Cubism & the Cubist Movement
Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque...
Picasso returned to Paris after his stay in Horta de San Juan where he had been painting nudes. The paintings of nudes are geometric, rectangular blocks with the exception of ovals for their faces. The oval faces break up the rhythm of the lines and create a diversion, making the viewers eye scan the whole painting. Back in Paris, Picasso resumed his paintings of heads with a portrait of Wilhelm Uhde. The portrait, started at the beginning of 1910, is typical of the Analytical Cubist style. The painting is made up of hundreds of facet shapes, like staring into a shattered mirror. The lines on the chin and cheeks do not change the direction of these lines and are there for impression. The use of colour has also been removed, leaving only a washed residue of gray and ochre. Braque did not show great interest in portraiture, but the portraits he painted are very individual, and very distinctive from that of Picasso. Braque's un interest in portraits was soon acknowledged
I had painted a great many portraits in my youth, almost all of them since destroyed. But this had never really interested me, and even when I painted figures, during the period of my cubist research, I regarded them as still life's. Picasso on the contrary, has always painted real portraits
The portrait of The Women's Head is one of a minority, he treated the painting like he would a still life. Far from being an abstract art, cubism aimed at reality in all it's aspects, not according to what is seen by the camera or the Impressionist's eye. The painting is less static,
The sense's deform, the spirits forms
It was in this sense cubist's presented themselves as realist's. This view was not only put across by painter's but also poets Apollinire, Salmon, Reverdy and Cendrars. One of the many painters to take interest in cubism was Fernand Leger.
The realistic value of work is totally independent of any imitative quality....Pictoral realism is the simultaneous organization of the three great plastic qualities: The lines, forms and colours
From 1910-1911 Picasso and Braque extended their use of analytical cubism to a higher degree, this became 'Hermetic'. The objects are violated and elements fragmented until the resulting image is almost illegible.