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Pablo Picasso soaked in all the experimental energy from the |
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Parisian art scene. Inspired by other artists, especially Cézanne |
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and the “primitive” art of Africa and the Pacific, Picasso |
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started to create a radically new style. In the summer of 1906, |
| (5) |
vacationing in a Catalan village, Picasso began carving wooden |
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sculptures. In these works, Picasso was driven to a |
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simplification of form by both the technical properties of the |
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wood he worked with and by the compelling memory of the |
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prehistoric Spanish sculpture he had seen in the Louvre. His |
| (10) |
experience in wood carving led to changes in his painting: his |
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portrait of Gertrude Stein—in which he so radically simplified |
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her face that it became the image of a chiseled mask—marks a |
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crucial shift. He stopped painting what he saw and started |
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painting what he thought. |
| (15) |
At the beginning of 1907, Picasso began the painting, Les |
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Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Women of Avignon), that would |
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arguably become the most important of the century. Initially, the |
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painting consisted of five prostitutes and two men in a narrative |
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brothel scene. But the painting metamorphosed as he worked on it; |
| (20) |
Picasso painted over the clients, leaving the five women to gaze |
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out at the viewer, their faces terrifyingly bold and solicitous. |
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The features of the three women to the left were inspired by the |
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prehistoric sculpture that had interested Picasso the previous |
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summer; those of the two to the right were based on the masks |
| (25) |
that he saw in the African and Oceanic collections in a museum in |
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Paris. Picasso was deeply impressed by what he saw in these |
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works, and they were to be one of his primary influences for the |
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next several years. |
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Art historians once classified this phase of Picasso’s work |
| (30) |
as his “Negro Period.” French imperialism in Africa and the |
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Pacific was at its high point, and gunboats and trading steamers |
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brought back ritual carvings and masks as curiosities. While the |
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African carvings, which Picasso owned, had a kind of dignified |
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aloofness, he, like other Europeans of his time, viewed Africa as |
| (35) |
a symbol of savagery. Unlike most Europeans, however, Picasso saw |
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this savagery as a source of vitality and renewal, which he |
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wanted to incorporate into his painting. His interpretation of |
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African art, in these masklike faces, was based on this idea of |
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African savagery—his brushstrokes are hacking, impetuous, and |
| (40) |
violent. |
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Les Demoiselles was so shockingly new that Gertrude Stein |
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called it “a veritable cataclysm.” She meant this, of course, as |
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a compliment. Not only did this painting later become a turning |
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point duly remarked upon in every history of modern art, but |
| (45) |
Picasso felt at the time that his whole understanding of painting |
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was revised in the course of creating this canvas. |
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In 1907, Picasso met Georges Braque, another young painter |
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deeply interested in Cézanne. Braque and Picasso worked together |
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closely; Braque later said they were “roped together like |
| (50) |
mountaineers” as they explored a new approach to organizing |
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pictorial space. While Picasso had cleared the ground with Les |
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Demoiselles, cubism was a joint construction, to the extent that |
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sometimes Picasso and Braque could not tell their work apart. |
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Afterward, describing Braque’s role in cubism’s later evolution, |
| (55) |
Picasso called him “just a wife,” simultaneously dismissing both |
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his colleague and women. But Braque’s integral role in cubism’s |
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initial invention cannot be disputed. |
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During the summer of 1908, Braque went to L’Estaque, in |
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southern France, where his idol Cézanne had painted before him. |
| (60) |
The way in which cubism attempted to see all angles at once, to |
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paint an analysis of a form instead of its appearance, is |
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illustrated by a comparison of Braque’s painting Houses at |
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L’Estaque with a photograph of the view that Braque was painting. |
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In the painting, scale and perspective are gone, and forms are |
| (65) |
simplified into blocks. There is no distinction between |
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foreground and background; the shapes of the painting seem to be |
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stacked on top of each other . |
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The influence of Braque and Cézanne is clear in Picasso’s |
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paintings from the summer of 1909, which he spent in Horta de |
| (70) |
Ebro. Braque and Picasso had extended Cézanne’s method landscape |
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painting to the point where a view became an almost monochromatic |
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field of faceted form. This method led to paintings that were |
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almost indecipherable combinations of fragmented facets in grays |
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and browns. Kahnweiler was later to name this stage of Picasso |
| (75) |
and Braque’s work “analytical cubism,” because it was based on an |
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analytical description of objects. Describing this period, |
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Kahnweiler wrote, “The great step has been made. Picasso has |
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exploded homogenous form.” Indeed, cubism was an explosion; not |
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only did Cubist paintings resemble the shrapnel of their |
| (80) |
ostensible subjects, but the intent was a kind of joyous |
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destruction of the tradition of western painting and the result |
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was a revolution in art history. |
