Anjas’ Theme Of The Week: Picasso week 5: Cubist Period

Picasso: Cubist Period

Picasso - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

In my fifth post about Picasso we arrived at Cubism. I love this art. I love it when you have to really look at a painting to discover all its signs, meaning, forms, etc. Looking at Analytic Cubism, you sometimes need to look twice to see what is painted; a face, an instrument, a table. Great art!

Photos in this blog are in chronological order.

Cubism (Wikipedia)

Picasso - Harlequin leaning, 1909

The beginnings of Cubism have been dated between 1907 and 1911. The question of when Cubism began depends on the questions of how it can be defined, what distinguishes Cubist art and who developed it first.
Pablo Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has often been considered a proto-Cubist work.

Georges Braque's 1908 Houses at L’Estaque (and related works) prompted Vauxcelles' cubes reference. Gertrude Stein referred to landscapes made by Picasso in 1909, such as Reservoir at Horta de Ebroas, as the first Cubist paintings. The first organized group exhibition by Cubists took place at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris during the spring of 1911 in a room called ‘Salle 41’; it included works by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and Henri Le Fauconnier, yet no works by Picasso and Braque were exhibited.
Picasso became recognized by 1911 as the inventor of Cubism, while Braque’s importance and precedence was argued later; with respect to his treatment of space, volume and mass in the L’Estaque landscapes. But "this view of Cubism is associated with a distinctly restrictive definition of which artists are properly to be called Cubists," writes the art historian Christopher Green: "Marginalizing the contribution of the artists who exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911

Picasso - Girl with mandolin (Fanny Tellier), 1910

Analytic Cubism was developed by Picasso and Braque during the winter of 1909-10. It lasted until the middle of 1912, when collage introduced simplified versions of the "analytic" forms.

Picasso and Braque invented specific shapes and characteristic details that would represent the whole object or person.Specific parts of an object that are meant to represent the whole thing seen from various points of view (simultaneity).

These "signs" developed from the artists' analyses of objects in space. The most complex period of "Analytic Cubism" has been called "Hermetic Cubism," because it is almost impossible to figure out the images. However, they are there--no matter how distorted they may be. Analytic Cubism is not abstract art.