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| Essential
Architecture- Search by style
Cubist architecture
Expressionist Architecture |
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| Goetheanum by Rudolph Steiner in 1923 |
Goetheanum |
Prague's House at the Black Madonna |
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| Prague |
Bauerova vila - Libodřice |
Cubist House
Neklanova | Prague, Czech |
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| Georges Braque, Woman with a guitar,
1913 |
Pablo Picasso, Le guitariste, 1910 |
Juan Gris, Portrait of Picasso, 1912, oil on
canvas |
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| It was revolutionary in appearance both
because of the new shapes facades could take, being different from
contemporary and historical styles and because of the use of (reinforced)
concrete structures. In this sense Cubism was richer in content than
Modernism since it considered the facade as a plane of expression that could
hold more than plain white stucco. However, the plans of the buildings
usually were less radical than those developed by Modernism. Also, one may
wonder whether properties of Cubism in painting such as transparency, the
suggestion of three- and four dimensions, and ambiguity hold when they are
applied in architecture. |
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Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo
Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and
sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. The first
branch of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism, was both radical and influential
as a short but highly significant art movement between 1908 and 1911 in
France. In its second phase, Synthetic Cubism, (using synthetic materials in
the art) the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the
Surrealist movement gained popularity.
English art historian Douglas Cooper describes three phases of Cubism in his
seminal book The Cubist Epoch. According to Cooper there was Early Cubism,
(from 1906-1908) during which time the movement was initially developed in
the studios of Picasso and Braque; the second phase being called High
Cubism, (from 1909 to 1914) during which time Juan Gris emerged as an
important exponent; and finally Cooper referred to Late Cubism (from 1914 to
1921) as the last phase of Cubism as a radical avant-garde movement.[1]
In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an
abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist
depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject
in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random
angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes
interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of
cubism's distinct characteristics.
Conception and origins
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite
were discovering African, Micronesian and Native American art for first
time. Artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were
intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those
foreign cultures. Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein,
at a time when both artists had recently acquired an interest in
primitivism, Iberian sculpture, African art and African tribal masks. They
became friendly rivals and competed with each other throughout their
careers, perhaps leading to Picasso entering a new period in his work by
1907, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian and African art. Picasso's
paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, as notably seen in
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the antecedent of Cubism.
Some believe that the roots of cubism are to be found in the two distinct
tendencies of Paul Cézanne's later work: firstly to break the painted
surface into small multifaceted areas of paint, thereby emphasizing the
plural viewpoint given by binocular vision, and secondly his interest in the
simplification of natural forms into cylinders, spheres, and cones.
However, the cubists explored this concept further than Cézanne; they
represented all the surfaces of depicted objects in a single picture plane,
as if the objects had had all their faces visible at the same time. This new
kind of depiction revolutionized the way in which objects could be
visualized in painting and art.
The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then
residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the movement's main
innovators. A later active participant was the Spaniard Juan Gris. After
meeting in 1907 Braque and Picasso in particular began working on the
development of Cubism. Picasso was initially the force and influence that
persuaded Braque by 1908 to move away from Fauvism. The two artists began
working closely together in late 1908 - early 1909 until the outbreak of
World War I in 1914. The movement spread quickly throughout Paris and
Europe.
French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term "cubism", or "bizarre
cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as
'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use
although the two creators did not initially adopt it. Art historian Ernst
Gombrich described cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out
ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture - that of a man-made
construction, a coloured canvas."[2]
Cubism was taken up by many artists in Montparnasse and promoted by art
dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, becoming popular so quickly that by 1911
critics were referring to a "cubist school" of artists. However, many of the
artists who thought of themselves as cubists went in directions quite
different from Braque and Picasso. The Puteaux Group was a significant
offshoot of the Cubist movement; it included Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert
Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, his brothers Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques
Villon, and Fernand Léger, and Francis Picabia. Other important artists
associated with cubism include: Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Marie
Laurencin, Max Weber, Diego Rivera, Marie Vorobieff, Louis Marcoussis,
Jeanne Rij-Rousseau, Roger de La Fresnaye, Henri Le Fauconnier, Alexander
Archipenko, František Kupka, Amédée Ozenfant, Léopold Survage, Patrick Henry
Bruce among others. Section d'Or is another name for a related group of many
of the same artists associated with cubism and orphism.
In 1913 the United States was exposed to cubism and modern European art when
Jacques Villon exhibited seven important and large drypoints at the famous
Armory Show in New York City. Braque and Picasso themselves went through
several distinct phases before 1920, and some of these works had been seen
in New York prior to the Armory Show, at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery.
Czech artists who realized the epochal significance of cubism of Picasso and
Braque attempted to extract its components for their own work in all
branches of artistic creativity - especially painting and architecture. This
developed into Czech Cubism which was an avant-garde art movement of Czech
proponents of cubism active mostly in Prague from 1910 to 1914.
Analytic Cubism
Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, The Art Institute of Chicago.
Picasso's Analytic Cubist portrait of his longtime art dealer. Picasso wrote
of Kahnweiler What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn't had a
business sense?
Analytic Cubism is one of the two major branches of the artistic movement of
Cubism and was developed between 1908 and 1912. In contrast to Synthetic
cubism, Analytic cubists "analyzed" natural forms and reduced the forms into
basic geometric parts on the two-dimensional picture plane. Colour was
almost non-existent except for the use of a monochromatic scheme that often
included grey, blue and ochre. Instead of an emphasis on colour, Analytic
cubists focused on forms like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent
the natural world. During this movement, the works produced by Picasso and
Braque shared stylistic similarities.
Both painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque 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 their paintings Ma Jolie
(1911), by Picasso and The Portuguese (1911), by Braque.
In Paris in 1907 there was a major museum retrospective exhibition of the
work of Paul Cezanne shortly after his death. The exhibition was enormously
influential in establishing Cézanne as an important painter whose ideas were
particularly resonant especially to young artists in Paris. Both Picasso and
Braque found the inspiration for Cubism from Paul Cézanne, who said to
observe and learn to see and treat nature as if it were composed of basic
shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Picasso was the main
analytic cubist, but Braque was also prominent, having abandoned Fauvism to
work with Picasso in developing the Cubist lexicon.
Synthetic Cubism
Synthetic Cubism was the second main branch of Cubism developed by Picasso,
Braque, Juan Gris and others between 1912 and 1919. It was seen as the first
time that collage had been made as a fine art work.
The first work of this new style was Pablo Picasso's Still Life with
Chair-caning (1911–1912), which includes oil cloth pasted on the canvas. At
the upper left are the letters "JOU", which appear in many cubist paintings
and may refer to a newspaper titled "Le Journal". Newspaper clippings were a
common inclusion in this style of cubism, whereby physical pieces of
newspaper, sheet music, or the like were included in the collages. JOU may
also at the same time be a pun on the French words jeu (game) or jouer (to
play). Picasso and Braque had a constant friendly competition with each
other and including the letters in their works may have been an extension of
their game.
Whereas analytic cubism was an analysis of the subjects (pulling them apart
into planes), synthetic cubism is more of a pushing of several objects
together. Picasso, through this movement, was the first to use text in his
artwork (to flatten the space), and the use of mixed media—using more than
one type of medium in the same piece. Opposed to analytic cubism, synthetic
cubism has fewer planar shifts (or schematism), and less shading, creating
flatter space.
Another technique used was called papier collé, or stuck paper, which Braque
used in his collage Fruit Dish and Glass (1913).
Cubism and its ideologies
Paris before World War I was a ferment of politics. The new
anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and women's rights movements were
especially active and vigorous, but patriotic, nationalist movements were
strong as well. Cubism was a particularly varied art movement in its
political affiliations, with some sections being broadly leftist or radical,
and others strongly aligned with nationalist sentiment.
Cubism in other fields
The written works of Gertrude Stein employ repetition and repetitive phrases
as building blocks in both passages and whole chapters. Most of Stein's
important works utilize this technique, including the novel The Makings of
Americans (1906–08) Not only were they the first important patrons of
Cubism, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were also important influences on
Cubism as well. Picasso in turn was an important influence on Stein's
writing.
The poets generally associated with Cubism are Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise
Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, André Salmon and Pierre Reverdy. As
American poet Kenneth Rexroth explains, Cubism in poetry "is the conscious,
deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic
entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. This is quite
different from the free association of the Surrealists and the combination
of unconscious utterance and political nihilism of Dada."[3] Nonetheless,
the Cubist poets' influence on both Cubism and the later movements of Dada
and Surrealism was profound; Louis Aragon, founding member of Surrealism,
said that for Breton, Soupault, Éluard and himself, Reverdy was "our
immediate elder, the exemplary poet."[4] Though not as well remembered as
the Cubist painters, these poets continue to influence and inspire; American
poets John Ashbery and Ron Padgett have recently produced new translations
of Reverdy's work.
Cubism today

Cal Poly Pomona university library in Pomona,
California.
Far from being an art movement confined to the annals of art history, Cubism
and its legacy continue to inform the work of many contemporary artists. Not
only is cubist imagery regularly used commercially but significant numbers
of contemporary artists continue to draw upon it both stylistically and
perhaps more importantly, theoretically. The latter contains the clue as to
the reason for cubism's enduring fascination for artists. As an essentially
representational school of painting, having to come to grips with the rising
importance of photography as an increasingly viable method of image making,
cubism attempts to take representational imagery beyond the mechanically
photographic and to move beyond the bounds of traditional single point
perspective perceived, as though, by a totally immobile viewer. The
questions and theories which arose during the initial appearance of cubism
in the early 20th century are, for many representational artists, as current
today as when first proposed.
References
^ Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, pp. 11-221, Phaidon Press Limited 1970
in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art ISBN 0 87587041 4
^ Ernst Gombrich (1960) Art and Illusion, as quoted in Marshall McLuhan
(1964) Understanding Media, p.12 [1]
^ The Cubist Poetry of Pierre Reverdy (Rexroth)
^ Bloodaxe Books: Title Page > Pierre Reverdy: Selected Poems
^ Illinois Wesleyan University - The American Poetry Web
^ "Welcome to the Library!" (HTML). University Library at Cal Poly Pomona.
Retrieved on 2008-09-19.
Further reading
John Cauman (2001). Inheriting Cubism: The Impact of Cubism on American Art,
1909-1936. New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries. ISBN 0-9705723-4-4.
Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, pp. 11-221, Phaidon Press Limited 1970 in
association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art ISBN 0 87587041 4
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| Link-
http://lava.ds.arch.tue.nl/gallery/praha/tcubism.html (Czech Cubism) |
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