Cubism In Art Essay, Research Paper

In the

world of art, Cubism is probably the most important art movement in the history

of 20th Century Art. Cubism brought in new ways of composing pictures and also

showed new ways of representing nature. New movement also brought in new

attitudes towards the picture surface and the application of paint. The ideas of

colour theory were all changed. This caused a liberation of these elements from

a merely descriptive function have all featured in the development of Cubism. At

the beginning of the first decade of this ending century two young artists

emerged trying to make a name for themselves in the highly competitive

Avant-Garde of Paris. One of them, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), a young Spaniard

who had moved to France had been a deliberate act of encouraging the latest

developments of French paintings. The other artist was Georges Braque

(1881-1963) already a vanguard of modern painting as a practising Fauve. He was

experimenting with liberating colour in an attempt to be the forefront of a

small Avant-Garde community. Both artists met and they developed a solution

between them. Between 1909 and the outbreak of the First World War Cubism was

introduced. Cubism evolved from a mixture of influences. However there were two

that were of great importance. The first was a major exhibition o Primitive Art

mainly displaying sculptures, totems, juju figures and ancestral figures. The

work and end in its self however it was a catalyst for ideas in the future. The

second influence was the work of Paul Cezanne. Hs significance for cubists was

in attempting to re-establish a sense of 3D-Form in painting, which he believed

impressionists had lost. In doing this he developed a theory that the entire

world and everything in it could be reduced to basic forms such as cones,

cylinders, spheres, cubes. The end result was a network of small marks, which

broke up the surface of the canvas. This was Cezanne?s distinct style, the

deconstruction of form, which is the key to the manner in which Cubists were to

reshape Western European Art. The ?Aficionado? painting by Picasso was an

ultimate example of a Cubist picture. The fragments of this picture produce a

visual puzzle. The painting is a portrait of a bull fighting fan and in the

painting there are suggestions of a mouth, eyes, a wine bottle and a guitar. The

Aficionado is an example of what is known as analytic Cubism, which was

developed in 1911/12. 1913 was a period that Braque produced a series of

paintings. These included ?Still life the table? and ?Still life with a

bottle of Bass?. He used Cubist devices known as ?Tricks of the Trade? in

his work. During this period his work was usually refereed to as Synthetic

Cubism.