cubism cubism

(French cubisme, from cube - cube), a modernist trend in the visual arts (mainly in painting) of the first quarter of the 20th century. The emergence of cubism is attributed to 1907, when P. Picasso painted the painting "The Girls of Avignon" (Museum of Modern Art, New York), unusual in its sharp grotesqueness: deformed, coarsened figures are depicted here without any elements of chiaroscuro and perspective, as a combination of decomposed on the volume plane. In 1908, the Bateau Lavoir (The Raft Boat) group was formed in Paris, which included Picasso, J. Braque, the Spaniard X. Gris, the writers G. Apollinaire, G. Stein, and others. the basic principles of Cubism were expressed. Another group, which arose in 1911 in Puteaux near Paris and took shape in 1912 at the exhibition "Sexión d'or" ("Golden Section"), included popularizers and interpreters of cubism - A. Gleizes, J. Metsenger, J. Villon, A. Le Fauconnier and artists who only partially came into contact with Cubism - F. Leger, R. Delaunay, Czech F. Kupka. The word "Cubists" was first used in 1908 by the French critic L. the world in the form of combinations of regular geometric volumes (cube, ball, cylinder, cone).

Cubism, born in the conditions of an acute crisis of bourgeois culture in the era of imperialism, marked a decisive break with the traditions of realistic art. At the same time, the work of the Cubists was in the nature of a challenge to the standard beauty of salon art, vague allegories of symbolism, and the fragility of late impressionist painting. Reducing to a minimum, and often completely abandoning the figurative and cognitive function of art, trying to build their works from a combination of elementary, "primary" forms, the representatives of cubism turned to constructing a three-dimensional form on a plane, dismembering a real volume on a geometrized body, shifted, intersecting each other. friend, seen from different points of view. Entering the circle of rebellious bourgeois-individualist movements, cubism stood out among them by its gravitation towards the harsh asceticism of color, towards simple, weighty, tangible forms, towards elementary motifs (such as a house, a tree, utensils, etc.). This is especially characteristic of the early stage of Cubism, which took shape under the influence of P. Cezanne's painting (his posthumous exhibition was held in Paris in 1907) and African sculpture. In this "Cezanne" period of cubism (1907-09), the geometrization of forms emphasizes the stability, objectivity of the world; powerful faceted volumes seem to be densely laid out on the surface of the canvas, forming a kind of relief; color, highlighting the individual facets of the object, both enhances and crushes the volume (P. Picasso, "Three Women", 1909, GE; J. Braque, "Estac", 1908, Art Museum, Bern). In the next, "analytical" stage of cubism (1910-12), the object disintegrates, is crushed into small facets, which are clearly separated from each other; the subject form, as it were, spreads out on the canvas (P. Picasso, "A. Vollard", 1910, Pushkin Museum; J. Braque, "In honor of J. S. Bach", 1912, private collection, Paris). In the last, "synthetic" stage (1912-14), the decorative principle wins, and the paintings turn into colorful planar panels (P. Picasso, "Guitar and Violin", 1913, GE; J. Braque, "Woman with a Guitar", 1913, National Museum of Modern Art, Paris); there is an interest in all kinds of textural effects - stickers (collages), powders, volumetric structures on canvas, that is, the rejection of the image of space and volume is, as it were, compensated by relief material constructions in real space. At the same time, cubist sculpture appeared with its geometrization and shifts in form, spatial constructions on a plane (non-pictorial compositions and assemblages - sculptures from heterogeneous materials by Picasso, works by A. Laurent, R. Duchamp-Villon, geometrized reliefs and figures by O. Zadkine, J. Lipchitz, concave counter-reliefs by A. P. Archipenko). By 1914, cubism began to give way to other trends, but continued to influence not only French artists, but also Italian futurists, Russian cubo-futurists (K. S. Malevich, V. E. Tatlin), German artists of the Bauhaus (L. Feininger, O. Schlemmer). Late cubism came close to abstract art (“abstract cubism” by R. Delaunay), at the same time, some major masters of the 20th century, who sought to develop a modern laconic expressive artistic language, passed through the passion for cubism, overcoming its influence, - the Mexican D. Rivera, the Czechs B Kubista, E. Filla and O. Gugfreind, Italian R. Guttuso, Pole Yu. T. Makovsky and others.

P. Picasso. "Lady with a fan". 1909. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Moscow.

(Source: "Popular Art Encyclopedia." Edited by Polevoy V.M.; M.: Publishing House "Soviet Encyclopedia", 1986.)

(Source: "Art. Modern Illustrated Encyclopedia." Under the editorship of Prof. A.P. Gorkin; M.: Rosmen; 2007.)

See what "Cubism" is in other dictionaries:

One of the first trends in avant-garde art. The year of origin is considered to be 1907, when Picasso exhibited his software cubist. painting “The Maiden from Avignon”, and a little later Marriage his “Nude”. The name K. was given to the direction to ... ... Encyclopedia of cultural studies

Cubism- Cubism. P. Picasso. Portrait of A. Vollard. 1910 Moscow. State Museum of Fine Arts. A.S. Pushkin. CUBISM (French cubisme, from cube cube), an avant-garde movement in the visual arts of the 1st quarter of the 20th century. Developed… Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary

A direction in painting that originated in France around 1908, which can be considered as a reaction to impressionism (see this word) with its attraction to the light completeness of the picture, from which the clarity of the details of individual objects was lost, like ... Literary Encyclopedia

Cubism- CUBISM A direction in painting that originated in France around 1908, which can be considered as a reaction to impressionism, (see this word) with its attraction to the light completeness of the picture, from which the clarity of the details of individual ... ... Dictionary of literary terms

- [fr. cubisme] claim. avant-garde (avant-garde) movement in the fine arts of the early 20th century; the cubists decomposed the object into flat faces or likened it to the simplest bodies of a ball, cone, cube. Dictionary of foreign words. Komlev N.G., 2006 ... Dictionary of foreign words of the Russian language

- (French cubisme from cube cube), avant-garde movement in the visual arts of the 1st quarter. 20th century Developed in France (P. Picasso, J. Braque, H. Gris), in other countries. Cubism brought to the fore formal design experiments ... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

CUBISM, cubism, pl. no, husband. (from cube1) (claim.). A direction in painting (partly in other arts) at the beginning of the 20th century, depicting objects of reality decomposed into simple geometric shapes, without observing external resemblance to ... ... Explanatory Dictionary of Ushakov

CUBISM, a, husband. In the visual arts of the early 20th century: the formalist trend, the followers of which represented the objective world in simple geometric forms (cube, cone, faces). | adj. cubist, oh, oh and cubist, oh, oh. ... ... Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov

cubism- a, m. cubisme cube. Avant-garde formalist trend in European fine arts early. 20th century; in an effort to reveal the geometric structure of the volume, the cubists decomposed the object into flat faces or likened it to the simplest bodies ... Historical Dictionary of Gallicisms of the Russian Language

Pablo Picasso, Maidens of Avignon, 1907 Cubism (fr. Cubisme) modernist ... Wikipedia

Books

• Olga Rozanova and the early Russian avant-garde, Nina Guryanova, The first monographic study on the life and work of the original painter, poet and theorist of the Russian avant-garde O. V. Rozanova (1886-1918). Her art is seen in an unbreakable… Category:

the direction of modernism, which made an attempt to model - by means of artistic creativity - a specific theory of knowledge, founded on the presumption of anti-psychologism (see Anti-psychologism). Classical representatives of art in painting are J. Braque, P. Picasso, F. Leger, H. Gris, R. Delone (in a certain period of his work), J. Metzinger, and others; in poetry - G. Apollinaire, A. Salmon and others. The term "K." was first used by Matisse (1908) in relation to the painting by J. Braque "Houses in Estac", which allegedly reminded him of children's cubes. In the same 1908, in the October issue of the journal Gil Blas, the critic L. Vauxin noted that modern painting "reduced to the image of cubes" - thus, "the name of the new school was originally in the nature of a mockery" (J. Golding). In 1907-1908, C. took shape as a trend in painting (traditionally, P. Picasso's painting "The Maidens of Avignon", 1907) is considered to be C.'s hallmark; in the late 1910s, the French poet A. Salmon recorded "the beginning of a completely new art" - both in relation to painting and in relation to poetry. Genetically, K. goes back to expressionism (according to P. Picasso, "when we invented cubism, we were not going to invent it at all. We just wanted to express what was in ourselves / highlighted by me - M. M. /" (see Expressionism). Like any modernist trend, K. demonstrates programmatic methodology and purely reflexive attitudes regarding the understanding of artistic creativity: already in 1912, the conceptual monograph of the artists A. Gleizes and J. Metzinger "On Cubism" and the critical work of A. Salmon "Young Painting of Modernity" were published. According to critics, K. can be regarded as one of the most radical trends of modernism, because "bravely breaks with most of the traditions that have operated without fail since the Renaissance" (M. Seryulaz).According to critics, K. can be considered as one of the most radical trends of modernism, since it "bravely breaks with most of the traditions that have been operating without fail since the Renaissance" (M. Seryulaz). .Gris). Accordingly, "when Cubism ... showed the conditional nature of space, as the Renaissance understood it, just as the Impressionists showed in their time the conditional nature of color, they were met with the same misunderstanding and insult" (R. Garaudy). In 1912, the question of banning the Cubist exhibition at the Autumn Salon was even discussed in the French Chamber of Deputies; socialist J. - L. Breton considered it "completely unacceptable that ... national palaces serve as a place for demonstrations of such an anti-artistic and anti-national character"; at the same time, however, it was concluded that "the gendarmes should not be called" (the wording of the deputy Samba). Objectively, K. can be considered as a significant milestone in the history of the evolution of the modernist paradigm in art: according to art critics, “it was precisely by deciding to openly proclaim their rights to dissent in the field of art and exercising these rights, despite all obstacles, that contemporary artists became the forerunners of the future. Thus, their revolutionary role cannot be denied: their moral position has brought them a brilliant rehabilitation in our days, to a much greater extent than their artistic merits, regarding which the last word is far from being said "(R. Lebel). The prevailing emotional tone of K. was an acute and acutely catastrophic experience of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, associated with the dominance of what M. Duchamp designated as the "mechanical forces of civilization" (compare with the pathetically optimistic perception of the machine industry in the context of futurism - see below). Futurism): the objective world has revealed its new face to the human world, casting doubt on the previous version of human understanding, destroying the usual ontologizations of traditional knowledge. It is no coincidence that N. Berdyaev saw in Cubist works a kind of portraits of inauthentic being (“these are the demonic grimaces of the fettered spirits of nature”), which necessarily involves posing questions about the true face of the world, about the possibility of this authenticity and the possibility of its image. Due to the reflexive comprehension of this context, k. is one of the most philosophically articulated directions in the development of modernist aesthetics - already in the manifesto "On Cubism" (1912) it is recorded that the picture as such is a kind of picture (concept) of the world (in the history of art it is fixed, that critics already saw in P. Cezanne "criticism of the theory of knowledge written in colors" - E. Novotny). K. actively involves in his reflexive comprehension of the nature of artistic creativity the ideas of Plato, medieval realism, G. Hegel, - first of all, in the aspect of searching for the abstract essence (ideal eidos) of the object and the philosophical justification of the presumption of ontology variability, which substantiates the idea of ​​the relative modeling of possible worlds (speech it is not so much about the conceptual and content mastery of the academic philosophical tradition, but about the connection of artists to the cultural atmosphere of the early 20th century. , in which philosophical ideas were in a kind of fashion focus: for example, about J. Braque, L. Reinhardt notes that he, "the son of a Parma peasant ... learned philosophy in table conversations at the beginning of the century"). One way or another, the focus on a reflexive analysis of creativity as such is one of the distinguishing (and one of the strongest) aspects of K. According to J. Maritain, “in the days of the Renaissance, art opened its eyes to itself. seized by another impulse of introspection, leading to a revolution at least as significant ... Its lessons are as useful for a philosopher as they are for an artist. Aesthetics of K. is practically a specific modeling of the cognitive process, based on the basic principle for K. of "denial of naive realism, which implies the artist's refusal to rely on the visual perception of the objective world. This principle underlies the program proclaimed by K. of the" struggle with vision ", t .i.e. the fight against the uncritical acceptance of the phenomenology of the video sequence as the basis for cognition in general and the artist’s comprehension of painting, in particular (the world is distorted, its essence is not visible and cannot be seen, i.e. phenomenological reduction cannot claim to be an adequate method of cognizing the world) : according to the wording of A. Gleizes and J. Metzinger, "the eye is able to interest and seduce the mind with its delusions", but at the heart of this temptation is nothing more than an optical illusion, trompe loeil. As J. Braque wrote, "feelings deprive of form, spirit forms. Only what is produced by the spirit is reliable. "In this context, naturally, according to K., that "wishing to achieve the proportion of the ideal, artists, not being more limited by something human, present us works that are more speculative than sensual" (G .Apollinaire). In this context, it is significant that R. Lebel calls his monograph dedicated to K., "The wrong side of painting", thereby emphasizing the intention of the cubists to penetrate beyond (through) the phenomenological series. For example, Berdyaev wrote about P. Picasso: " he, like a clairvoyant, looks through all the veils ... [...] Go even further deeper, and there will no longer be any materiality - there is already an internal structure of nature, a hierarchy of spirits "- and the tendency of this movement "leads to an exit from the physical , material flesh in a different, higher plane. "Thus, "instead of the confusion of sensual experiences of Monet and Renoir, the cubists promise the world something more solid, not illusory - knowledge" (L. Reinhardt). In the evolution of the philosophical foundations of K., two stages can be distinguished . The initial presumption of the aesthetic concept of K. is the presumption of the destruction of the object as such: according to R. Delone (who began his career with Kandinsky - see Expressionism), "as long as art is not freed from the subject, it condemns itself to slavery." Thus, according to the Cubist strategy of artistic creativity, "one should not even try to imitate things... Things in themselves do not exist at all. They exist only through (in) us" (J. Braque). As noted in the programmatic work for K. A. Gleizes and J. Metzinger, “cubism replaces the scraps of freedom obtained by Courbet, Manet, Cezanne and the Impressionists with boundless freedom. Now, finally recognizing objective knowledge as a chimera and considering it proven that everything accepted by the crowd as natural is a convention, the artist will not recognize other laws than the laws of taste. The mission of the artist in this context is articulated as the liberation of oneself (and through this - and others) from the "banal kind of things" (A. Gleizes, J. Metzinger). As its fundamental credo, K. takes the formula "Enough decorative painting and picturesque scenery!" (A. Gleizes, J. Metzinger). In this context, K. postulates as his method specifically articulated "lyricism" or "lyricism inside out" (G. Apollinaire's term), which was understood by K. as a method of liberating consciousness from the slavery of the objective world, achieved by programmatically causing the artist to feel disgust for the subject of his work (as J. Braque wrote, "it looks like you are drinking boiling kerosene"). According to Ozenfant and Jeanneret, "lyricism" can be considered as the basic paradigm for early K.: "his theoretical contribution can be summarized as follows: cubism considers the picture as an object that creates lyricism - lyricism as the only goal of this object. All kinds of freedom are allowed to the artist , provided that it creates lyricism". In practice, this means that K. goes beyond the limits of fine art - to abstract art: if the visually observed world can (is) illusory, then the artist's interest should be focused on the true (essential) world, i.e. the world of pure geometric forms: as Mondrian wrote, "Plato's ideas are flat" (it is interesting that the mathematician Prencet was directly involved in the theoretical discussions of the Cubists). According to K.'s reflective self-assessment, "for us, lines, surfaces, volumes are nothing but shades of our understanding of fullness / that noumenal that is not represented by the appearance of an object - MM. /", and everything "external" in the cubist vision of it is reduced "to one denominator of mass" (A. Gleizes), namely, its geometric basis. Accordingly, the aesthetics of K. is based on the idea of ​​deformation of the traditional (visually observable) form of the object, - deformation, which is designed to expose the true essence of the object.C. is constituted as neoplasticism, based on the rejection of traditional plastic: "cubism considers the picture completely independent of nature, and it uses forms and colors not for the sake of their imitative ability, but for the sake of their plastic value" (Ozanfant, Jeanneret). Thus, K. comes to the idea of ​​plastic modeling of the world as a cognitive search for its plastic (structural) basis, i.e. its true face, not hidden behind the phenomenological series. In other words, K.'s mature conceptual program turns out to be very far from the original idea of ​​rejection of the object: as M. Duchamp wrote (during the Cubist period of his work), "I always strive to invent, instead of expressing myself." K. makes a radical turn from criticism of the object as such to criticism of its inadequate (in particular, subjective) understanding. The critical pathos of mature K. is no longer directed against reality as a subjective illusion, but against subjectivity in the interpretation of reality. In this regard, K. decisively distances the visually observable (given in experience) object (nature-objet or "the general artistic revolution of cubism" and "striking innovation, which consists in the inclusion in the action of many aspects of the same subject." As A writes .Lot, in the practice of "K. representations" the usual "perspective structure is overthrown. Part of the same object, for example, a vase of fruit, we see from below, another part - in profile, a third - from some other side. And that's all it connects in the form of planes that collide with a crash on the surface of the picture, lie next to each other, overlap each other and penetrate each other. "Classic in this respect can be considered, for example," Dance "by J. Metzinger; "Student with a newspaper ", "Musical Instruments" by P. Picasso; "Bottle, glass and pipe", "Praise to J.S. Bach" by J. Braque; "Portrait of Chess Preyers" by M. Duchamp, etc. (cf. similarly with M. Chagall: "I and the village", "The hour between the wolf and the dog", which simultaneously set the full face, profile, etc.). And if within the framework of "analytical K." the artist was least of all interested in the phenomenon of movement and the problem of its pictorial fixation ("the picture is a silent and motionless revelation" in A. Glez), “C. of representations”, on the contrary, constitutes programmatic dynamism (for example, M. Duchamp’s “Nude descending the stairs” is in many ways close to futuristic findings in the field of transferring the “dynamic” or “energy line” of movement). However, movement is also understood by K. not as a visually observed movement in space (a kind of agitation for vision), but as a direct mouvement - movement as such, i.e., according to K.'s concept, what we know about movement as such. 3) "Abstract K." or "purism", i.e. "pure painting" (peinture pure), within which all the basic principles of K. are brought to their logical conclusion: the principle of anti-psychologism. the principle of searching for "elements of the world" as geometrically articulated and the principle of anti-visualism. (According to the criterion of radicalism, A. Salmon compared peinture pure with the religion of the Huguenots.) The movement of K. from simultanism to purism is vividly demonstrated by the creative evolution of R. Delone: ​​if in his work “In Honor of Bleriot” concentric circles are a product of analysis (“refraction”) such a phenomenon as Blériot's flight across the English Channel, and can: be read as projections of the movement of the propellers of an airplane, then in "Circular Rhythms" the same circles (despite all external similarity) are a fixation of the elements of mouvement - the product of an essential analysis of what the artist knows about movement. Revealing the essence of "abstract K." in one of the interviews. P. Picasso practically speaks of his visual technique as an implementation of the ideal type method, as M. Weber understood him: "abstract art is nothing but a combination of color spots ... You always need to start somewhere. Later, all traces of reality can be removed. And there is nothing to worry about, because the idea of ​​the depicted object will already have time to leave an indelible mark on the picture / see. Trace - M.M./". In this context, K. actualizes the semantic figures of "eidos" in Plato and "universals" in scholastic realism: according to G. Apollinaire, the picture appears in this context as an expression of "metaphysical forms." In this Cubist works, according to Maritain, "do not deviate from reality, they are similar to it ... by spiritual similarity. "- Within the framework of this approach to artistic creativity in K., an installation is formed on the possibility of the artist actually creatively constituting the essence of an object from non-objective elements ( cf. with the postmodern idea of ​​the meaning of semantically neutral text fragments - see Blank sign, Reality effect). Thus, peinture pure is, according to the definition of A. Gleizes, "a kind of painting of new ensembles by means of elements borrowed not from visible reality, but entirely created by the artist and endowed by him with a powerful reality." G. Apollinaire designates this ability of the subject of creativity as "orphism" (but analogies with the life-giving impulse of Orpheus' songs that can move stones) and understands in this context the artist as a subject introducing an integral structure into sensory chaos, directly seen in the sphere of abstraction. In this regard, K. believes that the secret of creativity is similar and close to the mystery of Creation: "the artist sings like a bird, and this singing cannot be explained" (Picasso). In this context, A. Gleizes sees essential analogies between the paradigm of perspective constituted in Renaissance painting (what A. Gleizes calls "space-form") and K., which breaks the very idea of ​​perspective (what A. Gleizes calls "time- forms"), on the one hand, and natural-scientific and mystical (the picture as a "silent revelation") approaches to reality, on the other. "Abstract" ("pure") K. actually laid the foundation for the tradition of abstractionism in the history of art of the 20th century - it is to his aesthetic program that all directions and versions of abstractionism go back, - according to L. Venturi, "today, when we talk about abstract art , we mean cubism and its heirs". (It is precisely for this reason that in Marxist art criticism, centered around the values ​​of materialism, K. was evaluated unambiguously negatively: from the peremptory verdict of G.V. "does not mean anything. After all, this world is a little crazy - it went out of its joints, according to Shakespeare's famous expression.") In general, the role of K. in the evolution of artistic modernism "is almost impossible to overestimate", because "in the history of art ... he was a revolution no less important than the revolution of the early Renaissance" (J. Berger). K. creates a fundamentally new language of art (see. The language of art), and in this area "the discoveries made by cubism are as revolutionary as the discoveries of Einstein and Freud" (R. Rosenblum). Moreover, according to J. Golding, "Cubism was, if not ... the most important, then, in any case, the most complete and radical artistic revolution since the Renaissance ... From a visual point of view, it is easier to make the transition through three hundred and fifty years, separating Impressionism from the High Renaissance than fifty years separating Impressionism from Cubism. .. The portrait of Renoir ... is closer to the portrait of Raphael than to the cubist portrait of Picasso. "According to the historian C.K. Gray, the formation of the cubist paradigm can be interpreted as the beginning of a new era in the history of art and a new worldview in the history of culture in general. Gelen compared the design of the cubist paradigm in art with the Cartesian revolution in philosophy - both in terms of the significance and radicalness of breaking tradition, and in content: like the epistemology of R. Descartes, the concept of K.'s artistic creativity justifies the rejection of empiricism and sensationalism, which led in its distant perspective to constitution in European culture of the paradigm of "postmodern sensitivity" (see Postmodern sensitivity).

« This is the beginning of an entirely new art to save the world."

André Salmona

Cubism

Pablo Picasso "Three Musicians" 1921

What is cubism?

Cubism is an avant-garde art movement depicting objects of reality deformed or decomposed into simple geometric shapes. The main idea of ​​cubism was the denial of three-dimensional reality. The Cubists did not want their paintings to look like photographs, and did not consider such achievements of academic painting as "chiaroscuro", "perspective", "optical realism" as the leading means of artistic expression. Thus, the main difference between cubism and classical art is that it is not based on imitation.

Georges Braque, Houses in Estaca, 1908

What are the cubes?

The term "Cubism" appeared in 1908, I know two versions of its appearance. According to the first, the term appeared after Henri Matisse, having seen the landscapes of "Houses in Estac", written by Georges Braque, exclaimed: "What kind of cubes" (fr. bizarreries cubiques); on the second - after the art critic Louis Vaucelles called the new paintings of Braque "cubic quirks." The derisive name came into use, but, focusing on external signs, it led away from the genuine novelty of the method and artistic thinking.

“When the Cubists, in turn, showed the conditional nature of space, as the Renaissance understood it, just as the Impressionists in their time showed the conditional character of the color of objects, they were met with the same misunderstanding and the same insults”

Roger Garaudy

Phases of cubism

Paul Cezanne - Mount Sainte-Victoire near Gardana-1885

Cezan Cubism 1907-1909

This is usually the name of the first phase of Cubism, which is characterized by a tendency to abstraction and simplification of the forms of objects. According to André Salmon, one of the first researchers of modern art, cubism was a reaction to the lack of form in impressionism, and its development is due to the ideas of post-impressionists, especially symbolist artists, who opposed phenomena of a semantic order to the purely pictorial goals and interests of the impressionists. They argued that the real reality is the idea, and not its reflection in the material world.

The role of the artist, then, is to create symbolic forms for the embodiment of ideas, and not to imitate the changing face of things.

Paul Cezanne. Mount Saint Victoire. 1906

The first stage of Cubism includes works of art influenced by the French painter Paul Cézanne.

Cezanne, we emphasize the stability and objectivity of the world: faceted volumes form a kind of relief, and colors highlight certain facets of objects, simultaneously strengthening and crushing the volume.

Cezanne said to his friend Joachim Gasquet (Gachet), pointing to his beloved Mount Sainte-Victoire: “What a rise, what an imperious thirst for the sun and what sadness, especially in the evening, when all heaviness seems to fall off. These giant blocks were formed from fire. The fire is still raging in them ... "

Pablo Picasso "Factory in Horta de Ebro", 1909

Georges Braque "Castle of La Roche-Guyon" 1909G.

Prismatic buildings are crowded and piled on top of each other, the planes begin to sway and turn in different directions. The geometric bone does not support it, but destroys it with misses of lines and arbitrary transfers of planes. A distinctive feature of Cezanov's cubism is the simplification of volumes based on landscapes, figures, still lifes painted directly from life. In the compositions of this period, created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, large faceted volumes were tightly laid out on the plane of the canvas, which created a feeling of relief in the image. The coloristic palette, shading the individual sides of the object, emphasized and crushed the volume.

Pablo Picasso, The Girls of Avignon, 1907

In the autumn of 1907, two important events took place: Cezanne's retrospective exhibition and the acquaintance of Braque and Picasso. The summer of 1907 Marriage spent in Estaca, where he became interested in painting Cezanne. From the end of 1907, Braque and Picasso began to work in the cubist style.

In one of his letters, Cezanne recommends that the young artist Pablo Picasso consider nitura as a collection of simple shapes - spheres, cones, cylinders. He meant that these basic forms should be kept in mind as the organizing principle of the curtain, but Picasso and Braque took the advice literally.

Pablo Picasso. "Portrait of Ambroise Vollard" 1910

Analytical Cubism 1909-1912

The distinction between space and form is blurred. Disappear images of objects. Cubism is moving into the next phase - analytical cubism. This period is characterized by the appearance of iridescent colors of translucent intersecting planes. Forms are constantly arranged in space in different ways. On the canvas of Pablo Picasso "Portrait of Ambroise Vollard" 1910 . To contrasts of color and texture are reduced to a minimum so that they do not interfere with the identification of the structure, and the picture with its muted tonality seems almost monochrome. The construction becomes more complicated, and a single principle is consistently carried out.

Pablo Picasso "Portrait of Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler" 1910

The object is broken into small pieces, easily separable from each other. Thus, the artist tries to present an object outside of time and space, ignoring the usual laws of perception. As a result, the canvases acquired a variety of stereometric effects: the volume turned into a plane, the front face into a side face, the lines suddenly broke, the forms mixed up.

That is, at the analytical stage, the object was completely crushed into its constituent parts, stratified into small faces separated from each other. R. Delaunay said on this occasion: “The elements of volumes disintegrate even more, the palette is reduced to black, white, to their decay into intermediate tones and earthy colors. The lines become more broken, the forms of the emerging world become less articulated… We are facing the era of analytical cubism.”

Pablo Picasso "Girl playing the mandolin" 1910

Albert Gleizes "Two Women Seated by a Window"

The perspective is completely broken. Instead of an object depicted from a perspective, the artist seeks to transfer onto the canvas its trace, the locus of points, a flat imprint, and, moreover, from different sides at the same time. Thus, the painting becomes a collection of individual aspects of the form, cut into small pieces.

Georges Braque. Newspaper, bottle, pack of tobacco ("Courier"). 1914

Synthetic Cubism 1912-1914

This phase of Cubism is called synthetic due to the fact that the forms in this case are recreated. But there is another name - "collage cubism", from the French word "collage" - the gluing technique with which it all began. Over the course of a year, Picasso and Braque created still lifes made up almost entirely of glued pieces of different materials, with the subsequent completion of the composition with just a few lines.

A characteristic feature of synthetic cubism is the denial of the third dimension in painting and the emphasis on the pictorial surface. Surface texture, line, and pattern are all used to construct a new object.

Pablo Picasso "Guitar" 1920

The paintings become more decorative and colorful. When the decomposition of forms reaches its maximum, threatening to go into abstraction, graphic signs appear - inscriptions, numbers, notes, letters, as well as newspapers, colored paper. French critic Alain Joufroy noticed that they are borrowed from a typical cafe environment - price tags, labels, menus, signs, newspapers on the table. The picture becomes like a collage. Often, artists did not make collages from additional materials, but completely painted it.

Perspective system, writes Golding, which has dominated European painting since the Renaissance, the Cubists opposed the right of the artist to move around his subject, incorporating information gleaned from previous experience or knowledge into his appearance ... "

"Time-form," writes the Catholic mystic Gleizes, takes the place of "space-form."

H. Gris. Glasses, newspaper and bottles of wine, 1913

Juan Gris Spanish decorator, painter, illustrator, sculptor in 1913 creates still lifes in the style of synthetic cubism, abandoning monochrome. Imitating J. Braque and P. Picasso, he used the collage technique - applications from newspaper clippings, pieces of wallpaper or broken glass.

Before cubism in European art, one of the main problems has always been the problem of lifelikeness. For several centuries, art has evolved without questioning this task. Even the Impressionists, who opened a new chapter in the history of painting devoted to light, fixing a fleeting impression, also solved the question: how to capture this world on canvas.

The impetus for the development of a new language of art, perhaps, was the question: why paint? By the beginning of the XX century. the basics of "correct" drawing could be taught to almost anyone. Photography was actively developing, and it became clear that images of a fixation, technical plan would become her domain. The question arose before the artists: how can art remain alive and relevant in a world where pictorial images are becoming more accessible and more easily replicated? Picasso's answer is extremely simple: in the arsenal of painting there are only its own specific means - the plane of the canvas, line, color, light, and it is absolutely not necessary to put them at the service of nature. The external world only gives impetus to the expression of the individuality of the creator. The rejection of a plausible imitation of the objective world opened up incredibly wide opportunities for artists. This process proceeded in several directions. In the field of "liberation" of color, Matisse, perhaps, was in the lead, and Braque and Picasso - the founders of cubism - were more interested in form.

Initially, under the influence of partly Iberian and African art, partly the ideas of Cezanne, Picasso began to coarsen and simplify the outlines of figures and objects (this is the period of early cubism, 1906/07-1909). The works of 1908 can serve as an example. The figures in The Farmer, Dryad, Three Women and Friendship are easily distinguished in the context of the canvas, but at the same time reduced to a certain combination of volumes conveyed by color. Cezanne said: "All natural forms can be reduced to spheres, cones and cylinders. Starting with these simple basic elements, you can do anything." Quite "Cezanne" in this sense is the work "Two Nude Figures", where human bodies are likened to the forms of the surrounding world, practically merged with it. Cezanne said: "One should not reproduce nature, but represent it, but by what pictorial means? By means of forming color equivalents." Picasso echoes him: "Cubism has never been anything other than painting for the sake of painting itself, in which all concepts of insignificant reality are excluded. Color plays a role only insofar as it helps to depict volumes."

In many still lifes of 1909, games are seen from the point of view of objects: for example, in the canvas "Bread and a bowl of fruit on the table" the view is directed from above to the vase and fruit, and to the inverted cup - from the side and slightly from below, because we do not see its bottom . More and more freely, the master manipulates the means of representation, now he is really free to do "whatever he wants" with them.

The period of "analytical" cubism begins (1909/10-1912). This manner can be seen in the portrait of Ambroise Vollard, on which Picasso worked in 1910. The face of the marchand is given a natural color, so it easily stands out from the mixing of faces, fragmentary forms, lines (in the portrait of Daniel Henri Kahnweiler, the face is almost not emphasized by color, and the work seems more formal and cold). The color in the works of this period only emphasizes the volumes and allows you to reveal the plastic essence of the image object. Picasso spoke about the decomposition of the form of an integral object into small heterogeneous details as follows: “The viewer sees the picture only in parts; always only a fragment at a time: for example, the head, but not the body, if it is a portrait; or the eye, but not the nose or mouth. Therefore, everything is always right."

In the works of synthetic cubism, dating from 1912-1914, the collage technique was often used, they included hitherto "outside" art elements (newspapers, fabrics, grains of sand, earth) and turned into some kind of art objects, the components of which only indicated similarities, correspondences , gave certain guidelines to the person looking at the picture, but did not show the subject in its "givenness" (as an example, one can cite the works "Guitar" of 1913 and "Composition with a bunch of grapes and a cut pear" of 1914).

Nevertheless, the increasing decomposition and distortion of forms (especially during the period of analytical cubism) led to the fact that the audience began to perceive cubist works as abstract, and Picasso did not like this at all. It was important for him that the viewer, firstly, emotionally react to the canvas, and secondly, to catch the author's message embedded in the work, and - preferably - obey him. With pure abstraction, however, this is far from always possible. Thus, cubism, which opened up a lot of new opportunities for fine art, gradually ceased to interest the master who created it.

In the decade leading up to the First World War. It reached its peak in 1911–1918. The works of artists of this trend are characterized by the predominance of straight lines, sharp edges and cube-like forms. The term "Cubism" was first used by the critic Léon Vaucelles in 1908, describing the works of Braque rejected by the Salon d'Automne of that year.

Cubism is a complex artistic phenomenon that brought together painters and sculptors, musicians and poets. It is rather difficult to give a simple statement of the main aims and principles of Cubism; in painting, one can distinguish three phases of this trend, reflecting different aesthetic concepts, and consider each separately: Cezanne (1907–1909), analytical (1909–1912) and synthetic (1913–1914) cubism.

Cezanne cubism.

This is usually the name of the first phase of Cubism, which is characterized by a tendency to abstraction and simplification of the forms of objects. According to André Salmon, one of the first researchers of modern art, cubism was a reaction to the lack of form in impressionism, and its development is due to the ideas of post-impressionists, especially symbolist artists, who opposed the purely pictorial goals and interests of the impressionists with phenomena of a semantic order. Following the transcendentalism of the late 19th century, they argued that the real reality is the idea, and not its reflection in the material world. The role of the artist, then, is to create symbolic forms for the embodiment of ideas, and not to imitate the changing face of things. This concept became the reason for the analysis of the means at the disposal of the artist, the elucidation of their expressive possibilities and the establishment of the ideal of purely expressive art, like music, little dependent on the outside world. Among the Symbolists, experiments in this area were primarily related to line and color, but such an analytical approach, once applied, inevitably led to an analysis of form.

A direct influence on the formation of Cubism was the experiments with form in painting by Paul Cezanne. In 1904 and 1907 exhibitions of his work were held in Paris. In a portrait Gertrude Stein, created by Picasso in 1906, one can already feel the passion for the art of Cezanne. Then Picasso painted a picture Avignon maidens, which is considered the first step towards cubism. It probably embodied the artist's interest in primitive Iberian and Negro sculpture. During 1907 and early 1908, Picasso continued to use forms of Negro sculpture in his works (later this time began to be called the "Negro" period in his work).

In the autumn of 1907, two important events took place: Cezanne's retrospective exhibition and the acquaintance of Braque and Picasso. The summer of 1907 Marriage spent in Estaca, where he became interested in painting Cezanne. From the end of 1907, Braque and Picasso began to work in the cubist style.

Strongly influenced by some of the postulates formulated by Cézanne and published by Émile Bernard in the autumn of 1907, the Cubists sought to reveal the simplest geometric forms underlying objects. In order to more fully express the ideas of things, they rejected the traditional perspective as an optical illusion and sought to give them a comprehensive image by decomposing the form and combining several of its types within the framework of one picture. An increased interest in the problems of form led to a distinction in the use of colors: warm for protruding elements, cold for distant ones.

analytical cubism,

the second phase of cubism is characterized by the disappearance of images of objects and the gradual erasure of the differences between form and space. In the paintings of this period, iridescent translucent intersecting planes appear, the position of which is not clearly defined. The arrangement of forms in space and their relation to large compositional masses is constantly changing. The result is a visual interaction of form and space.

Elements of analytical cubism appeared in the works of Braque as early as 1909, and in the works of Picasso in 1910; however, a stronger impetus to the development of this phase of the style was given by the artistic association "Golden Section", which was founded in 1912 by Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger and the brothers Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon. In the same year, the book by Gleizes and Metzinger was published. About cubism, and in 1913 the poet Guillaume Apollinaire published a book Cubist artists. They outlined the basic principles of the Cubist aesthetic, which was based on the concept of a dynamic, constantly changing universe of Henri Bergson, as well as the discoveries of natural sciences and mathematics made at the dawn of the industrial age. The artist was assigned the role of the creator of a new way of seeing the world.

Synthetic cubism

noted a radical change in the artistic perception of the movement. This first manifested itself in the works of Juan Gris, who became an active adherent of cubism from 1911. Synthetic cubism sought to enrich reality by creating new aesthetic objects that have reality in themselves, and are not just an image of the visible world. This phase of style is characterized by the denial of the significance of the third dimension in painting and the emphasis on the pictorial surface. If in analytical and hermetic cubism all artistic means had to serve to create an image of the form, then in synthetic cubism color, surface texture, pattern and line are used to construct (synthesize) a new object.

The first signs of this direction were already outlined in 1912, but it was most fully embodied in the collages of 1913. Fragments of paper of various shapes and textures were glued onto the canvas - from newspapers and notes to wallpaper. The artists argued that the surface of the picture is not an illusory reproduction of reality, but a self-sufficient object. Soon, however, the Cubists abandoned the technique of appliqué, because, as it seemed to them, the artist's imagination could create richer combinations of elements and textures, not limited to the possibilities of paper.

By the 1920s, cubism had practically ended its existence, having had a noticeable influence on the development of art in the 20th century.