Art Girl in Paris: Art Embodied: Cubism

With the skies gray and the rain falling, I was more than happy to head into the museum to do some sketching. The Picasso museum was closed, so I returned to the Pompidou, and later visited the Museum of Modern Art on the western banks of the Seine. Cubism has been the anthem of the week for my independent study project ‘Art Embodied’. Above, view from the Pompidou!

Cubism was an extremely influential artistic movement launched in Paris around 1904. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque exploded the notion of the single perspective point — an element of painting that had been taken as a given since, well, painting itself.

‘I paint what I think, not what I see,’ Picasso said in a quote that sums up the conceptual bent of cubism. Cubists instigated what some refer to as a ‘crisis of the realist illusion’ — a dramatic way to say they stopped representing the world around them as it was perceived by the eye.

Several elements of cubism have ramifications on how the human figure is represented, and how human anatomy factors into the equation.

Cubist works often feature numerous points of view at the same time. This approach is what lends many cubist works a sort of deformed quality, with planes that would normally be hidden brought into the plane of the two dimensional canvas. In terms of the human figure in these works, it means anatomy is largely disregarded. The artist’s goal is not to recreate the world, or the human body, as they see it, but rather how they interpret it conceptually and choose to represent artistically.

Cubist works are often dominated by an overwhelming planarity. Depth falls to the wayside as the entire subject matter is flattened into a single plane. Graident shading is rarely used, replaced by uniform shapes of color. It is shape and contour that gives these works their form.

On top of being flattened, the human body is often simplified in cubist works. The figures are the product of a complicated process of artistic digestion, in which the cubist takes in visual information, process it, and reinterprets it in an autonomous way. For the cubist this process often results in the streamlining of visual information. The cubist opts for the efficient mark — a triangle for a nose, a circle and dot for a breast, a large arc for a hip.

These three elements — multi perspectives, planarity, and simplification of form, guide the cubist’s representation of the human figure. To understand these principles in a more concrete way, I tried my hand at cubism in my sketches this week:

I also observed Cubist works in person to understand how the human figure was reduced to a planes.

‘La Ville de Paris,’ a large-scale painting in the Modern Art Museum of Paris, was painted by Robert Delaunay in 1910 and is a good example of human figures painted in the cubist fashion. The work features buildings in Paris interspersed with three female figures. At the same time, the simplified faces of the three figures are an explicit allusion to Pablo Picasso’s earlier work with cubist leanings, ‘Desmoiselles D’Avigonon.’

This work illustrates another prominent theme related to the human body in cubist art — objectification. Delaunay said of his work ‘Les nus feminins sont des immeubles, les immeubles des nus,’ or, ‘The female nudes are the buildings, the buildings the nudes.’ Cubism broke the prevailing hierarchy of subject matter in the art world, a heararhcy that traditionally valued human figures over objects and landscapes. Through the cubist lens everything — apple or woman — was reduced to a series of planes. In this case, the artist does not discriminate his attention between the woman or the urban context in which they exist. As a result the woman seem highly integrated into the landscape — a prevalent phenomenon in cubist art.

‘Les Baigneuses, a 1912 work by Albert Gleizes breaks down the human figure through an even more simplified prism. In this work a backs and limbs are redued to singular planes. Anatomy is foregone for capturing the movement and weight of the figures.

A third work hanging at the Modern art museum takes the crisis of the realist illusion to an even further extreme than the previous two. ‘L’oiseu bleu,’ painted by Jean Metzinger in 1913, illustrates an allegory of two children searching for a blue bird that was very ‘en vogue’ during the era. Lhotein reduces the narrative to a single image, simultaneously evoking time and space. The human figure is transformed to a peach-colored grid system of diagonal lines. Let’s just say accurate anatomy is no longer on the mind here, and has been replaced by newfound interest in the artistic process and the indivual artists unique interpretation and rendering of the subject.

Here are several more Cubist works at the Pompidou to illustrate the diversity fo cubist representations of the human form: ‘Femme Nue au Bonnet Turc’ by Pablo Picasso in 1955, ‘Explosion Lyrique Number 2’ by Alberto Mabnelli in 1918, ‘La Proi’ by Andre Masson in 1925, and one work the reduces the figure to a series of black and white planes, ‘Nu dans atelier’ by French cubist Fernand Leger in 1912.

Inspired by these works, I did some sketching myself:

I was especially intrigued by a series of marble statues and bas-reliefs by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in 1913-14. I found it helpful to sketch each object several times to try simplifying it in different ways.