Approaches: Year Long Project

Approaches: Year Long Project

Approach Style 3

Third Suggested Approach

3. Using this approach will cause you to use the concept of fragmentation to arrive at interesting and compelling representations of reality. This approach is based upon the idea that our experience of reality is really a series of glimpses or stop action views that are rather miraculously seamed together by our minds so as not to seem like fragments.

Influence of African Art Exhibit

Above: Les Mademoiselles D’Avignion, 1908, Pablo Picasso

The African Art exhibit in 1905 directly influenced painters in the early 19th century, specifically cubism. Les Mademoiselles D’Avignion is not a cubist piece, nor did Pablo Picasso invent the idea of cubism. It was a series of new and old ideas colliding which shaped and molded the early 20th century Modern Art Movements, and the catalyst—African Art.

Futurism 1907- 1914

Above: Nude Descending Staircase, 1912, Marcel Duchamp

Right: Funérailles de l'anarchiste Galli, 1911, Carlos Carrà

•Duchamp's first controversial work, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), depicts the motion of the mechanistic nude with superimposed facets, similar to motion pictures. The painting shows elements of both the fragmentation and synthesis of the Cubists, and the movement and dynamism of the Futurists.

•Carrà's Funeral of the Anarchist, representing events that the artist had himself been involved in in 1904. The action of a police attack and riot is rendered energetically with diagonals and broken planes. His Leaving the Theatre (1910-11) uses a Divisionist technique to render isolated and faceless figures trudging home at night under street lights.

Umberto BoccioniBelow: Street Noises Invade the House, 1911

Left: Elasticity, 1912

•Boccioni was the main theorist behind the movement •Inspired by Motion Pictures popularized 1895•Create the feel of movement in a still image or sculpture

Robert Rosenblum: "Boccioni's Elasticity of 1912 now begins to focus more exclusively on a study of vigorous, sequential movement, as foreign to the intellectual dynamics of Analytical Cubism as the aggressively harsh and sour colors. A literal demonstration of horsepower, Boccioni's machinelike horse, with its virile, black-booted rider, thunders across an appropriately mechanized landscape of high-tension poles and factory chimneys. If the splintered planes of such a work depend on the Cubist analysis of solid and void, the reasons for this dismemberment are very different. Here mass has been shattered by the dynamic energies of horse and rider, with their up-and-down as well as forward motion, rather than by the quiet spatial investigations of Cubism. If in Cubism the spectator, by implication, moves around static objects, in a Futurist canvas like this the spectator remains static while moving objects rush across his field of vision. Again, vestiges of an Impressionist viewpoint may be sensed here, especially in the way the extremities of horse and rider lie beyond the picture's edge. By using this Impressionist compositional technique, Boccioni implies not only that his tightly compressed subject is so dynamic that it must burst its four-sided confines, but that it is a fragment of a constantly changing visual experience."

Boccioni: Sculpture

Right: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

Above: Development of a Bottle in Space, 1912

"A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere."

Cubism 1908-1914

In Cubism the subject matter is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form. Picasso and Braque initiated the movement when they followed the advice of Paul Cézanne, who in 1904 said artists should treat nature "in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone. "There were three phases in the development of Cubism: Facet Cubism, Analytic Cubism, and Synthetic Cubism.

•Broken into planes with open edges•Edges slide into each other while denying all depth•Color is reduced and muted (until reintroduced in 1912)•Uniformly applied brushstrokes creating vibrations of light

Above: A Woman Sitting in Chair, 1910, Pablo Picasso

Right: Large Nude, 1908, George Braque

Below: Woman in Red and Green, 1914, Fernand Léger

George Braque

Below: Still Life with Violin, 1911

Braque's paintings of 1908–1913 began to reflect his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, appearing to question the most standard of artistic conventions. In his village scenes, for example, Braque frequently reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional. In this way, Braque called attention to the very nature of visual illusion and artistic representation.

Left: Glass, Carafe, and Newspapers, 1914, papiers collés

Below: Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe, and Glass, 1913, papiers collés

Other Cubist Images

Left: Le Petit Déjeuner, 1919, Fernand Léger

Above: The Violin, 1914, Pablo Picasso

Left: Castle at La Roche-Guyon, 1919, George Braque

Although Picasso is attributed for the theory of cubism, Gorge Braque is the true father of Cubism. Picasso had a huge influence in it’s popularity and helping stretch it’s bounds.