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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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Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning
Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, oil and oilcloth on canvas framed with rope, 29 x 37 cm (Musée Picasso, Paris), speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- is the phrase "Chair Caning" grammatically wrong? shouldn't it be "cane chair"?(2 votes)
- The phrase is perfectly correct. It's a gerund phrase acting as a noun. But, hey, this isn't the grammar course, it's Art History.(2 votes)
- Is the chair caning printed or painted?(2 votes)
- It is a printed industrial product. No artistry was wasted on it by the artist who used it to make the painting under discussion.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(upbeat piano music) - [Dr. Steven Zucker] We're in
the Musée Picasso, in Paris, and we're looking at
a little oval painting by Pablo Picasso called 'Still
Life with Chair Caning'. This dates to 1912. Chair
caning is the woven material that rattan seats are made of. - [Dr. Beth Harris]
Interestingly, this is not actual chair caning. - [Dr. Steven Zucker]
This is collage. Picasso has introduced this printed,
industrial material. That's a kind of outrageous act. It had been done also by
George Braqué, Picasso's collaborator in Cubism.
Introducing mechanically reproduced imagery into
a painting is a violation of so much of what painting
had been about. We revere good painting because of its virtuosity. - [Dr. Beth Harris] It's
undermining his very vocation as a painter. - [Dr. Steven Zucker] The
illusionistic creation of depth, it had been so much a part of painting since the Renaissance is here emphatically two-dimensional
because we're aware of this oil cloth. - [Dr. Beth Harris] I also
noticed the letters 'J-O-U', writing on something, you
know, you write on paper, that also is a very flat surface. But here, Picasso's doing
something much more complicated. He's so clearly telling
us that he's playing with space and with illusionism. - [Dr. Steven Zucker] There's
no question that lettering is on a surface and so writing on a canvas destroys
the illusion of depth. That's an idea that had been
introduced also by Braqué, originally, but here, it has
a double meaning. Look at the off-kilter rectangle. You can read that as a bundled newspaper. And the
word in French for newspaper is 'journal' or 'daily'. - [Dr. Beth Harris] Like 'The Daily Post'. - [Dr. Steven Zucker] Or
'The Wall Street Journal'. - [Dr. Beth Harris] But it could
also, since we're in Paris, be part of the word 'jouer'
which means to play, which is exactly what I
was saying Picasso is doing with space. And in any case,
those letters have become independent of any printed
matter, any magazine or newspaper that they were part of and
rides ambiguously on the surface of the painting. - [Dr. Steven Zucker] And
what we're looking at is a depiction by Picasso
of the stem of a pipe. You can see clearly a white pipe, perhaps one made of clay. You
can see the white of the stem, you can see the bowl. The
bowl doesn't seem to connect to the stem. There is a bit
of disassembly here. Actually, in all of the forms that we see
depicted within this canvas. - [Dr. Beth Harris] Meaning
a kind of taking apart, and you just referred to the
taking apart of the pipe. And so, I'm looking for other still-life elements because
after all, that's the title of this painting, 'Still Life
in Chair Caning', so what might be on a Parisienne
tabletop, a glass of wine perhaps? - [Dr. Steven Zucker] And
we see a piece of stemware with the bowl at the top, with a stem and with a round base. The problem is, is that Picasso seems to be, and this
is central to understanding what Braqué and Picasso were
trying to do with Cubism. This glass seems to be seen from a variety of different angles,
different perspectives, or points of view. So,
for instance, it looks as if we're looking down at
the base, but perhaps across at the stem, and then
the bowl of the glass is completely fragmented. - [Dr. Beth Harris] For hundreds of years, since the Renaissance, the
idea of depicting something from one vantage point,
at one moment of time, that was the standard. That's what paintings were.
And so this is a revolutionary thing to do, and calls into
question not only hundreds of years of illusionism,
but also how we see, how we experience the world. Who
says we should experience it from one place, at one time. - [Dr. Steven Zucker] Well,
we don't. We see through time, and we see through space. - [Dr. Beth Harris] Exactly,
so that Renaissance idea is a construction. It's not reality. - [Dr. Steven Zucker]
Picasso and Braqué are not inventing this. Cézanne had
begun to explore this idea in the late 19th century.
He's quite famous for his still lives. One
of the reasons Picasso was returning to the still
life. And what Cézanne did is place and apple on a table
and look at it from in front, but then perhaps he would lean
forward and look down at the apple ever so slightly, and he would allow for that disjunction to exist
simultaneously. Picasso and Braqué pushed that further,
and begin to say, "How can I explore the full visual
experience of the forms on what is here, actually a cafe table. - [Dr. Beth Harris] With a
rope as a frame, the way that we perhaps might see
something holding in place the edges of a tablecloth at a cafe. - [Dr. Steven Zucker] And
also poking a little bit of fun at the ornate frames with which paintings are often exhibited. - [Dr. Beth Harris] If you
walk through The Louvre, you see all sorts of ornate gold frames, and so this idea of including industrial, pre-fabricated,
not custom-made materials. - [Dr. Steven Zucker]
Although, in this case, the rope was custom-made by a rope maker so that it would fit this oval canvas. On the right, you can see the
handle on the blade of a knife and a bit of citrus. Maybe
a lemon, maybe a lime ... Below that, the scalloping
of a napkin. And so all of these elements are
things that you might see on a glass cafe table, and
then to fit it all together, the chair caning that gives
the painting its title, perhaps that's a chair that's
been tucked under the table that we're looking down at. - [Dr. Beth Harris] Again,
thinking about 'jouer', playing with the idea of the painting as a window through which we view reality, this is an idea that's so
central to western painting since the Renaissance. The
painting is so real that we mistake it for a view out the window. - [Dr. Steven Zucker] But
here Picasso is placing both shadow and reflection
on that glass tabletop. We can see diagonal brush strokes, for instance, off the
bottom of the wine glass. - [Dr. Beth Harris] The
great irony, it seems to me here though, is that
pre-fabricated chair caning that he's purchased and cut out and glued to the surface of
this canvas does a better job at providing an illusion than
the paint does. Which is what painting has been supposed
to have been doing for hundreds of years, but
now, a manufacturing process can do it better. - [Dr. Steven Zucker] And it
makes clear that the art is in the poetry, in the
intellectual pursuit, in the investigation, in
the analytic disassembly of what we see in the
philosophical investigation, rather than in the craftsmanship. But the irony is that Picasso
is also a brilliant craftsman. - [Dr. Beth Harris] But
this idea of devaluing craft and elevating philosophical
ideas, elevating the conceptual, is something that is so
important for the rest of 20th century painting. (lively piano music)