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The Analysis of Shape

In 1907 one painting signalled the prelude to a change in painting: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. When Pablo Picasso first exhibited this bordello scene with five female figures, even the collector Sergei Shchukin and his friend Georges Braque considered the painting to be ‘a loss for French painting.’ However, the significance of this new view of reality soon became clear to Braque. For the first time Picasso crafted a clear and rational lens without any aesthetic allusions. Continuing with the analysis of shape by Cézanne, Picasso fragmented the forms into cubes. It was the task of the viewer to put this puzzle of various spatial views together into a whole. The colour was muted. This was also new. However, most of all the novelty lay in the independence of the painting from the preconditions given by nature. At the same time, this was the artist’s answer to the changed preconditions of science regarding space and time. Cézanne’s demand that in nature one should seek out the sphere, the cone and the cylinder was the basis for his compositional ideas. At the 1909 exhibition of the Indépendents, the critic Louis de Vauxcelles spoke of cubes. Cubism was born.

Cubism underwent many evolutionary steps. The friends Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso said later: ‘We did not have the intention of creating Cubism. Moreover, we just wanted to express that which moved us… It almost seemed as if we were two mountain climbers who were hanging from a single rope.’ In the years 1909 to 1912, they brought art the independence from everything real without being completely abstract. This phase is called Analytical Cubism. In particular, they now painted figures and still lifes. They no longer painted an object viewed from one point, but layered these in order to capture the view from all sides. They analyzed the object and brought it to the canvas as a fragmented picture. Shape and space melted into one another in one structure of enmeshed, intersected and dissected surfaces. Instead of volume, one constructed surfaces. The situation captured in the painting became far more indefinite. Some surfaces became transparent, weightless or suddenly transformed themselves into a book or an instrument. With regard to colours, one limited oneself to a brown-gray-blue colour scale. They no longer painted in open nature, but in the studio, where the arsenal for their subjects was already at hand. Later, they no longer arranged their still lifes; rather, they created them out of the imagination, adding numbers and word fragments to the compositions.

In Synthetic Cubism, now accompanied by Juan Gris, they both achieved their artistic goals. It was no longer about taking the objects apart. Now, one created new objects with new materials. One recognised new qualities for works of art, using the most varied materials, even items that were to be thrown away. The collage was made into a painting.

Juan Gris, Still Life (Violin and Ink Pot), 1913.

Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 60.5 cm.

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

Pablo Picasso, Musical Instruments, 1913.

Oil, plaster and saw dust on oil cloth, 98 × 80 cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912.

Oil on oilcloth and rope, 29 × 37 cm. Musée National Picasso, Paris.

Picasso and Braque Discover ‘Popular’ Painting

Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso created a new type of painting: the daily world in the form of real materials. For this, they used fabrics, wax cloth, wallpaper scraps and newspaper shreds. Daily materials became the objects of high art. The so-called papiers collés were created. The interest of Picasso in the tactile and in materials found its first visual climax in May 1912 with Still Life with Chair Caning. Picasso used materials in an unorthodox manner. The printed pattern on the wax cloth conveyed the illusion of a cane chair pipe network. It was not about either painted or real caning. The pasted on paper pretends to be something else than it is. The surrounding rope is a concrete object. Shortly thereafter, Braque found a roll of wallpaper with an oak pattern. He cut pieces out and integrated them into a drawing. These endeavours eventually led to pure surface textures contrasted against one another and thus forming the whole painting.

Braque and Picasso understood their studio to be a place of craftsmanship. Using everyday materials, they experimented with extending art to the ordinary. Primarily in 1912 and 1913, this was done with paper. In order to develop their idea of a ‘popular iconography’ they used cardboard, paper of many shades and patterns, sand, combs, sawdust, metal shavings, ripolin varnish, sheet metal stencils, razor blades, and craft tools. Apollinaire and André Salmon compared the efforts of Braque and Picasso in regard to the readily comprehensible simplicity with the efforts of the poet François de Malherbe in his studies of the slang spoken by the dockers in order to enrich his own language.

The papiers collés were preceded by paper sculptures, first by Braque and later by Picasso. Already by 1911, Braque had created his first paper sculpture. These first paper sculptures by Braque reminded Picasso of the construction scaffolding of the Wright brothers’ double decker aircraft

Pablo Picasso became the genius among the artists of the 20^th century. Like no other artist, he made important contributions and innovations to nearly all of the artistic movements of the 20^th century. He journeyed to unexplored shores and again and again produced surprising new masterpieces.

Georges Braque, Compote Dish, Bottle and Glass, 1912.

Charcoal drawing and pasted papers, 62 × 46 cm. Private collection.

Félix Édouard Vallotton, Street Corner in Paris, 1895.

Gouache and oil on cardboard, 35.9 × 29.5 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The Merit of Material

From classical times until the end of the 18^th century, an artwork was evaluated according to its content. The material out of which the artwork was made played a subordinate role. One proceeded from the premise that an idea in its most complete and ideal state is immaterial. To a great extent, material had to be subordinate to the artistic form. Materials were placed in the hierarchical order that was determined by how little they would impinge upon the purity of the artistic premise. Only in the 20^th century did the aesthetics relating to materials take hold. Material justice now became one of the criteria for a good work of art. Materials rose in esteem. Out of this also developed the independence of the materials. Materials slowly became an independent medium of art.

Edgar Degas was a forerunner for the appreciation of so-called ‘poor’ materials. At the 1881 Paris Impressionist exhibition of the Salon des Indépendents, he displayed The Small Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, which he had completed in 1879–80. The flesh-coloured wax figure with a ponytail made of real red hair, and clothed in real clothes, a flax bodice, a white full-length dress and ballroom shoes, shocked the art world. In contrast to those critics who were reminded of the ‘young monster’ of a display at a fair, and specimen preparations for a zoological and physiological museum exhibit, the critic and poet Joris-Karl Huysmans vehemently defended Degas.

All the ideas the public has about sculpture, about cold, lifeless, white apparitions, about these memorable and stereotypical works that have been repeated over the centuries will be toppled. The fact is that Degas has knocked over the traditions of sculpture, just as he has for a long time now shaken the conventions of painting…This statuette is the only really modern attempt that I am aware of in sculpture with her living flesh shaped throughout by working muscles.

A similar view can be taken from the letter Vincent van Gogh wrote at the end of February or beginning of March 1883 to his friend, van Rappard: ‘Tomorrow, I will get some interesting things from this rubbish dump.’ He would dream of the collection of discarded buckets, kettles, baskets, oil cans and wire, and this winter he would really have something to work with.

In 1890, Maurice Denis reflected on the materiality and immaterialness of colour, space and technology: ‘A painting is essentially a tarpaulin surface covered by colours in a certain order.’ An example of this was Felix Vallotton with one of the many examples from 1897, Les Passants (scène de rue). The support for the painting is a reddish brown cardboard box with fine fibre inserts. Its colourfulness and graphic structure stand at several important places in the painting with broad surfaces unpainted and untreated. The beauty of the material has been brought forth.

In the later works of Paul Cézanne, large parts of the canvas also remain untouched. The level of sensitivity regarding the material quality of the painting support is reflected in the way this is used. Pablo Picasso gave the colours their independence in his Blue and Pink Periods. The papiers collés were a logical consequence of this.

The subjects and techniques of anthropology influenced the development of modernist art. The avant-garde pioneers systematically acquired new sources of inspiration and the categorical separation between art, folk art, and anti-art was lifted. Theodor Adorno specifically warned against limiting the insights of the modernist movement to similarities with older art. Only through the deliberate artistic use of techniques and material would the work become more than mere handicraft. It was only when Braque and Picasso first pasted pieces of paper in the papiers collés that the intellectual spark surpassed the effect and dexterity of the previous shapes.

Edgar Degas, Little Dancer Aged 14, 1865–1881, restored between 1921 and 1931. Painted bronze, muslin and silk ribbon in its hair, 98 × 35.2 × 24.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 32A (The Cherry Picture), 1921.

Combination, 91.8 × 70.5 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Collage

Two-dimensional paper assumed the role of the three-dimensional means of expression in the papiers collés. The traditional picture frame perspective was dissolved in space. Depending on colour, pattern, or material, the paper surface appeared in the foreground or in the background. The painting developed into a special flat relief. Picasso experimented at first with paper scraps that he had constructed into guitar box sculptures.

Futurism incorporated the flat surface of the papiers collés, the rhythmic repetitions, and the associated dynamic spatial structure. Futurism created a dynamic relief of the world in a state of unrest. The processes did not develop sequentially, but rather in a state of simultaneity of the past, present, and future.

Carlo Carrà pasted the prototype of a two-dimensional Futurist paper collage using paper and newspaper cut-outs. The Manifestazione Interventista appeared on 1 August 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, in the newspaper Lacerba in Paris. From the central point, printed strips of paper rotate outwards from the painting in all directions with incredible force. For the Futurists, the collage became, for the first time, a document of the period, consisting of scraps of news, advertising and musical scores. As if liberated, words and letters rolled out making sounds and noises, juggling and tumbling with an overflow of simultaneous information into the painting. The Futurist collage for the most part uses the typography of printed paper.

A short time later, Dadaism further developed the Futurist text and sound painting. Printed fragments of paper were now put together in new contexts of meaning; looked at separately, the images and symbols could illuminate radically different meanings. In reciprocal interaction, even unrelated levels of reality obtain a surprisingly deep significance.

In the works of Kurt Schwitters, the collage became the leading focus. He did not aspire to a synthesis of the arts in the sense of Kandinsky. Instead, he wanted, much more resolutely than either the Futurists or the Dadaists, to put everything in interplay of time and wipe away the boundaries. For him, art meant the integration of everything, including technology. The natural result of this view of life was the collage, which brought together all the arts of all manifestations. In his Merz-paintings and Merz-objects, Schwitters utilised materials and papers of all types and origins.

In the works of Max Ernst, collage played an essential role. Using already existing visual material, he opened up possibilities that completely changed the original meaning of the image elements. By 1919, Max Ernst began to expand the aesthetic background of the papiers collés. For him, collage was also ‘negation as a possible method of resistance against the overflow of images and their boundless blending.’ While staying at the home of the well-known Swiss criminal defence lawyer, Vladimir Rosenbaum and his wife, Aline Valangin, whose houses in Zurich and Comologno became the refuge for many of émigrés Ernst scandalised many by cutting up pages from the old books in his library to make collages out of them. For the art of the 20^th century, the collage as a way of thinking opened unknown paths and unexpected possibilities.

Max Ernst, Frucht einer langen Erfahrung (Fruit of Long Experience), 1919.

Relief in painted wood and metal, 45.7 × 38 cm. Private collection, Genoa.

Albert Gleizes, Brooklyn Bridge, 1915.

Oil on cardboard, 148.1 × 120.4 cm. Private collection.

Sonja Delaunay, Simultaneous Contrasts, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 46 × 55 cm. Gift of Sonja and Charles Delaunay, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Robert Delaunay, Windows, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 92 × 86 cm. Morton G. Neumann collection, Chicago.

Even in Cubist Circles: Simultaneity

In 1913, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire dedicated his work Les Peintures cubistes to Cubism thereby helping Cubism attain world renown. Painters like Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes made impressive contributions to the Cubist language of shapes. In 1912 one of the most famous paintings of the 20^th century was created: Nude Descending A Staircase. The painter was Marcel Duchamp. Aided by the Cubist vocabulary of shapes and his familiarity with the photos depicting movement made by Etienne Jules Marey, he painted a picture that moved the world. Five moments of the movement of one person, descending a spiral staircase, are captured in time-lapsed sequence, showing all the reciprocal movements triggered by her walking. Duchamp made time the fourth dimension in the painting. Though this nude triggered a scandal at the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York, but some recognised the innovative character of this new work: ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’ – simultaneity in four dimensions. Duchamp, brother of the painter Jacques Villon, the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and the painter Suzanne Duchamp, was anything but a consistent worker. His restless spirit quickly led him to art experiments that shocked people. In New York, he became friends with Francis Picabia, with whom he became responsible for Dada.

Simultaneity is the lyric expression of the modern view of life and signifies the rapidity and the simultaneousness of all existence and action. Simultaneity for the Futurists was the ‘lyrical exultation, the artistic visualisation’ of velocity. It is the result ‘of those great causes of universal dynamism.’ Simultaneity was also the focus of Robert and Sonja Delaunay. However, they both interpreted the term simultaneity in a completely different manner. When Guillaume Apollinaire credited both the Delaunays with the term, the Futurist Boccioni accused them of plagiarism. Boccioni was not prepared to cede this key term to others.

The Delaunays did not use this term for dynamism. They did not refer to the élan vital as Bergson did, but rather to Chevreul’s theory of the law of simultaneous contrast. This theory, dating to 1839, and which had already played a role with the Impressionists, related colours and the relationship of coloured objects to one another. This work was republished in 1890. Sonja Delaunay, in the Simultaneous Contrasts, dared to jump directly into the abstract. Her painting was already a formal reference system of colour rhythms at a time when her husband Robert, as well as Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Picasso were still slowly making way towards detaching themselves from objects.

Robert Delaunay founded Orphism. On account of the orchestration of colour, Guillaume Apollinaire named the Delaunays’ painting style after Orpheus, the singer of Greek mythology. The origins of his painting style are derived from Impressionism, Analytical Cubism, and from Cézanne. The new landmark of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, built in 1898, fascinated Delaunay. Its elegant design became the subject of The Window series. He painted it again and again, in new variations and refractions, in light and bright colour harmonies based on the colour values of light separated by a prism. He painted the dizzying views of the tower, the delicate construction, the fantastic view that he always saw and yet always saw anew with new perspectives.

From his examination of Cubism and Orphism, the French-Czech painter Frantisek Kupka already early on arrived at colour rhythms completely free of objects. Living in Paris since 1895, he taught religion and served as a spiritualist medium. From 1911 to 1912, he painted Fuge in Two Colours. On a white surface, rhythms in red, green, blue and black move concentrically. He was a pioneer of abstract art, but he did not achieve much fame with his Diagrammes and Arabesques tournoyantes. He understood his paintings as philosophical architecture.

Marc Chagall also experimented with the simultaneity of time and place. He is considered to be one of the most significant artistic personalities of the first half of the 20^th century. His narrative, expressive style had a calming effect on European and Russian painting and had a stimulating effect on the Surrealists in Paris. André Breton noted that ‘through Chagall alone, the metaphor entered triumphantly into modern painting.’ Metaphor was the basis for Chagall’s painting. Alternating between dream and reality, Chagall linked his memories of Russia with the present and the prophetic. His visual language depicts the real in a fairy tale-like surrounding. Figures move in the weightlessness of the unreal. Behind the often riddle-like compositions of this master storyteller hides an artist who has seen and experienced the highs and lows of human existence.

Marcel Duchamp, Nude descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 147.5 × 89.2 cm. Louise and Walter Arensberg collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

František Kupka, Apathetic – Escape in Two Colours, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 211 × 220 cm. Národní Galerie v Praze, Prague.

Marc Chagall, On the Street, 1914–1918.

Oil on canvas, 141 × 197 cm. Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow.

Mikhail Larionov, Rayonism, 1912–1913.

Oil on canvas, 52.5 × 78.5 cm. Baschkirski Museum, Ufa.