Cubism (pt. 6)

A late Expressionist, Marc Chagall practiced Cubism in his earlier works but then moved onto personal Expressionism that also took from Surrealism (which is an art movement we will look at in greater detail later).  Many of his works showcased couples, but this one, La Mariée, is particularly among his most famous paintings.

There are certainly surreal elements within the work, but Chagall operates from Expressionist approaches to subject matter.  In fact, the artist frequently used images from Jewish and Russian folktales as well as children's stories to convey aspects of cultural identity, energy, and passion.  In this painting we are entering into a realm of fantasy.  Incidentally, the subject is a young bride who is preparing for her wedding.  She carries a bouquet and wears a red dress to convey her love.  All around her are blues and muted yellows so that she is the brightest figure in the painting.  Perhaps it is taking place at night, or maybe the artist merely shoves aside the rest of the world as bleak or uninteresting; the bride is the center of focus.  Standing at a tilted angle, she appears to be receding back into the dreamy, fantasy world behind her, where a goat is playing an instrument (some kind of small cello) and other musicians are playing and dancing.  An attendant glides across the bride to fix her veil, and a fish jumps up (perhaps also in dance).  A random table, matching the bride's red dress, appears in the upper right hand corner, just floating in space over the fish.  Behind all of that is a small church, doubtless where the couple will be wed (but since it appears all the way in the background that aspect of the ceremony almost seems insignificant or undesirable).  The artist has handpicked and chosen what gets placed where; the scene comes purely from his inventive mind, and the colors, from his emotional responses to the subject.  In that sense, there's nothing real about this painting at all.

Chagall, besides carrying on the Expressionist tradition into the 20^th century, built off of earlier stylistic models from Symbolist artists like Paul Gauguin.  Gauguin had sought to make his art about the untouched paradise of exotic lands and the purity of the native peoples therein.  This movement was donned Primitivism, for it featured artists' rejection of traditional painting techniques and realistic renderings for stylized, simplified work like that of native peoples and children.  The Expressionist symbolism in La Mariée certainly makes reference to Primitivism with its violin-playing goats and literally flying fish—the stuff of children's fairy tales.

Cubism (pt. 5)

The broad, bleak sentiment of post-war life, as I humbly attempted to describe before, was a profound reality in the Western world during the 1920s and '30s.  In 1922, T. S. Eliot produced his famous poem The Waste Land, which would become a key, defining work of Modern literature.  Broken, disassembled, washed-out writing conveys deep themes of religion, politics, love, sociology, and language and the pervading sense of loss associated with each of those aspects in the poem.  Trying to find himself and world again after the destruction and devastation, the Modern poet found barely perceptible streams of light in an otherwise hopelessly dark world, remnants of an old truth that had been lost and, by all appearances, would never be regained.  In the poem, Eliot's persona finds himself lost in a shattered world where there is no solitary foundation of truth or principle, no safe refuge against the onslaught of the future, "no rock."  (The Postmodernists to follow would totally do away with hope and truth).  But the title of Eliot's work alone metaphorically conveys the predominant sentiments of writers, poets, and artists at this time; that all were now living in a Modern-age wasteland, abandoned, alone, and anonymous.

Mechanized brutality, the wars of nations, bloodshed, and genocide would continue into the 20^th century.  After the bombing of Guernica in 1937 during the height of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso found the destruction almost too much to bear.  One of his most famous works, merely entitled Guernica, was produced that year as an outpouring of the terror, rage, sorrow, and incomprehensibility of war in the Modern world.

Violence, madness, and total ruin characterize the themes of this painting.  Here we are in an enclosed room, dark and colorless.  From the far left we see a bull, a mighty and powerful beast and one associated with the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament.  The bull's tongue is shaped pointy and narrow like a dagger, and the bull's tail on the left resembles a pillar of smoke as if from a fire.  About to be burned and cut, the bull stands facing a woman wailing over the death of her baby.  Perhaps this child's death is the "sin" for which the bull must be sacrificed and have its blood poured out.  The woman shrieks in agony with her head tilted back, facing the heavens, eyes broken apart, breasts hanging naked from her chest as she holds the dead body of her child in her hands.  Below that we see the scarred, open palm of a dismembered arm.  A decapitated head lies next to this; and further across, another arm grasping the hilt of a broken sword in rigor mortis.  Near the center of the work is a horse screaming in pain as its back is pierced by a spear.  A black-and-white gap mark splits open the horse's body and shows the wound.  In chaos, terror, and pain, the horse tramples over the dead body below it.  Another sharp object, perhaps a broken board or plank, slices into the horse's belly from beneath.  Overhead, there is a lamp mysteriously like an eye watching over the whole scene and bearing down over it like a bomb being dropped over the scene in Guernica.  To the right of it, a woman stretches her head and arm in from a window and holds a small flame (natural light next to the electric bulb) to the lamp in quizzical comparison or defiant opposition.  Below her is another woman who stumbles onto the scene with heavy feet and an awkward posture.  She gazes fixedly upwards toward the light, in search of hope amid the scene.  She comes from a darkness on the far right of the painting where another person is being engulfed in flame, arms out in agony and head raised to heaven in petition.  Nothing lies above him but an empty window; above that, only more flames.  From the clenched fist of the dismembered arm at the very bottom of the painting, under the dying horse's trampling feet, sprouts a tiny flower next to the broken sword.  We are given here an unforgettable image of the ravages of war, with only the smallest offering of hope to come from it.  In its Cubist style, everything is drawn as flat—dying figures overlap with live ones; live ones blend in with the dead.  The scene is staggering beyond expression, and that is the Modern conception of warfare.  Just over a year after this painting's completion, Adolf Hitler's paramilitary officers within the Nazi regime launched a series of attacks against the Jewish people of Germany and Austria in an overnight massacre, called Kristallnacht, which would launch the Jewish Holocaust.

Cubism (pt. 4)

It's worth note to examine the capabilities of the mind's eye in works such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and The Three Musicians.  Picasso was a painter who was very aware of how things looked (different from the Expressionists' concern with the feelings attached to a given subject), and through this arena of visual aesthetics he experimented with form, shape, and design.  His Cubist works demonstrate this; that he was interested in creating a specific image of an object which could convey a more geometrically accurate view.  Collage-style art helped him to better narrow down shapes into pure, linear constructs, as seen in The Three Musicians.  Eventually, he could narrow down the human face to pure shapes.  This image of the Head of a Woman, from 1927, shows the extremes of Cubism.

Most people associate Pablo Picasso with this sort of style because it made his art the most instantly recognizable of nearly any other style.  We can see this painting from afar and know that "it's a Picasso."  And, while it bothers many people, the style is actually not one that is too complicated to grasp.  Here we see the Head of a Woman, plain and simple.  This is an image of an enclosed space with two eyes, two nostrils, a mouth with teeth, and crowning hair on top.  It doesn't matter that the objects are totally distorted and misplaced; so long as all of the criteria are there, Cubism allows for the deformation of the subject in order to delve to the bottom of some element of greater verity, be it a visual, technical, or theoretical element.  Though we see something that looks different, this is no less the Head of a Woman than this more realistically drawn chalk-on-paper rendering of the same title, produced five years earlier.  On the flat tableau of the painter, both are equals in depiction of their subject.

The stunning realism of this work shows us Picasso's talent (as well as other works from various periods of the artist's life that show stunning accuracy and ability to paint well), and it reinforces the fact to us that the artist chose to paint the way he did, not for any lack of ability, but because he believed it theoretically significant to the development of art.

Cubism (pt. 3)

By 1921 the artist was employing the stylistic approaches within the medium of collage artworks in his paintings.  A collage involves adding other materials to the picture surface.  Although this work, The Three Musicians, is purely an oil-on-canvas painting, Picasso has mimicked the style of a collage as an extended form of Cubism.

We have descended here to simple shapes and colors, but our mind's eye can nevertheless pick out the finer details.  We see three musicians, one playing a saxophone, another on a guitar, and the third with a song sheet in his hands.  They sit or stand behind a table and on top of a rug in a small room.  Two holes for eyes have been given to each, as well as two feet, two hands (barely distinguishable), and each his own color scheme (implying costume dress).  The far-left musician even has a mustache.  This lively bunch of complementary colors strikes the viewer as an instantly characteristic trio of expressive people, simply drawn but brightly colorized to emphasize the vividness of their expression through music.  Jazz was coming into style at this time, thanks in part to the musical works of American composer George Gershwin, who seamlessly blended classical music with jazz and revolutionized the coming musical era.  And as eclectic as that musical genre can be, these three artists clash with their monotonous, brown background and even with each other.  White against black, blue against yellow, Picasso's approach to color vivifies the characters with more life than could be expressed through realist imagery.  Cubism has, in addition to deconstructing, rebuilt their image in a grander, though more simplistic, fashion.

Cubism (pt. 2)

This famous work of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, from 1907, shows five prostitutes.  There is no background to the painting, and each figure appears very flat and geometrically drawn onto the canvas.  They do not look realistic or even entirely human.  Two of them even have masks on to hide their faces.  Picasso has drawn them geometrically, with harsh linear structure that lends a tone of violence to their countenances; blank stares from their eyes cause them to resemble animalistic creatures, not people.  When painted in the Cubist style, they lose their realism, being stripped down to bare shapes and lines and colors; but the artist has implemented a little tonal nuance within his subject matter.  Why should prostitution be painted as glamorous?  Why should prostitutes be shown as pretty and poignant?  Here, the artist has done away with all pretenses of beauty.  Through the facial masks on the right and the woman's face on the left, the artist has made allusion to venereal diseases, some of which were believed to have come from Africa (the masks bear resemblance to works from African tribal art).  Not only is the Cubist technical approach attempting to portray the subject in a more comprehensively geometric and theoretically accurate way, the artist's treatment of the subject matter in the painting lend the work a sense of raw realism.  Prostitution is, after all, not the glamorous business which commercialists make it out to be, and there is something animalistic to be found in the practice.  And so, two figures hide their faces (and therefore hide their humanity), whilst another on the left has already begun to lose it.  Her face is discolored from the rest of her body, and her hand rests above her head in a disjointed pose.  The artist is making reference here to the sexually transmitted diseases which come with prostitution.  The two women on the right may bear similar (or worse) facial complexions, but they remain hidden under their masks.  The two women in the middle look out at the viewer indifferently.

Cubism (pt. 1)

Separate from the Expressionists were the Cubists, who reinforced structured ideals of art theory.  Their notions of style spawned largely from the earlier works of Cézanne, who sought to better paint the object in its three-dimensional fullness.  Plagued by this problem of remaining flat on a canvas, painters sought to bring out their subjects' mass and volume through stylized brushwork and technical approaches to perspective, color, and form.  This was a discipline of art that focused on the theoretical aspects of constructing images.  Although artists such as Picasso echoed the freedom of artists like Van Gogh, the Cubists employed their unorthodox techniques for the sake of their subject matter and larger art theory on a whole.  Cubism itself was merely a style of painting which artists could use to try to show all sides of a three-dimensional object on a flat surface.

In order to accomplish this transference (from real life to the painter's canvas, let's say), shapes had to be broken up and then reassembled.  Imagine drawing a cube, an object with six surfaces or sides.  One would have to flatten the cube, breaking apart corners, in order to show the full picture.  Similarly, then, artists broke apart their subjects and tried to view them purely geometrically when contemplating how best to paint them.  Flowers, a landscape, imaginative material—even people had to be "disassembled" first, and we see that clearly in Picasso's portrait of Vollard, 1910.

The artist has almost dissected the man, and the chunks are laid out on the canvas to give the full picture of him.  Realism need no longer be worried about, for this painting is trying to achieve an effect, like Impressionism.  Painting here has become a science of experimentation.  Here, colors are not realistic; browns, grays, and drab hues are used to convey an almost rudimentary, black-and-white image (except for his colorful face) of this man.  Compare this to the patchy brushwork of Paul Cézanne, who, you will remember, painted the Mont Saint-Victoire in sections or chunks.  Cubism, seeking to break down both the subject matter (the object) and the technique (art itself), adopted this new stylistic approach to painting that became the staple fashion of artists like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

Picasso is of course the most famous Cubist painter.  He became famous for his painting and collages and later extended his abilities to sculpture.  From a very early age, this Spanish painter showed the signs of sheer talent.  His paintings from the 1890s displayed a level of incredible realism that quickly distinguished him in the art world.  But Picasso chose to deviate from the realist style.  He wanted his art to be about something more than mere aesthetic traditionalism; his notions of Cubist art theory launched the artist into a creative period of experimentation and stylistic development that launched the careers of one of the most successful and well-known artists in Western art history.