African Influences in Modern Art | Thematic Essay
During the early 1900s, the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists who formed an avant-garde in the development of modern art. In France, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and their School of Paris friends blended the highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting pictorial flatness, vivid color palette, and fragmented Cubist shapes helped to define early modernism. While these artists knew nothing of the original meaning and function of the West and Central African sculptures they encountered, they instantly recognized the spiritual aspect of the composition and adapted these qualities to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance. In The Autobiography of Alice B.
Exhibition | Kemper Art Museum
Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928–1945 offers the first detailed examination of Braque’s experiments with still lifes and interiors during the years leading up to and through World War II, an overlooked and transitional period in the career of this leading founder of Cubism. Braque employed the genre of the still life to conduct a lifelong investigation into the nature of perception through the tactile and transitory world of everyday objects. Attending to the cyclical nature of the artist’s work, the project examines the transformations in Braque’s creative process as he moved from painting small, intimate interiors in the late 1920s, to depicting bold, large-scale, tactile Cubist spaces in the 1930s, to creating personal renderings of daily life in the 1940s. The exhibition also considers his work in relation to contemporary aesthetic debates about politically engaged culture. Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928–1945 is curated by Karen K. Exhibition support
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cubism: Analytic and Synthetic Cubism
In the analytic phase (1907–12) the cubist palette was severely limited, largely to black, browns, grays, and off-whites. In addition, forms were rigidly geometric and compositions subtle and intricate. Cubist abstraction as represented by the analytic works of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris intended an appeal to the intellect. The cubists sought to show everyday objects as the mind, not the eye, perceives them—from all sides at once. The trompe l'oeil element of collage was also sometimes used. During the later, synthetic phase of cubism (1913 through the 1920s), paintings were composed of fewer and simpler forms based to a lesser extent on natural objects. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. More on cubism Analytic and Synthetic Cubism from Infoplease: cubism: Analytic and Synthetic Cubism - Analytic and Synthetic Cubism In the analytic phase (1907–12) the cubist palette was severely ... See more Encyclopedia articles on: European Art, 1600 to the Present
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David Hockney, interview
“If he did three things on one day,” he tells me, “they’re number one, two, three, so you know what he did in the morning and in the afternoon. It’s fantastic. I’ve sat down and looked through the whole thing from beginning to end three times. This is one way in which Hockney has maintained a close, posthumous relationship with Picasso. “When you stop doing something it doesn’t mean you are rejecting the previous work,” says Hockney. “Picasso is still influencing me. “When Picasso was 70 he had another 23 years of painting and smoking ahead of him,” he says. “A lot of his late pictures are about being an old man. Four decades ago in the early Seventies, Picasso was already on Hockney’s mind. In 1973, shortly after Picasso’s death, Hockney went to the South of France to see an exhibition of the artist’s late work at the Palais des Papes in Avignon. Hockney was staying with Douglas Cooper, an erstwhile friend of Picasso’s and owner of a magnificent collection of his earlier work.
Cubism
Following their 1907 meeting in Paris, artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneered the Cubist , a new vision for a new century that inspired that were initially ridiculed by critics for consisting of “little cubes.” Often painting side-by-side in their Montmartre, Paris, studios, the artists developed a visual language of geometric planes and compressed space that rejected the conventions of and . Cubist works challenged viewers to understand a subject broken down into its geometrical components and often represented from several angles at once. Pablo Picasso. Georges Braque. Pablo Picasso. Cubists from real life to make their work, but most often maintained small identifiable clues to a realistic figure, whether a woman or a violin. A war fought from 1914 to 1918, in which Great Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, Italy, Japan, the United States, and other allies defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria. 1. The visual or narrative focus of a work of art.
