III.

Analytical and Synthetic Cubism: Picasso and Braque

Art historians generally divide Picasso and Braque’s early cubism into two phases. Analytical cubism, the earlier phase, continued until 1912. It was followed by synthetic cubism, which lasted through 1915. Analytical cubism fragments the physical world into intersecting geometric planes and interpenetrating volumes. Synthetic cubism, by contrast, synthesizes (combines) abstract shapes to represent objects in a new way.

A.

Analytical Cubism

By 1910, when Picasso painted his Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia), the language of cubism had become flatter and more consistent, but also more ambiguous. In this work, Picasso fragmented a human figure into a series of transparent geometric planes that intersect at a variety of angles. But none of these planes give the illusion of three-dimensionality—that is, of volume as in a cube. By this stage in analytical cubism, it had become progressively evident that there were no cubes in cubism. In fact, Picasso seemed to be dismantling the idea of three-dimensional form altogether, not only by fragmentation, but also by his use of Cézanne's passage technique. With Portrait of Ambroise Vollard Picasso merged figure and environment, solid and void, background and foreground. The resulting composition is visually consistent but does not appear to conform to the physical laws of nature.

On the basis of analytical cubism’s fragmented, intersecting planes, many people have argued that the underlying intention of cubist artists was to depict an object or human figure from multiple perspectives. For example, the mouth of a bottle might be shown from the top, with the rest of the bottle shown in profile. But this is only one aspect of cubism and does not account for much of its appearance. A more persuasive interpretation is that cubism aimed to invent a new visual language that had its own internal logic and consistency, one that did not attempt to imitate nature directly. The cubists never intended to depict nature accurately, whether from one point of view or many. After all, Picasso and Braque intentionally limited their color scheme to dark browns and grays, an approach that could only have resulted from a radical departure from nature.

B.

Synthetic Cubism

A technique called collage, invented by Picasso, initiated the second phase of cubism in 1912. Collage, from the French word coller meaning “to glue,” involved pasting a piece of paper or other material to the surface of a painting. In his Still Life with Chair Caning (1912, Musée Picasso, Paris, France), Picasso included a piece of oil cloth printed to look like chair caning. This was a radical act, for nobody had ever before put anything but paint on a painting. Just as important, oil cloth was a material that had had no previous connection with art. Its inclusion implied that art could be created with scissors and glue as well as with brushes and paint. Both Picasso and Braque began to include bits of newspaper, wallpaper, or advertising in their paintings. Collage opened the door for any object or material, however ordinary, to be included within (and possibly even to replace) a work of art.

Reinforcing this tendency to merge art with outside elements was the inclusion in Still-life with Chair Caning of the painted letters JOU, a reference to the beginning of the word journal (French for “newspaper”) or possibly to the word jouer (French for “to play”). Picasso, after all, was playing with forms. In this work, Picasso combined several visual languages (such as paint, oil cloth, and newsprint) with a verbal language (the lettering).

Instead of working toward a consistent, unified surface as analytical cubism had done, synthetic cubism tended toward multiplicity by combining a variety of styles, surfaces, and visual languages into one painting. In Braque's Clarinet (1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), for instance, the artist combined representational drawing with abstract shapes to suggest a still life. Some forms are flat, whereas others, though simplified, appear three-dimensional and cast shadows. Synthetic cubism routinely combined abstract and representational forms, as well as a variety of textures: wood grain, sand, printed matter, and so on. Sometimes these different textures were incorporated by means of collage; other times the artist simply painted an area to look like another surface, such as wood.

The later work of Picasso and Braque underwent numerous stylistic changes, but a great deal of it continued to show the influence of cubism. However, the ways that they used cubism no longer fit neatly into the strictly defined categories of analytical or synthetic cubism.