1 00:00:06,336 --> 00:00:11,929 Okay, let's now take a look at the really first and very famous 2 00:00:11,929 --> 00:00:16,355 face of abstraction that is known as Cubism. And this is George Braque's 3 00:00:16,355 --> 00:00:18,344 "Violin and Palette." 4 00:00:18,344 --> 00:00:22,622 A palette is, if you've ever seen the sort of stereotypical artist 5 00:00:22,622 --> 00:00:26,194 holding a palette with all the colors. This is a palette up here, okay? 6 00:00:26,194 --> 00:00:29,206 And so, it's "Violin and Palette." It's oil on canvas. 7 00:00:29,786 --> 00:00:34,327 1909 to 1910. Sometimes we don't know exactly when artists paint this. 8 00:00:34,327 --> 00:00:36,664 We are also in the period of time where artists go back 9 00:00:36,664 --> 00:00:38,402 and sort of fiddle with their work. 10 00:00:38,402 --> 00:00:41,727 Remember, this is oil and so it stays wet and you can -- 11 00:00:41,727 --> 00:00:43,944 You can play around with your work. 12 00:00:43,944 --> 00:00:48,576 And notice that it's not really that big. Okay? It's fairly small. 13 00:00:49,206 --> 00:00:52,752 You can clearly, I think, see see the violin in here and 14 00:00:52,752 --> 00:00:56,487 some sheet music and then the palette and what looks like curtains here, 15 00:00:56,487 --> 00:01:01,138 but I don't think you would argue with me that this is very abstract. 16 00:01:01,138 --> 00:01:04,460 I mean we know it's something, we know it's got objects in it, 17 00:01:04,460 --> 00:01:08,392 we know there's a subject here. But we -- It becomes increasingly 18 00:01:08,392 --> 00:01:11,635 difficult to see this. So let's think a little bit about Braque 19 00:01:11,635 --> 00:01:13,565 and sort of his process here. 20 00:01:15,522 --> 00:01:19,175 Here are some lovely photos of Braque. Here he is in his studio 21 00:01:19,175 --> 00:01:23,603 over on the left as a young man, sort of in his full Cubist phase. 22 00:01:23,603 --> 00:01:26,450 And note that he's -- Some of these that -- 23 00:01:26,450 --> 00:01:29,538 Instruments and other things that are on the wall, 24 00:01:29,538 --> 00:01:33,733 these are his collections. And in many ways, you could go back 25 00:01:33,733 --> 00:01:35,683 and look at "Violin and Palette," and if you look at some of 26 00:01:35,683 --> 00:01:39,299 these other Cubist works, the subject matter is very traditional. 27 00:01:39,299 --> 00:01:43,392 It's kind of like a Dutch still life in which you have a bunch of things 28 00:01:43,392 --> 00:01:45,842 piled on and the painters paint them. 29 00:01:45,842 --> 00:01:47,945 In the Dutch still life, they are, of course, trying to make it 30 00:01:47,945 --> 00:01:51,326 as naturalistic as it is possible. And what Braque is doing here 31 00:01:51,326 --> 00:01:54,559 is making something that is very abstract. 32 00:01:54,559 --> 00:01:58,373 But these are all objects in his studio that he would have used 33 00:01:58,373 --> 00:02:01,571 to sort of -- He would have composed sort of a little still life and then 34 00:02:01,571 --> 00:02:07,683 used that as a jumping off basis for his very abstract renderings of these. 35 00:02:08,219 --> 00:02:09,887 Here he is later in life. 36 00:02:09,887 --> 00:02:15,897 He kind of stuck with what he knew and he's now working with some 37 00:02:15,897 --> 00:02:19,273 of these bigger geometric forms, but he still remains very much 38 00:02:19,273 --> 00:02:22,658 an abstract artist all the way through his career. 39 00:02:26,008 --> 00:02:29,213 You know, a lot of these artists, it's fascinating because they -- 40 00:02:29,213 --> 00:02:34,456 Several of the artists we'll talk about today, they go Paris. 41 00:02:34,456 --> 00:02:38,145 It's like Van Gogh. You have to go to Paris because that's where it's at. 42 00:02:38,145 --> 00:02:40,940 It's like everybody now wants to go to Brooklyn, you know? 43 00:02:40,940 --> 00:02:44,521 Used to be Manhattan -- And now everybody wants to go Brooklyn and hang out. 44 00:02:45,591 --> 00:02:52,189 But then it was Paris. And so, Braque, he went there and 45 00:02:52,189 --> 00:02:58,137 he sort of goes through these sort of ontological stages. 46 00:02:58,137 --> 00:03:02,015 And so, he sort of dabbles in kind of Impressionistic stuff, and then -- 47 00:03:02,015 --> 00:03:04,968 This is kind of post-Impressionist, very bright colors, 48 00:03:04,968 --> 00:03:08,576 almost these large brushstrokes, like the painter Seurat. 49 00:03:09,116 --> 00:03:15,194 And he has a sudden change in his style. And people have -- 50 00:03:15,194 --> 00:03:18,516 Scholars have suggested that this is because Braque goes down 51 00:03:18,516 --> 00:03:22,383 to the south of France, and he becomes familiar with 52 00:03:22,383 --> 00:03:26,443 the painting, in particular, of Cézanne. And we haven't really talked about 53 00:03:26,443 --> 00:03:29,993 Cézanne in this course, but Cézanne is this 54 00:03:29,993 --> 00:03:33,120 very important post-Impressionist painter. There have been several 55 00:03:33,120 --> 00:03:36,210 retrospectives of his work. And he is really -- 56 00:03:36,210 --> 00:03:40,317 Cézanne is really the one who's really starting to take apart the landscape 57 00:03:40,317 --> 00:03:45,609 and find this component geometry that is underlying this. 58 00:03:45,609 --> 00:03:51,288 All the while also absolutely reinforcing the fact that the canvas 59 00:03:51,288 --> 00:03:52,895 is two-dimensional and flat. 60 00:03:52,895 --> 00:03:59,062 And so, it's this great sort of quixotic, impossible quest in many ways. 61 00:03:59,062 --> 00:04:03,992 I mean, you want to show, you want to find the underlying geometry 62 00:04:03,992 --> 00:04:08,530 and you also want to show that the canvas is flat, that it's two-dimensional. 63 00:04:08,530 --> 00:04:13,467 So this is something that Cézanne works on and Cézanne works on it for a long time. 64 00:04:13,467 --> 00:04:18,576 And he's incredibly wealthy. He doesn't have to worry about getting his -- 65 00:04:18,576 --> 00:04:22,711 Anybody buying his paintings. And Braque becomes interested in this, 66 00:04:22,711 --> 00:04:24,730 but you can see he takes on a much -- 67 00:04:24,730 --> 00:04:28,926 Cézanne's got more of that sort of, you know, loose brushstroke 68 00:04:28,926 --> 00:04:31,888 that we affiliate with Impressionism and post-Impressionism. 69 00:04:31,888 --> 00:04:35,980 And here you can see we have a much more limited color palette. 70 00:04:35,980 --> 00:04:40,998 It's not that sort of range of colors, it's just the green and the gold colors. 71 00:04:40,998 --> 00:04:45,210 And it's much stronger geometries here. 72 00:04:45,210 --> 00:04:51,324 So, you know, you think about this is 1907, he sees Cézanne -- 73 00:04:51,714 --> 00:04:56,012 And here is 1908, when he also goes down to the south of France. 74 00:04:56,012 --> 00:05:00,365 So, there's a big change, so this is very important in his life. 75 00:05:00,365 --> 00:05:06,570 And then from there, he goes on to reducing the color even more 76 00:05:06,570 --> 00:05:10,526 and working more on, again, finding the underlying geometry. 77 00:05:10,526 --> 00:05:15,940 In this case, in the "Houses at L'Estaque," 78 00:05:16,520 --> 00:05:20,386 he's using the geometry of the houses and the sort of mountainous 79 00:05:20,386 --> 00:05:22,504 region for the geometry. 80 00:05:22,504 --> 00:05:27,548 What he's now doing in this newer phase of what we call analytic Cubism 81 00:05:27,548 --> 00:05:30,635 is he's taking something that you wouldn't necessarily think of 82 00:05:30,635 --> 00:05:36,362 as being made of geometric shapes and solids, 83 00:05:36,362 --> 00:05:41,162 and that is just a violin, a palette, some music, 84 00:05:41,162 --> 00:05:43,578 maybe a newspaper, some curtains. 85 00:05:43,578 --> 00:05:48,908 These are not things you think of as being cubes but he finds the geometry in these. 86 00:05:48,908 --> 00:05:51,856 And you know, one of the things, just like with Impressionism, 87 00:05:51,856 --> 00:05:54,973 that the term is taken -- It was applied to 88 00:05:54,973 --> 00:05:59,874 Monet's paintings as a pejorative term. The same thing happens with the Cubists. 89 00:05:59,874 --> 00:06:06,844 There's a lot of apocryphal information about this, 90 00:06:06,844 --> 00:06:08,926 and some people say it's metis. I don't know. 91 00:06:08,926 --> 00:06:12,431 But somebody says Braque had reduced everything to cubes, 92 00:06:12,431 --> 00:06:16,422 and in a very dismissive sort of way. So, of course, 93 00:06:16,422 --> 00:06:19,421 what happens is this painting becomes known as Cubism. 94 00:06:19,421 --> 00:06:23,858 And you know, you can sort of roughly, intuitively translate that 95 00:06:23,858 --> 00:06:26,987 as finding the cube, finding the geometry in something. 96 00:06:29,277 --> 00:06:33,767 Now, here's another Braque over here, and here's a Picasso, 97 00:06:33,767 --> 00:06:38,688 and I dare you to figure out which is which, right? 98 00:06:39,442 --> 00:06:44,625 It -- And I would never ask you to do that. But what happens is 99 00:06:44,625 --> 00:06:48,247 we have one of the great artistic partnerships of the 20th century 100 00:06:48,247 --> 00:06:52,612 that takes place in these few years when Braque and Picasso worked together. 101 00:06:52,612 --> 00:06:55,362 Now Picasso, you remember, he has this sort of large ego, 102 00:06:55,362 --> 00:06:58,419 he's coming off the "Demoiselles d'Avignon," 103 00:06:58,419 --> 00:07:02,791 which also had broken things up into its geometries. 104 00:07:02,791 --> 00:07:07,653 And so, he and Braque, Picasso and Braque, were sort of arriving at the same place 105 00:07:07,653 --> 00:07:13,912 at the same time, and they end up working together in their studios, 106 00:07:13,912 --> 00:07:18,669 but working together and come up with, again, the style of painting 107 00:07:18,669 --> 00:07:21,052 that is known as analytic Cubism. 108 00:07:21,052 --> 00:07:24,360 And as you can see here, it becomes more and more abstract. 109 00:07:24,360 --> 00:07:28,533 It's quite difficult in the later phases to see -- 110 00:07:28,533 --> 00:07:36,317 This is a street musician in Marseille, a Portuguese street musician here, 111 00:07:36,317 --> 00:07:38,899 and you can only just sort of barely see his face here, 112 00:07:38,899 --> 00:07:41,750 and little bits of guitar strings maybe. 113 00:07:42,357 --> 00:07:47,553 This is Picasso's -- This is Picasso. "Ma Jolie" means "my beautiful one." 114 00:07:47,553 --> 00:07:52,276 You know it's like, "Oh, I hope no one ever does a portrait of me like that." 115 00:07:52,905 --> 00:07:58,816 But he has now totally broken up what would be a portrait into a series of, 116 00:07:58,816 --> 00:08:03,745 you know, cubes and shapes and geometries. And so, again, 117 00:08:03,745 --> 00:08:07,598 there's the sort of subject matter that is just the hanging, you know, 118 00:08:07,598 --> 00:08:14,105 just the sort of frame, and then we have this exploration of space and form 119 00:08:14,105 --> 00:08:15,916 going on in both of these. 120 00:08:15,916 --> 00:08:20,129 So, here, -- Very, very abstract, both of these. 121 00:08:20,959 --> 00:08:27,237 Now, the "Violin and Palette" is a good one to look at in terms of 122 00:08:27,237 --> 00:08:31,031 analytic Cubism because we can still see what's going on here, right? 123 00:08:31,031 --> 00:08:35,027 We can still see, again, that there's the violin and the palette and the music. 124 00:08:35,027 --> 00:08:38,973 And so, we can get a sense of how this is working for them. 125 00:08:38,973 --> 00:08:42,467 This is a little bit earlier, this is a year or so before the "Portuguese" 126 00:08:42,467 --> 00:08:46,771 and "Ma Jolie" in which they abstract things more and more and more. 127 00:08:46,771 --> 00:08:54,754 And then Picasso, in particular, moves on to different kinds of art, but it is -- 128 00:08:54,754 --> 00:08:58,373 This is a little bit one of those moments like Caravaggio where this is -- 129 00:08:58,373 --> 00:09:03,410 This profoundly changes the way people think about art in Europe at this time. 130 00:09:03,410 --> 00:09:08,409 This is an incredibly important milestone in terms of taking art that 131 00:09:08,409 --> 00:09:13,056 was becoming sort of generally more abstract, and now really just 132 00:09:13,056 --> 00:09:19,155 amping it up. And we end up with something that looks astonishingly 133 00:09:19,155 --> 00:09:21,923 different from the art before it. 134 00:09:22,463 --> 00:09:27,537 As I said, it's called analytic Cubism because there's this idea that it's -- 135 00:09:27,537 --> 00:09:30,884 You know, there's this analysis of the geometry. 136 00:09:30,884 --> 00:09:35,008 And there's a couple of features I think that are helpful for you 137 00:09:35,008 --> 00:09:36,967 to try to figure this out. Okay? 138 00:09:36,967 --> 00:09:40,710 And one is the -- There's very shallow pictorial space. 139 00:09:40,710 --> 00:09:42,820 In fact, there's almost none. Okay? 140 00:09:42,820 --> 00:09:45,617 So, we have this, again, this collapsing of space that 141 00:09:45,617 --> 00:09:49,606 we've been talking about all the way along, with Japanese painting, 142 00:09:49,606 --> 00:09:55,949 and then Japanese prints, and then, you know, later Impressionist painting. 143 00:09:56,679 --> 00:10:00,649 So, we have this very shallow and collapsed pictorial space. 144 00:10:00,649 --> 00:10:03,081 We have a limited palette. Okay? 145 00:10:03,081 --> 00:10:06,196 And we talked about that when we talked about Caravaggio. 146 00:10:07,026 --> 00:10:12,223 And that means there's very little color. It's not without color, 147 00:10:12,223 --> 00:10:17,010 but the emphasis is on form here, it is not on color, and so there's 148 00:10:17,010 --> 00:10:23,052 just little vestiges to sort of help you differentiate between 149 00:10:23,052 --> 00:10:25,758 the different objects but there's very little color. 150 00:10:25,758 --> 00:10:28,525 And then, very importantly, there's something called the Cubist grid. 151 00:10:28,525 --> 00:10:30,982 And almost always, in particular with Braque and Picasso, 152 00:10:30,982 --> 00:10:34,375 you can see a sort of grid here. And again, you can think about this 153 00:10:34,375 --> 00:10:39,837 as a sort of template or skeleton or frame that all of this is hanging on. 154 00:10:39,837 --> 00:10:42,537 And what happens with the Cubist grid is you have -- 155 00:10:42,537 --> 00:10:45,319 You have some objects that are sort of rendered three-dimensionally, 156 00:10:45,319 --> 00:10:49,499 some that are completely flattened out, but they're all hanging on this grid. 157 00:10:49,499 --> 00:10:55,034 And that grid also adds to the sense of the -- Overall sense of the geometry, 158 00:10:55,034 --> 00:10:58,673 that this has been reduced to its geometry. Okay? 159 00:10:58,673 --> 00:11:01,656 So, these are some of the features that are very important to think about 160 00:11:01,656 --> 00:11:03,588 when you think about the Cubist grid. 161 00:11:04,258 --> 00:11:08,844 I always think it's very helpful to think about this, in many ways, 162 00:11:08,844 --> 00:11:12,454 as the opposite of what's happening in the Renaissance. Okay? 163 00:11:12,454 --> 00:11:18,542 And so, we talked about the sort of -- not discovery of perspective, 164 00:11:18,542 --> 00:11:27,124 but the putting perspective into some sort of code with scientific perspective. 165 00:11:27,124 --> 00:11:33,264 And Brunelleschi and Alberti, and this idea that you have a vanishing point, 166 00:11:33,264 --> 00:11:37,672 and you have the orthogonals leading to that vanishing point, 167 00:11:37,672 --> 00:11:40,502 and you have the transversals, and you create this grid so that 168 00:11:40,502 --> 00:11:45,148 you can very carefully diminish figures along this grid. Okay? 169 00:11:45,148 --> 00:11:49,158 So, we have figures getting smaller and smaller in the background. 170 00:11:49,158 --> 00:11:55,044 And essentially what the Cubists do is they take that perspectival grid 171 00:11:55,044 --> 00:11:58,170 that people worked so hard to figure out how to do (laughs), 172 00:11:58,170 --> 00:12:02,768 and they just smash it back again, okay? Just (exhales) it back again. 173 00:12:02,768 --> 00:12:08,726 And everything becomes collapsed in the picture plane, in that -- 174 00:12:08,726 --> 00:12:17,574 You know, sort of, very liminal space between us and the actual painting itself. 175 00:12:17,574 --> 00:12:22,189 And so, again, I think these two ways of thinking about grids 176 00:12:22,189 --> 00:12:25,812 nicely bracket the development of perspective, and the taking away 177 00:12:25,812 --> 00:12:30,179 of perspective in this early abstract art. 178 00:12:32,916 --> 00:12:36,104 One of the other things that's very important with this and it's -- 179 00:12:36,104 --> 00:12:41,632 I'm going to tell you, it's tricky, and so, just bear with me here a little bit, 180 00:12:41,632 --> 00:12:48,366 is the fact that there's not a consistent system that is happening in Cubist work. 181 00:12:48,366 --> 00:12:52,708 So, for instance, I don't know if it could be any more consistent Perugino, 182 00:12:52,708 --> 00:12:55,912 if you could be more consistent than that. I mean, he has made this 183 00:12:55,912 --> 00:13:00,113 so unbelievably clear. Literally, we have the transversals 184 00:13:00,113 --> 00:13:02,672 and orthogonals plotted out here. 185 00:13:02,672 --> 00:13:07,223 And people have said, suggested, in the past that this was made so clear 186 00:13:07,223 --> 00:13:11,481 because this is such an important moment for the papacy, when Jesus basically 187 00:13:11,481 --> 00:13:16,827 gives the keys of the church to Peter and therefore Peter then becomes 188 00:13:16,827 --> 00:13:19,923 the first Pope and that's how the church acquires its power. 189 00:13:19,923 --> 00:13:25,392 But it is absolutely crystal clear in a way that almost deadens the composition. 190 00:13:25,392 --> 00:13:29,242 Right? It's so crystal clear. And so, we need about the Cubist grid 191 00:13:29,242 --> 00:13:31,906 as not being like that, okay? And it's more variable. 192 00:13:31,906 --> 00:13:36,930 And again, there's sort of things going in and out of three-dimensional space. 193 00:13:36,930 --> 00:13:38,393 So, what do I mean by that? 194 00:13:38,393 --> 00:13:42,991 Well, if you look at the side of the violin over here, you can see 195 00:13:42,991 --> 00:13:47,747 that the violin has started to be formed into these cubes. And you know, 196 00:13:47,747 --> 00:13:51,625 you can't take all these cubes and put them back and have them form a violin. 197 00:13:51,625 --> 00:13:55,689 I mean, they're finding these underlying cubes, but it's not like you can put this 198 00:13:55,689 --> 00:14:00,227 all together and, you know, put it back into place. It's not a jigsaw puzzle. 199 00:14:00,227 --> 00:14:06,039 Okay? So -- But what he's done is Braque has found these forms, 200 00:14:06,039 --> 00:14:09,433 but there are some places where he has rendered them almost with 201 00:14:09,433 --> 00:14:14,427 fairly traditional modeling. And so, we get a sense here, 202 00:14:14,427 --> 00:14:19,440 if you look over here at this corner, you know, that this is a line 203 00:14:19,440 --> 00:14:26,032 that suggests that you have a face of this geometric feature that is 204 00:14:26,032 --> 00:14:29,996 more or less parallel to the picture plane and that this one is receding away. Okay? 205 00:14:29,996 --> 00:14:32,041 So there's that very sharp line. 206 00:14:32,041 --> 00:14:36,291 But there are also elements in here that you can't see that, okay? 207 00:14:36,291 --> 00:14:40,701 And there's just sort of a gradual merging along here. 208 00:14:40,701 --> 00:14:43,959 And this is what we call passage, and this is -- This comes from -- 209 00:14:43,959 --> 00:14:46,562 This term was -- Cézanne used this term. 210 00:14:46,562 --> 00:14:50,922 And what it is is it's suggesting the way your eye really works. 211 00:14:50,922 --> 00:14:55,386 You know, if you look at something very quickly and you get that first, you know, 212 00:14:55,386 --> 00:15:00,829 snapshot and glance, you can see the sharp edges that form shapes. 213 00:15:00,829 --> 00:15:04,588 But, in fact, the way we actually look at things is that we take time to look at 214 00:15:04,588 --> 00:15:08,529 an object and we sort of look around the object and, you know, 215 00:15:08,529 --> 00:15:11,794 we see all of the different aspects of it in our eye. 216 00:15:11,794 --> 00:15:15,980 Again, that idea, like we talked about in Chinese art, of the cinematic eye. 217 00:15:15,980 --> 00:15:22,499 The eyes are moving around here. And so, very importantly, what this does is this 218 00:15:22,499 --> 00:15:27,359 adds in the element of time to the painting, because we are not 219 00:15:27,359 --> 00:15:31,885 just seeing a snapshot of a frozen moment as you do in -- When you look through 220 00:15:31,885 --> 00:15:34,474 the window into a Renaissance painting. 221 00:15:34,474 --> 00:15:37,532 What the artist is saying is, "I understand you're going 222 00:15:37,532 --> 00:15:40,130 "to stand in front of this and you're going to look at it and you're going to 223 00:15:40,130 --> 00:15:43,612 "see all of these different aspects." And so, you've added in this element 224 00:15:43,612 --> 00:15:49,936 of time. And there's been a lot of research, including by people 225 00:15:49,936 --> 00:15:55,550 in our own department, about, you know, how much did people know about Einstein 226 00:15:55,550 --> 00:15:58,568 and the fourth dimension and the inclusion of time. 227 00:15:58,568 --> 00:16:01,748 And certainly, people like Braque and Picasso were -- 228 00:16:01,748 --> 00:16:06,691 They're artists, but they were aware of these ideas which were sort of floating 229 00:16:06,691 --> 00:16:11,150 around Paris, you know? Paris was also the intellectual hub of Europe 230 00:16:11,150 --> 00:16:18,190 at this time, and so, there may be some ties to the sort of popular science ideas 231 00:16:18,190 --> 00:16:21,848 and this idea of time. But the idea of incorporating time, you know, 232 00:16:21,848 --> 00:16:24,111 this is something fairly new in Western art. But, of course, 233 00:16:24,111 --> 00:16:27,361 we've already seen this in Chinese art, if we think about something like 234 00:16:27,361 --> 00:16:31,208 a hanging scroll and the way that your eye sort of moves up 235 00:16:31,208 --> 00:16:35,385 as you take this visual pilgrimage through the space. Okay? 236 00:16:35,385 --> 00:16:40,753 But this is something now very new and rendered in a very abstract manner. Okay? 237 00:16:40,753 --> 00:16:46,566 So, this is all -- It's all a little difficult to get a handle on, 238 00:16:46,566 --> 00:16:52,798 I realize that. But as I said, this particular painting by Braque 239 00:16:52,798 --> 00:16:58,243 is one which I think is relatively easy to see these different aspects. Okay. 240 00:16:59,103 --> 00:17:04,432 Alright. So, the next time, we are going to move from Braque 241 00:17:04,432 --> 00:17:06,927 into Non-Objective painting.