Cubism Case Study

1. Cubism was a 20th Century avant-grade art movement first developed in 1908 by Pablo Picasso and George Braque. They worked closely together until the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914. The term 'cubism' was first used by art critic Louis Vauxcelles after seeing a piece of artwork by Braque. He described it as 'little cubes' after which the term was gained worldwide use into the world of art, however Picasso and Braque did not immediately adopt the term.
2. George Braque, Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne were among the key leading artists to have revolutionised cubism in all of it's glory.
3. It fragmented the subject matter into it's component parts, using geometric shapes and created new and interesting abstract forms. Rather than depict the object from one viewpoint, the artist would depict the subject from multiple angles with random intersecting surfaces and a lack of a coherent sense of depth. The spaces and shapes can be ambiguous leaving it to the observer's imagination.
4. Although it has been widely debated over the years, many people have considered Picasso's own picture, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907) was the first ever piece of cubist artwork ever created. Here is a picture for reference.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907 by Pablo Picasso

5. The key inspirations for creating the cubism movement are derived from the primitivism found in African, Micronesian and Native American artwork.They were also influenced by the Fauvism movement for their bright colours and semi realistic depiction of life.
6. The first type of cubism was "Analytic Cubism" which broke down objects into its composing parts or facets that were then analysed and reassembled into an abstract work. This meant that the artist, rather than depicting an item from one viewpoint, depicted it from several viewpoints at once.

Violin and Candlestick, 1910 by George Braque

7. Synthetic Cubism is the second type of cubism artwork. With this technique, many different items were collected together to make new forms. Distinct parts were painted or even pasted onto the canvas and it brought about the use of brighter colours in cubist work. Synthetic Cubism brought about the birth of the collage and this can be seen in what is considered to be the first Synthetic Cubist work Picasso's 'Still Life with Chair Caning'(1911-12). See below-

                                

8. Here are two examples of cubist portraits.

Femme en Pleurs (Weeping Woman), 1937 by Pablo Picasso

This painting was created using oil on canvas. However, it began life as part of a mural painted in protest at the bombing of the town of Guernica by the Germans. The face of the woman was based on his, then, lover Dora Maar.

Girl Before a Mirror, 1932 by Pablo Picasso

Once again, like the previous painting, this picture was made using oil paint on a canvas.

9. Here is my drawing of an African mask, which was one of the key influences in creating the cubist movement to begin with.

I had drawn this picture using a 3B pencil from my pencil case. As you can see I had drawn in a lot of detail with this picture, (especially the shading) and I'am actually proud with how this picture came out. Now here is the photograph that I had used as a reference.

I had to make a quick Google images search to look for this image, and to be honest, this is my second time drawing a picture based on this image. I had previously drawn another image using this image for my case study, but I had unfortunately lost that picture. So now I had drawn another picture using the same image, and second time around, the drawing turned out really well, which was what I had said previously up above.

So now that was my case study on Cubism, I hope you all enjoy it, and I will see you all in the next blog post. See you all until then, bye!