VII.

Cubism (1908-1917)

For many scholars, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—with its fragmented planes, flattened figures, and borrowings from African masks—marks the beginning of the new visual language, known as cubism. Other scholars believe that French painter Paul Cézanne provided the primary catalyst for this change in style. Cézanne’s work of the 1890s and early 1900s was noted both for its simplification and flattening of form and for the introduction of what art historians call passage, the interpenetration of one physical object by another. For example, in Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), Cézanne left the outer edge of the mountain open, allowing the blue area of the sky and the gray area of the mountain to merge. This innovation—air and rock interpenetrating—was a crucial precedent for Picasso’s invention of cubism. First, it defied the laws of our physical experience, and second, it indicated that artists were viewing paintings as having a logic of their own that functioned independently of, or even contrary to, the logic of everyday experience.

Scholars generally divide the cubist innovations of Picasso and French painter Georges Braque into two stages. In the first stage, analytical cubism, the artists fragmented three-dimensional shapes into multiple geometric planes. In the second stage, synthetic cubism, they reversed the process, putting abstract planes together to represent human figures, still lifes, and other recognizable shapes.

A.

Analytical Cubism (1908-1912)

Profoundly influenced by Cézanne's later work, Picasso and Braque initiated a series of landscape paintings in 1908. These paintings approximated Cézanne’s both in their color scheme (dark greens and light browns) and in their drastic simplification of nature to geometric shapes. Upon seeing these paintings, French critic Louis Vauxelles coined the term cubism. In Picasso’s Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro (1909, Museum of Modern Art), he gave architectural structures a three-dimensional, cubic quality, but he abandoned conventional three-dimensional perspective: Instead of being depicted one behind the other, buildings appear one on top of the other. Moreover, he simplified every aspect of the painting according to a vocabulary of cubic shapes—not just the houses but the sky as well. By neutralizing differences between earth and sky, Picasso made the canvas appear more unified, but he also introduced ambiguity by not differentiating solid from void. In addition, Picasso often used inconsistent light sources. In some parts of a painting, light appears to come from the left; in other parts, it comes from the right, the top, or even the bottom. Spatial planes intersect in ways that leave the spectator guessing whether angles are concave or convex. Delight in confusing the viewer is a regular feature of cubism.

By 1910, it had become evident that cubism no longer had any cubes and that the illusion of three-dimensional space, or volume, was gone. Picasso seemed to have dismantled the very idea of solid form, not only by fragmenting the human figure and other shapes, but also by using Cézanne’s concept of passage to merge figure and environment, solid and void, background and foreground. In this way he created a visually consistent painting, yet the consistency does not conform to the physical consistency of the natural world as we experience it. Picasso’s decision to limit his color scheme to dark browns and grays also suggests that his paintings have initiated a radical departure from nature, rather than attempted to copy it.

The year 1912 marks another major development in the cubist language: the invention of collage. In Still Life with Chair Caning (1912, Musée Picasso), Picasso attached a piece of oilcloth (that depicts woven caning) to his work. With this action Picasso not only violated the integrity of the medium—oil painting on canvas—but also included a material that had no previous connection with high art. Art could now be created, Picasso seems to imply, with scissors and glue as well as with paint and canvas. By including pieces of cloth, newspaper, wallpaper, advertising, and other materials in his work, Picasso opened the door for any object or material, however ordinary, to be included in (or even replace) a work of art. This innovation had important consequences for later 20th-century art. Another innovation was including the letters JOU in the painting, possibly referring to the beginning of the word journal (French for “newspaper”) or to the French word jouer, meaning “to play,” as Picasso is playing with forms. These combinations reveal that cubism includes both visual and verbal references, and merges high art with popular culture.

B.

Synthetic Cubism (1912-1917)

By inventing collage and by introducing elements from the real world in his canvases, Picasso avoided taking cubism to the level of complete abstraction and remained in the domain of tangible objects. Collage also initiated the synthetic phase of cubism. Whereas analytical cubism fragmented figures into geometric planes, synthetic cubism synthesized (combined) near-abstract shapes to create representational forms, such as a human figure or still life. Synthetic cubism also tended toward multiplicity. In Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass (1912, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas), for instance, Picasso combined a drawing of a glass, several spots of color, sheet music, newspaper, a wallpaper pattern, and a cloth that has a wood–grain pattern. Synthetic cubism may also combine different textures, such as wood grain, sand, and printed matter. Sometimes Picasso applied these textures as collage, by gluing textured papers on the canvas. In other cases the artist painted an area to look like wood or wallpaper, fooling the spectator by means of visual puns.