Cubism 2 Technical and stylistic aspects

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite were discovering African, Micronesian and Native American art for the first time. Artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures. Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when both artists had recently acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture, African art and African tribal masks.

Picasso ~ Girl with Mandolin

The art historian Douglas Cooper states that Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne "were particularly influential to the formation of Cubism and especially important to the paintings of Picasso during 1906 and 1907”. Cooper goes on to say: "The Demoiselles is generally referred to as the first Cubist picture. This is an exaggeration, although it was a first step towards Cubism it is not yet Cubist.

Pablo Picasso ~ Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Due to the work being a sensitive nature, it will be “censored” for maturity levels in this class, the work portrays five ladies from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó (Avinyó Street) in Barcelona. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionally feminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Two are shown with African mask-like faces and three more with faces in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain.

Georges Braque ~ violin and pitcher

The term Cubism did not come into general usage until The concept developed in Du "Cubisme" of observing a subject from different points in space and time simultaneously, i.e., the act of moving around an object to seize it from several successive angles fused into a single image ('multiple viewpoints' or 'mobile perspective'), is now a generally recognized phenomenon of the Cubist style.