Okay, let's now take a look at the really first and very famous
face of abstraction that is known as Cubism. And this is George Braque's
"Violin and Palette."
A palette is, if you've ever seen the sort of stereotypical artist
holding a palette with all the colors. This is a palette up here, okay?
And so, it's "Violin and Palette." It's oil on canvas.
1909 to 1910. Sometimes we don't know exactly when artists paint this.
We are also in the period of time where artists go back
and sort of fiddle with their work.
Remember, this is oil and so it stays wet and you can --
You can play around with your work.
And notice that it's not really that big. Okay? It's fairly small.
You can clearly, I think, see see the violin in here and
some sheet music and then the palette and what looks like curtains here,
but I don't think you would argue with me that this is very abstract.
I mean we know it's something, we know it's got objects in it,
we know there's a subject here. But we -- It becomes increasingly
difficult to see this. So let's think a little bit about Braque
and sort of his process here.
Here are some lovely photos of Braque. Here he is in his studio
over on the left as a young man, sort of in his full Cubist phase.
And note that he's -- Some of these that --
Instruments and other things that are on the wall,
these are his collections. And in many ways, you could go back
and look at "Violin and Palette," and if you look at some of
these other Cubist works, the subject matter is very traditional.
It's kind of like a Dutch still life in which you have a bunch of things
piled on and the painters paint them.
In the Dutch still life, they are, of course, trying to make it
as naturalistic as it is possible. And what Braque is doing here
is making something that is very abstract.
But these are all objects in his studio that he would have used
to sort of -- He would have composed sort of a little still life and then
used that as a jumping off basis for his very abstract renderings of these.
Here he is later in life.
He kind of stuck with what he knew and he's now working with some
of these bigger geometric forms, but he still remains very much
an abstract artist all the way through his career.
You know, a lot of these artists, it's fascinating because they --
Several of the artists we'll talk about today, they go Paris.
It's like Van Gogh. You have to go to Paris because that's where it's at.
It's like everybody now wants to go to Brooklyn, you know?
Used to be Manhattan -- And now everybody wants to go Brooklyn and hang out.
But then it was Paris. And so, Braque, he went there and
he sort of goes through these sort of ontological stages.
And so, he sort of dabbles in kind of Impressionistic stuff, and then --
This is kind of post-Impressionist, very bright colors,
almost these large brushstrokes, like the painter Seurat.
And he has a sudden change in his style. And people have --
Scholars have suggested that this is because Braque goes down
to the south of France, and he becomes familiar with
the painting, in particular, of Cézanne. And we haven't really talked about
Cézanne in this course, but Cézanne is this
very important post-Impressionist painter. There have been several
retrospectives of his work. And he is really --
Cézanne is really the one who's really starting to take apart the landscape
and find this component geometry that is underlying this.
All the while also absolutely reinforcing the fact that the canvas
is two-dimensional and flat.
And so, it's this great sort of quixotic, impossible quest in many ways.
I mean, you want to show, you want to find the underlying geometry
and you also want to show that the canvas is flat, that it's two-dimensional.
So this is something that Cézanne works on and Cézanne works on it for a long time.
And he's incredibly wealthy. He doesn't have to worry about getting his --
Anybody buying his paintings. And Braque becomes interested in this,
but you can see he takes on a much --
Cézanne's got more of that sort of, you know, loose brushstroke
that we affiliate with Impressionism and post-Impressionism.
And here you can see we have a much more limited color palette.
It's not that sort of range of colors, it's just the green and the gold colors.
And it's much stronger geometries here.
So, you know, you think about this is 1907, he sees Cézanne --
And here is 1908, when he also goes down to the south of France.
So, there's a big change, so this is very important in his life.
And then from there, he goes on to reducing the color even more
and working more on, again, finding the underlying geometry.
In this case, in the "Houses at L'Estaque,"
he's using the geometry of the houses and the sort of mountainous
region for the geometry.
What he's now doing in this newer phase of what we call analytic Cubism
is he's taking something that you wouldn't necessarily think of
as being made of geometric shapes and solids,
and that is just a violin, a palette, some music,
maybe a newspaper, some curtains.
These are not things you think of as being cubes but he finds the geometry in these.
And you know, one of the things, just like with Impressionism,
that the term is taken -- It was applied to
Monet's paintings as a pejorative term. The same thing happens with the Cubists.
There's a lot of apocryphal information about this,
and some people say it's metis. I don't know.
But somebody says Braque had reduced everything to cubes,
and in a very dismissive sort of way. So, of course,
what happens is this painting becomes known as Cubism.
And you know, you can sort of roughly, intuitively translate that
as finding the cube, finding the geometry in something.
Now, here's another Braque over here, and here's a Picasso,
and I dare you to figure out which is which, right?
It -- And I would never ask you to do that. But what happens is
we have one of the great artistic partnerships of the 20th century
that takes place in these few years when Braque and Picasso worked together.
Now Picasso, you remember, he has this sort of large ego,
he's coming off the "Demoiselles d'Avignon,"
which also had broken things up into its geometries.
And so, he and Braque, Picasso and Braque, were sort of arriving at the same place
at the same time, and they end up working together in their studios,
but working together and come up with, again, the style of painting
that is known as analytic Cubism.
And as you can see here, it becomes more and more abstract.
It's quite difficult in the later phases to see --
This is a street musician in Marseille, a Portuguese street musician here,
and you can only just sort of barely see his face here,
and little bits of guitar strings maybe.
This is Picasso's -- This is Picasso. "Ma Jolie" means "my beautiful one."
You know it's like, "Oh, I hope no one ever does a portrait of me like that."
But he has now totally broken up what would be a portrait into a series of,
you know, cubes and shapes and geometries. And so, again,
there's the sort of subject matter that is just the hanging, you know,
just the sort of frame, and then we have this exploration of space and form
going on in both of these.
So, here, -- Very, very abstract, both of these.
Now, the "Violin and Palette" is a good one to look at in terms of
analytic Cubism because we can still see what's going on here, right?
We can still see, again, that there's the violin and the palette and the music.
And so, we can get a sense of how this is working for them.
This is a little bit earlier, this is a year or so before the "Portuguese"
and "Ma Jolie" in which they abstract things more and more and more.
And then Picasso, in particular, moves on to different kinds of art, but it is --
This is a little bit one of those moments like Caravaggio where this is --
This profoundly changes the way people think about art in Europe at this time.
This is an incredibly important milestone in terms of taking art that
was becoming sort of generally more abstract, and now really just
amping it up. And we end up with something that looks astonishingly
different from the art before it.
As I said, it's called analytic Cubism because there's this idea that it's --
You know, there's this analysis of the geometry.
And there's a couple of features I think that are helpful for you
to try to figure this out. Okay?
And one is the -- There's very shallow pictorial space.
In fact, there's almost none. Okay?
So, we have this, again, this collapsing of space that
we've been talking about all the way along, with Japanese painting,
and then Japanese prints, and then, you know, later Impressionist painting.
So, we have this very shallow and collapsed pictorial space.
We have a limited palette. Okay?
And we talked about that when we talked about Caravaggio.
And that means there's very little color. It's not without color,
but the emphasis is on form here, it is not on color, and so there's
just little vestiges to sort of help you differentiate between
the different objects but there's very little color.
And then, very importantly, there's something called the Cubist grid.
And almost always, in particular with Braque and Picasso,
you can see a sort of grid here. And again, you can think about this
as a sort of template or skeleton or frame that all of this is hanging on.
And what happens with the Cubist grid is you have --
You have some objects that are sort of rendered three-dimensionally,
some that are completely flattened out, but they're all hanging on this grid.
And that grid also adds to the sense of the -- Overall sense of the geometry,
that this has been reduced to its geometry. Okay?
So, these are some of the features that are very important to think about
when you think about the Cubist grid.
I always think it's very helpful to think about this, in many ways,
as the opposite of what's happening in the Renaissance. Okay?
And so, we talked about the sort of -- not discovery of perspective,
but the putting perspective into some sort of code with scientific perspective.
And Brunelleschi and Alberti, and this idea that you have a vanishing point,
and you have the orthogonals leading to that vanishing point,
and you have the transversals, and you create this grid so that
you can very carefully diminish figures along this grid. Okay?
So, we have figures getting smaller and smaller in the background.
And essentially what the Cubists do is they take that perspectival grid
that people worked so hard to figure out how to do (laughs),
and they just smash it back again, okay? Just (exhales) it back again.
And everything becomes collapsed in the picture plane, in that --
You know, sort of, very liminal space between us and the actual painting itself.
And so, again, I think these two ways of thinking about grids
nicely bracket the development of perspective, and the taking away
of perspective in this early abstract art.
One of the other things that's very important with this and it's --
I'm going to tell you, it's tricky, and so, just bear with me here a little bit,
is the fact that there's not a consistent system that is happening in Cubist work.
So, for instance, I don't know if it could be any more consistent Perugino,
if you could be more consistent than that. I mean, he has made this
so unbelievably clear. Literally, we have the transversals
and orthogonals plotted out here.
And people have said, suggested, in the past that this was made so clear
because this is such an important moment for the papacy, when Jesus basically
gives the keys of the church to Peter and therefore Peter then becomes
the first Pope and that's how the church acquires its power.
But it is absolutely crystal clear in a way that almost deadens the composition.
Right? It's so crystal clear. And so, we need about the Cubist grid
as not being like that, okay? And it's more variable.
And again, there's sort of things going in and out of three-dimensional space.
So, what do I mean by that?
Well, if you look at the side of the violin over here, you can see
that the violin has started to be formed into these cubes. And you know,
you can't take all these cubes and put them back and have them form a violin.
I mean, they're finding these underlying cubes, but it's not like you can put this
all together and, you know, put it back into place. It's not a jigsaw puzzle.
Okay? So -- But what he's done is Braque has found these forms,
but there are some places where he has rendered them almost with
fairly traditional modeling. And so, we get a sense here,
if you look over here at this corner, you know, that this is a line
that suggests that you have a face of this geometric feature that is
more or less parallel to the picture plane and that this one is receding away. Okay?
So there's that very sharp line.
But there are also elements in here that you can't see that, okay?
And there's just sort of a gradual merging along here.
And this is what we call passage, and this is -- This comes from --
This term was -- Cézanne used this term.
And what it is is it's suggesting the way your eye really works.
You know, if you look at something very quickly and you get that first, you know,
snapshot and glance, you can see the sharp edges that form shapes.
But, in fact, the way we actually look at things is that we take time to look at
an object and we sort of look around the object and, you know,
we see all of the different aspects of it in our eye.
Again, that idea, like we talked about in Chinese art, of the cinematic eye.
The eyes are moving around here. And so, very importantly, what this does is this
adds in the element of time to the painting, because we are not
just seeing a snapshot of a frozen moment as you do in -- When you look through
the window into a Renaissance painting.
What the artist is saying is, "I understand you're going
"to stand in front of this and you're going to look at it and you're going to
"see all of these different aspects." And so, you've added in this element
of time. And there's been a lot of research, including by people
in our own department, about, you know, how much did people know about Einstein
and the fourth dimension and the inclusion of time.
And certainly, people like Braque and Picasso were --
They're artists, but they were aware of these ideas which were sort of floating
around Paris, you know? Paris was also the intellectual hub of Europe
at this time, and so, there may be some ties to the sort of popular science ideas
and this idea of time. But the idea of incorporating time, you know,
this is something fairly new in Western art. But, of course,
we've already seen this in Chinese art, if we think about something like
a hanging scroll and the way that your eye sort of moves up
as you take this visual pilgrimage through the space. Okay?
But this is something now very new and rendered in a very abstract manner. Okay?
So, this is all -- It's all a little difficult to get a handle on,
I realize that. But as I said, this particular painting by Braque
is one which I think is relatively easy to see these different aspects. Okay.
Alright. So, the next time, we are going to move from Braque
into Non-Objective painting.