Cubism

Pablo Picasso 'Three Musicians'

1921 BCE

Three Musicians is a perfect example of Picasso's Cubist style. It is hard to tell where one musician starts and another stops, because the shapes that create them intersect and overlap, as if they were paper cutouts. Cubism has been described as an intellectual style because the artists analyzed the shapes of their subjects and reinvented them on the canvas. The viewer must reconstruct the subject of the work by comparing the different shapes and forms to determine what each one represents.

Juan Gris 'Still Life with Open Window Place Ravignan'

1915 BCE

Gris painted mostly still lifes in a synthetic cubist style often using bold colours and collage techniques. 'Still Life with Open Window, Rue Ravignan' contains some of the traditional objects commonly associated with still life: a bowl of fruit, a bottle and a glass, a newspaper and a book, all carefully arranged on a table top at a balcony window. Within the structure of this grid, he delicately balances and counterbalances different areas of the work.

Synthetic cubism

1912 BCE

Synthetic cubism is the later phase of cubism characterised by simpler shapes and brighter colours. It began when the artists started adding textures and patterns to their paintings, experimenting with collage using newspaper print and patterned paper. Analytical cubism was about breaking down an object viewpoint-by-viewpoint, into a fragmentary image.

Georges Braque 'Bottle and Fishes'

1910 BCE

Ordinary objects – a bottle and fishes on a plate, laid on a table with a drawer – have been dramatically fragmented to form a grid-like structure of interpenetrating planes. The traditional domestic subject matter and sober colours in this work can be seen as a reaction against the luminous hues and free expression of Braque’s earlier fauvist paintings. The simplified colours of a monochromatic color scheme were used to not distract the viewer from the primary interest of the form itself.

Analytical Cubism

1908 BCE

The term analytical cubism describes the early phase of cubism characterized by a fragmentary appearance of multiple viewpoints and overlapping planes. Other special features of analytical cubism were a simplified palette of colours, so the viewer was not distracted from the structure of the form, and the density of the image at the centre of the canvas. The technique involved a close examination and analysis of the subject in order to translate it into flat geometric shapes, angles and lines.

It is a point of view

1907 BCE

"Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different;if you go lower again they will look different. It is a point of view."- Jacques Lapchitz. Cubism was invented around 1907 in Paris. It was the first abstract style of modern art. A Cubist painting ignores the traditions of perspective drawing and shows you many views of a subject at one time. The Cubists were influenced by art from other cultures particularly African masks.

Influence on society

1907 BCE

Invention of photography took over from the needs of traditional art forms to reproduce realistic scenes. New philosophies and rise of psychology. Artists could now interpret the world communicating their emotions, thoughts and philosophies. Artists no longer wanted to depict a single traditional view in their art but wanted to interpret their world showing movement, time and multiple views as if you were moving through space, thoughts and opinions, a more expressive response to the subject.

Juan Gris

1887 BCE

Juan Gris was more calculating than any other Cubist painter in the way he composed his pictures. Every element of a painting was considered with classical precision: line, shape, tone, colour and pattern were carefully refined to create an interlocking arrangement free from any unnecessary decoration or detail. Juan Gris is thought of as the third Cubist but he was the artist who was the most consistently dedicated to the style.

Georges Braque

1882 BCE

One of the creators of Cubism; most of his paintings are of still life. Under the influence of Picasso's 'Demoiselles d'Avignon' he started to use a more restrained palette of greens, browns and greys, simplified his forms, and painted his first Cubist pictures. Braque's paintings reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. His later paintings included many compositions of still lifes and interiors with contrasting patterns and more complex effects of space.

Pablo Picasso

1881 BCE

Pablo Picasso 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 his paintings. 'Three Musicians' is painted in the style of Synthetic Cubism and gives the appearance of cut paper. Picasso paints three musicians made of flat, brightly colored, abstract shapes in a shallow, boxlike room.

The French warship Jena is blown up at Toulon; 120 lives lost.

Mar 3, 1907

Upon completion Iena was assigned to the Mediterranean Squadron and remained there for the duration of her career. She participated in the annual fleet manoeuvers and made many visits to French ports in the Mediterranean. While docked for repairs, Iéna was gutted on 12 March 1907 by a magazine explosion caused by the decomposition of well-aged "Powder B" propellant. While it was possible to repair her, the ship was not thought worth the time or expense.