Skank Your Art

Cubism

BREAK is never a good word. A broken glass, a broken heart. Pieces that do not make any sense when on their own.

Two people changed that though, encapsulated in one word--cubism.

Art used to imitate life and is a depiction of actual nature.

But not when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque started to revolutionize art in the development known as modern art. Central to this, is cubism.

It is called cubism, not necessarily because cubes are prominent in this mode of art. It is not the shape, but the manner. Albeit, the name was derived after an artist known as Matisse, described Picasso’s first cubist work as “with little cubes.”

Cubism is defined by fragments of geometrical shapes.

Each part of the art piece is magnified through the shaped fragment that it has been presented in.

Cubism was born in the 20th century.

It was a movement that defied the more popular art that spreads the nature and life on the canvass. Where what one sees in the real world is planted on a rectangular frame.

While Picasso was a Spaniard, this form of art was created in Paris, France between 1907 and 1914.

It became the most influential art style of that generation. A novice and revolutionary design.

Biographers would imply that Picasso had become unhappy in his home country at the turn of the 19th century. That was when he discovered inspiration in Paris. A new place, for a new kind of art.

If cubism was a clan, the patriarch would be Les Demoiselles Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon). It was Picasso’s 1906 creation that confused many, but which Braque understood fairly well. Braque was working on a similar technique.

The painting was controversial in two levels--because it was a painting of women on the street of Avignon where brothels are popular, and because of the then unconventionally manner by which it was presented.

Picasso, a Spaniard, and Braque, a French, stuck up a partnership and developed the cubist art movement in Paris.

The movement though slowly inched its way to America, Holland, Germany, Russia, Italy and England.

Picasso and Braque wanted to show multiple views of the subject in a single canvass. Each magnified and with a personality of its own.

With the public referring to the cubist art came the term analytical cubism.

The latter was also in consonance with the analytic approach a viewer has to possess as the cubist movement progressed.

Cubist art became less discernible. One has to study the blocks by which the entire subject is presented on, to the point of telepathically moving the blocks to fit an understandable form.

Around 1910 to 1912, the works of Picasso and Braque became very abstract that high mode of analysis was wanting of an observer.

Between those years was also the first cubist exhibit of Picasso and Braque in Amsterdam, what one may call the most liberal city in the planet.

Picasso was born on Oct. 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain but died in Mougins, France on Oct. 25, 1881. It was in France where he made his mark in history, particularly in art, so it was fitting that he died there.

It was no surprise that Picasso ventured into art because his father was a professor at drawing. Picasso became his father’s student at age 10.

Braque had a more or less the same story. He took up after his father. Only, Braque’s father was a house painter and Braque apprenticed for him for a while, until the cubist decided to study painting as a fine art.

Braque was born on May 13, 1882 near Paris in France and died in Paris on Aug. 31, 1963.

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