Cubism & the Cubist Movement
Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque...
The painting's of L'Estaque and Gardanne that Cezanne had painted in the 1880's are, broken into planes which are separated by the houses, the ochre's show different play's of light and a description of space, but one aspect of Cubism stands out the most in these painting's, the use of geometric shapes, striations and cross hatching's seen in many composition's of 1908-1909. Braque and Picasso set out to follow in the footsteps of Cezanne. Braque first went to Ciotat in 1907, and then to L'Estaque. It was in L'Estaque, where Braque changed his style from Fauvism, a way of rendering space in terms of colour, opposing hot and cold colours, to the more subtle analysis of space by, splitting the painting into planes, juxtaposing and superimposing them. Compositions composed muted tones massively dominated by browns and ochre's, tending to go towards the idea of monochromatism.
Brague stayed in L'Esaque in 1908,and painted the same subjects as Cezanne twenty years earlier, the viaduct, the road from L'Estaque and a number of landscapes. Architectural elements, cubes for walls and pyramids for roofs of houses, and a relation to vegetation, the curves of trees, their trunks and foliage, which look denser and more plane like, Unlike their natural and separated forms. While Braque was painting in Provence, Picasso spent a few weeks in a little village to the north of Paris called La Rue-des-Bois, painting landscapes of the Oise Valley. Painted using a similar style to that of Braque, but I feel that they are less inventive. Picasso found his inspiration when he went to Horta de San Juan in the summer of 1909. The use of Cezannian style is brought out to show distance and space on many of the sketches and paintings of the small Spanish village.
Picasso unlike Braque did not limit his experimentations to landscapes, he made many studies of heads in the spring of 1909. Portraits that stand out are that of Fernade, painted in oils on canvas and shows the use of plains of colour, right angles broken by the sweep of the chin, and the roundness of the cheeks. There is minimal background information only in the form of a vase of flowers. In that same spring Picasso painted a portrait of Clovis Sagot, but the figure is not broken up into plans like that of Fernade and show's a consideration to background detail.
The year of 1909 was less productive than 1908, but was important as a turning point for Braque. Braque's interest in landscapes continued, but now he sought to widen its possibilities. A move to I'le-de-France and Normandy created a new edge to his work. The painting of La Roche-Guyon, is still inspirational to that of Cezanne and his own painting's of L'Estaque, he abandoned all attempt at depth, for his main intention is to produce a harmony of forms using opposing ochre's and greens on a two dimensional surface.The painting of the port in Normandy is yet again different to those previous. The composition is made up of boat's seascape and lighthouse, they are broken up into plane's and interpenetrated, so that sea, sky and land can not be Isolated as one single element. The whole picture has been solidified into overlapping planes. The painting presents itself as a whole, not as an assembly of independent and individual elements. Such a break up of the painted surface into multiple planes in order to give an idea of space, was later to be turned into Analytical Cubism.