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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, The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro
Pablo Picasso, The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro, oil on canvas, summer 1909, 24-1/8 x 20-1/8" (MoMA, fractional and promised gift). Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Why is there a..sort of green shadow in the centre of the painting?(6 votes)
- Probably to provide contrast to the viewer and to make them think about how sharp the other objects are when compared to this sudden curved subject in the lower third. Picasso enjoyed stretching reality and perspectives for his viewers and wanted to change the way that you look at what he's made, especially in this period of his work. The idea was to challenge the previously accepted way of painting in a way that's not as harsh and violent as Duchamp, but not as garish as Pollack. Let me know if this helps, and if anyone has other ideas about what it is, I'd be happy to discuss them. I'm always up for learning something new. (I could have this totally wrong, you know....)(3 votes)
- Was it Picasso or Matisse who said that "Cezanne is the father of us all?"
This painting supports the case for Picasso in my mind.(4 votes)- I believe it was Matisse who said "Cezanne is the father of us all"(4 votes)
- In regards to MoMA's ownership of this painting, I see that it says "fractional and promised gift".
I looked in to it briefly, and it seems that it means that MoMA currently owns a percentage stake in the painting, shares exhibition/physical ownership with the benefactor, and then will eventually take full possession at a future date...
Is that about the gist of it?(3 votes) - What is the meaning of this painting? Like is there a deep meaning to it?(2 votes)
- I think there is. It has to do with the creation of a new visual language of representation.(2 votes)
- I've always known Picasso for his fractured paintings of people, and I never liked them much (I always found them grotesque and undesirable). I wish that I had known Picasso for this piece. This piece I can appreciate in a way I really can't appreciate his Demoiselles or Guernica.
Why is Picasso more well known for his portraits? And did he do many cubist landscapes?(2 votes) - What State is the Museum of Modern Art in? I would like to go there some day.(1 vote)
- It is located on West 53rd Street off Fifth Avenue in New York.(1 vote)
- states that the image becomes almost plastic, malleable as we move around the painting. Is this the beginning of the Plasticism movement and could someone tell me if this is connected to sculpture? Of course, I am off to do some research, but I am always interested in other opinions. 1:24(1 vote)
- I probably don't know as much about this as you do, but I think that most artists are in some way influenced by most other artists around them, so there's a very good chance that this did have some bearing on Neo-Plasticism or other forms.(1 vote)
- What twist does this painting gives us about 1909?(1 vote)
Video transcript
(piano music) Voiceover: We're on the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art looking at a painting by Pablo Picasso from 1909. From the summer of 1909,
Horta de Ebro, and it's one of Picasso's critical
early cubist paintings. Voiceover: It looks very cubist, already. (laughter) I mean, it already looks like a radical departure from Cézanne. But this is two years after
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Voiceover: Yeah. Voiceover: So he's already made that step. Voiceover: He has. This is one of those
paintings that lives up to the title of the movement, right? Voiceover: Cubism? Voiceover: Yeah. Voiceover: Because it really
looks like little cubes. Voiceover: It does. Our historical chronology
is usually that after Desmoiselles, Braque
really begins to explore Cézanne in very serious ways. Picasso responds to- Voiceover: Follows Braque. Voiceover: Yeah, by way of
Cézanne, exactly, right. And he'd gone to the
South of Spain to this very arid environment and you can really get a sense of the terracotta. We're looking at a hilltop town. There's a little water collect down at the bottom right and,
actually, you can even see the reflection in the
surface of the water there. Of course what most
people find so interesting about this painting is his willingness to pull and push perspective. Voiceover: Mm hm. So that we're looking,
sometimes, at the top of things and the sides of things. From below and from
above as though we were moving and shifting our
gaze through the site. Voiceover: Yeah, so
that the objects become plastic, they become,
you know, malleable, they become shaped by our
movement through space and through time. Voiceover: But they're
also all interconnected. That thing that Picasso,
and Cézanne started also before him, of interlocking these different planes by
color so that something that's brown moves into something else that's brown that is a different shape that's the top of a house that moves into the side of a house. So that there's really a kind of loss of the separation of
different forms in a space. Voiceover: It becomes a synthetic hole. And actually, he's doing
something else that I think further assists that. If you look at shadow and
reflection, they become almost objects in space themselves rather than just, sort of, optical phenomena. Voiceover: What do you mean? Voiceover: Well if you
look, for instance, at some of the doorways in the
center of the canvas, you can see that there are
shadows and reflections that cast of it that
are, in some ways, almost as solid as the objects that are purported to create those optical phenomena, right? So there's almost this leveling of object and the visual. Voiceover: And surface? Voiceover: More than surface. Object and, in a sense, the visual- Voiceover: Phenomena. Voiceover: Phenomena. Something that is pure
sight and intangible becomes as important in the canvas as a building. Voiceover: Maybe the
way that we begin to see in Les Demoiselles that the space itself between the figures seems solid. Voiceover: Yes, exactly right. Voiceover: Okay. The other thing that struck me as funny when you said that this was a village was that I imagine sunlight in a landscape and there's no sense of
it here to me at all. Voiceover: There isn't, you're right. It's funny that light has been ... I mean, light is clearly the thing that constructs form here. Voiceover: Right. Voiceover: You've got shadow, you've got areas of light, but in
fact, there is no actual- Voiceover: No. Voiceover: Direction. It almost has more to
do with the subjective experience of one's sight
as one moves through, the way in which light
is cast or shadows cast, than what is, in fact, from nature. Voiceover: Right. And the other thing that strikes me is the way that, for
example, you were talking about those doorways. The one in the center really looks like a doorway into something. But just to the left of
that, there's something else that seems to be a doorway that also casts a shadow but is also much more obviously a stroke of paint. Voiceover: Right and it almost seems like a positive form in front
of the building in a sense. Voiceover: Right. And yet it's also a brush stroke. Voiceover: That's right. That's wonderful. So there's this constant
sort of dislocation of the way in which form is constructed. So it's not just about
the rendering of form, it's not just the observing of form. It's actually also, sort of, this funny dislocating of the
process of rendering form. Voiceover: Right. Voiceover: Yeah. Voiceover: It's very self-conscious in a very modern way. Voiceover: It certainly is. (piano music)