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Modernisms 1900-1980
Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 3
Lesson 1: Cubism- Cubist Sculpture II
- The Case for Abstraction
- Picasso's Early Work
- Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein
- Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein
- Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
- Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
- Pablo Picasso, Three Women
- Inventing Cubism
- Cubism and multiple perspectives
- Synthetic Cubism, Part I
- Synthetic Cubism, Part II
- Salon Cubism
- Pablo Picasso and the new language of Cubism
- Braque, The Viaduct at L'Estaque
- Picasso, The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro
- Georges Braque, Violin and Palette
- Braque, The Portuguese
- Braque, The Portuguese
- Cubist Sculpture I
- Picasso, Guitar
- Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning
- Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
- Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning
- Pablo Picasso, The Three Musicians
- Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Glass, and Bottle
- Conservation | Picasso's Guitars
- Picasso, Guernica
- Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso: Two Cubist Musicians
- Fernand Léger, "Contrast of Forms"
- Robert Delaunay, "Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon"
- The Cubist City – Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger
- Juan Gris, The Table
- Cubism and its impact
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Pablo Picasso and the new language of Cubism
Pablo Picasso, The Guitarist, 1910, oil on canvas, 100 x 73 cm (Centre Pompidou, Paris). Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris.
Want to join the conversation?
- Picasso was inventing a new language of depiction. That I fail to understand it is not Picasso's "fault", but my own. Were I to invent a new "language" using my own created words in an order that I devised to express ideas, and was consistent in my grammar and attachment of meanings to the words I created, then another's failure to understand me would be similar to my failure to understand Picasso, right?(4 votes)
- i know this is five years after you asked this, but i will try to answer. Asuming the words you made have meaning, and picasso's paintings have meaning, i would say yes that would be very similer, just like not evrybody understands german, not evrybody understands Picasso.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Beth] We're in the
Pompidou Centre in Paris, looking at a painting by Pablo Picasso called The Guitarist, from 1910. - [Steven] This is what is often referred to as analytic cubism. - [Beth] Analytic in the idea
of taking something apart, analyzing the parts of something. And you can see that does
look like a jigsaw puzzle. Where the forms have been disassembled. - [Steven] It's an abstraction. - [Beth] The further we
stand back from the painting the more I can see the forms of a man. A head, shoulders, elbows,
the fingerboard of the guitar, the rounded forms of the
outside of the guitar. - [Steven] But I don't think
that Picasso meant this to be a puzzle that we're
supposed to put back together. Although Picasso is best
known for abstracted paintings such as this, it's important to remember that Picasso was something
of a child prodigy, he could draw in the
academic style beautifully. For the previous four
or five hundred years, Western art had been
preoccupied with naturalism, with representing the natural world as carefully and exactly as possible. - [Beth] Representing the world
as it appears to our eyes. - [Steven] An artist developed
a toolkit to do this, this included linear perspective. - [Beth] Using light and
shadow to create the illusion of three-dimensional form. - [Steven] The problem that Picasso faced, is that the modern world
was one that felt ruptured. Old systems no longer felt valid. - [Beth] The early twentieth century is a time of tremendous upheaval. There is sense that vision
itself is unreliable. - [Steven] Picasso was
grappling specifically with the issue that painting
was a kind of illusion, a representation of
three-dimensional form and space on a two-dimensional surface. - [Beth] A system of representation. - [Steven] So could Picasso invent a new language for representation? But one that was not hiding
the two-dimensionality of the canvas, but rather
putting that in the forefront. So let's look closely at this painting and see if we can understand
how Picasso has done this here. Picasso has simplified the human form. - [Beth] We see diagonals, horizontals, vertical lines, in black. We see circles that intersect. - [Steven] But it's so
abstracted that if we oriented it as if it were a landscape,
we might expect to see the rooftops of a village instead
of a man holding a guitar. - [Beth] The fundamentals
of perspective that governed Western painting for so long, supposed a single viewer fixed
in front of a work of art, and showed us that view. - [Steven] And Cezanne
in the nineteenth century had developed those ideas. Cezanne said, "Instead
of standing in one place, looking from one point in space and time, I actually move around the
thing that I'm painting." - [Beth] Even if you don't move around it, what if you slightly turn your head to the right or to the left? The reality is that one's view is constantly changing and shifting. - [Steven] And Picasso takes
that idea and runs with it, what would happen if you represented this man holding a guitar, over time, from multiple perspectives? - [Beth] That's a different kind of truth than the kind of truth
that Western painting had given us for 500 years. - [Steven] So this is not less true, it's just differently true. - [Beth] Picasso has
also emptied the painting of much of its color. - [Steven] And much of its content, we don't see hands, we don't see a face, we don't see emotion. The things that generally draw us into a painting of a person. What Picasso is interested in instead, is the structural logic of the
language that he's inventing. And he's inventing it not by himself, but with his compatriot, Georges Braque. - [Beth] And we still do
have some illusion of space, there is a shallow relief here, we have light and shade,
we have the movement between those pale tones
and darker shadows. So there is a suggestion of a form there, this is not entirely flat. But it certainly is
reminding us of the flatness of the canvas that this is painted on. - [Steven] And as you
said he's reducing color so that we focus on mind, on
form, on mass, on structure. The color's reduced to some
browns, and whites, and blacks, and perhaps some pale greens. - [Beth] So we have light and shade that suggest three-dimensional form, and we have overlapping of
shapes that also suggests depth. - [Steven] But not deep space. This is a shallow space,
maybe a few inches, just enough for the fractured
forms that are represented. It's as if Picasso has
taken a series of views of the human body and reconstructed them on the two-dimensional plane. - [Beth] I find a tension
between the title The Guitarist and the painting itself. - [Steven] Without the title as a prompt, you'd be hard-pressed to
locate the man or the guitar. This is a painting that is about the way that painting itself works. Picasso here is on the
edge of abstraction, but this is not pure abstraction. It is not entirely divorced
from the world that we see. Throughout his entire career,
Picasso remained interested in the tension between what we see and the way in which we depict it.