-
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.
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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 --
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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.
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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
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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 --
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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"
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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.