emerged, i.e. all the parts were developed on the same plane. The works became uncompromising in terms of the aesthetics of things, which is why they appeared on the same plane and at dierent times, for example, in the case of human faces, the nose was represented in prole and the eye was represented from the front. There is no longer a single vision, which is why there is no sense of depth in works of art.
Portraits, landscapes, and urban still lifes, were the main subjects that were most prominent when depicted. As far as colour is concerned, the most commonly used are muted tones such as browns, greens or greys, that is to say, all the colours that characterised Fauvism or Impressionism are removed. The gradations of light and shade disappear and the colours of reality are no longer used, with black and white appearing in the representations. Geometric shapes invade the compositions. The abstract style was not used, the form was always respected.
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THE MAIN PHASES OF CUBI ST ART
There are dierent stages in the gradual development of this style of art, among which we can highlight the following:
Analytical cubist art
It is known as the rst phase of cubism that goes from 1909 and ends in 1912 and its precursor is Paul Cézanne. The artists dedicated themselves to the analysis of images and their reconstruction through these geometric forms. Their aim became a deeper search, which tried to extrapolate from reality and represent the very essence of the visible. This phase was characterised by the decomposition and imbalance of gures and forms. Its main aim was to observe them and try to establish a separate order. It was at this stage that one could see a cubism that was diicult to understand and very pure.It was characterised by the decomposition of form and gures into multiple parts, all of them geometric. forms of the cone, cylinder and sphere and through the use of pure colour. The laer was an analytical process called induction.
Synthetic cubist art
A term that generally identies the second part of the pictorial movement that commonly dates back to 1912, when Picasso painted Nature morte à la chaise cannée. The authors developed new techniques that enabled them to work with dierent textures and surfaces such as collage to create novel pictorial works. The main compositional characteristics of synthetic cubism lie in the choice of juxtaposition or superimposition of dierent parts of a performance. It often makes use of relevant techniques, such as collage and papier collé, thus favouring compositions of polioculari objects visions of the same object. At this stage the objects were no longer observed and ordered, but rather a summary of the essential gure, which is why dierent parts of the painting are highlighted. The synthesis is made by highlighting on the canvas the most signicant parts of the gure that will be seen from all sides.
Cubist painters
Pablo Ruiz Picasso: his outstanding works within cubist art were several, as an example we have Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which represents a brothel in Barcelona.The paintings depict naked women with disgured faces, influenced by Cézanne, Iberian art and black sculpture, in which he breaks with all the traditional rules of gurative painting by fragmenting perspective into square and angular volumes. Other works by Pablo Ruiz Picasso were the Nude with Towel, TheHortadeEbroFactory, and PortraitofAmbosio Vollard. One of his best works was Guernica, the painting symbolising the horror of the Spanish Civil War
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and the bombing that destroyed the Basque town of Gernika, in a cubist style and with a symbolism of surrealism and expressionist deformations.
George Braque: He is the other great creator of Cubism. He discovered that forms could be simplied by reducing them to prisms and cylinders. In his StillLife with Playing Cards he reduced chromaticism to grey colours and geometrised and decomposed forms to create a new reality by means of superimpositions and transparencies. He also delved into collage. Other outstanding works include StillLifewiththeGuitar, StillLifewiththeCelloand ThePainter ' sStudio.
Juan Gris: His Cubism is fundamentally synthetic and coloured. He used compositions with a rm structure and harmonious rhythm. He mixes softness and energy, which can be seen in the arrangement of his still lifes, executed on the basis of very violent planes. He focuses on the theme of still life, with elements such as glasses, boles, diaries, fruit bowls, pipes, harlequins, musical elements. Outstanding works include StillLife, Breakfastand StillLifeonaChair.
Fernand Léger: he worked in a cubism that tended towards mechanical and tubular forms. His most frequently used themes were related to everyday life and the machinism of the big city, with characters with a certain automaton-like character. We have works such as TheCardGame, where the protagonists have
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been turned into a sort of metallic robots, with other important works such as TheAcrobats, TheCylinders, ThePropellers.
There are many other very famous painters of this style of art. Among them we can highlight some of those who are still known today, as well as their works, these artists are: Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizs. Of course, many more artists from this period are known today, but the best known and therefore the most famous are these artists.
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Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. P a b l o P i c a s s o , 1 9 0 7
Breakfast (Le Petit déjeuner), J u a n G r i s , 1 9 1 4 Still Life with Playing Cards, G e o r g e B r a q u e , 1 9 1 3
Soldiers playing cards, F e r n a n d L é g e r , 1 9 1 7
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Three Women, F e r n a n d L é g e r , 1 9 2 1 Portrait of Dora Maar, P i c a s s o , 1 9 3 6
Art scuplture faces, P i c a s s o
POINTILLI SM
Pointillism is an artistic technique that consists of making a work through the use of tiny dots. It rst appeared in 1869, spearheaded by the neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat, who was followed by artists such as Henri-Edmond Cross and Vlaho Bukovac. This procedure consists of placing dots of pure colours instead of brushstrokes on the canvas. This was the result of the chromatic studies carried out by Georges Seurat (1859-1891), the French painter, who in 1884 arrived at the division of tones by the position of touches of colour which, when viewed from a distance, create the desired combinations on the retina. Another of the most important Pointillist artists was Paul Signac, who participated with Seurat and other Neo-Impressionists in the Société des Artistes Indépendants (1884), all of them followers of Pointillism or Divisionism. It is related to Divisionism, a more technical variant of the method. Divisionism is concerned with colour theory, while Pointillism focuses more on the specic style of brush used to apply the paint. It is a technique with few serious practitioners today, and is notably seen in the works of Seurat, Signac and Cross. By adopting tiny, dot-like brushstrokes, they succeeded in accumulating, even on small surfaces, a great variety of colours and tones, each of which corresponded to one of the elements contributing to the appearance of the object. At a given distance these tiny particles are optically mixed and the result would produce a much greater colour intensity than any mixture of pigments.
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Gray Weather, Grande Jatte, Georges Pierre Seurat, 1888 A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Georges Pierre Seurat, 1884
Morning, Interior, Maximilien Luce, 1890.
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Entrance to the Port of Marseilles, Paul Signac, 1911
Le Cirque, Georges Pierre Seurat, 1891
Le Pont Neuf, Hippolyte Petitjean, 1912
SOV IET CON STRUCTIV I SM
Russian constructivism is an artistic movement that triumphed in Russia in the 1920s. Painting, graphic design, photography and cinema show its influence, but it was in architecture that it found its most concrete and revolutionary application. The movement arose from the rejection of the decorative and ornamental excesses that it considered typical of bourgeois art. In contrast to the neoclassicism and Art Nouveau prevailing in the rest of Europe, they created an art based on simplicity, pure lines and geometric forms, inspired by Cubism and Futurism.
Art at the service of the revolution
Constructivism became the oicial art of the Russian Revolution after its triumph and the aesthetic manifestation of the new socialist society. Constructivists understood art as another tool of the revolution, which could and should contribute to the formation of the new social order and the spread of socialist ideology. The artists wished to change the world with their artworks, which they always considered from a utilitarian and functional perspective, where aesthetics is always at the service of function. The design style was influenced by the industrial revolution that took place in Soviet territory after the revolution. We see it in one of the main works of Constructivism, Vladimir Tatlin ' s Monument to the Third International. The laer was never built, and combined a machine aesthetic with dynamic components that celebrated technology, such as spotlights and projection screens.
Russian constructivism in graphic design
Pure geometric forms, linearity, symmetry, repetition, simple dry stick typefaces, dominance of red and black, repetition, photomontage... With these elements, the Constructivists created a style of graphic design that shunned all artice and which we still associate today with post-revolutionary Russia. One of its functions was to inform a largely illiterate population of the new government' s policies. To do this, one of the main characteristics is used: the manipulation of typography to give each part of the text the characteristics (body, colour) that correspond to its importance in the message as a whole. Its central gures were Aleksandr Rodchenko, his wife Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky and the Stenberg brothers. The advertising agency founded by Rodchenko together with the poet Mayakovsky produced more than 150 designs and advertising pieces between 1923 and 1925.
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It is 1925 in the newly created USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), the revolutionary process has brought with it a series of changes in the social structure of the time, and it is (at least up to that time) fertile ground for the incipient avant-garde. Painting, cinema, music, architecture... Soviet artists seemed determined to break with art as it had been understood up to that time and to put all their talents at the service of communist propaganda and the construction of a new society. It was in this context that Alexander Rodchenko designed this and other posters for Soviet lmmaker Sergei Eisenstein ' s lm Baleship Potemkin, which recounts the events of the failed aempt at popular revolution in 1905.
The work is a clear example of the groundbreaking proposals in the world of graphic design made at that time by artists such as El Lissitzky, Varvara Stepanova and Rodchenko himself. The aggressive and striking use of colour, the recurring use of diagonals and the incorporation of typography as an additional element in the pictorial composition are unmistakable characteristics of this period. in addition, they bear a certain resemblance to the contemporary works produced at the Bauhaus.
Rodchenko ' s designs proved to be hugely influential in graphic design and advertising throughout the 20th century. And the movie is today considered a cult lm and one of the masterpieces of the Soviet lm avant-garde. Indeed, director Brian De Palma was inspired by the lm for the famous scene of the pram tumbling down the stairs, which appears in his lm The Untouchables of Eliot Ness.
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Constructivist poster by Maiakowski
Books! poster by Alexander Rodchenko
Battleship Potempkin, Alexander Rodchenko, 1925
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Varvara-Stepanova: poster Through Red and White Glasses, 1924
Soviet Russian propaganda poster, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Rodchenko, 1923
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