Cubism: influences and terms
Excerpts from Cubism, by Neil Fox
The space of the Cubist work was unstable, even unrecognizable; textures were treated arbitrarily , and color reduced to a minimum. Writers on cubism have offered three main explanations: that the cubists were representing what the mind knows rather than what the eye sees; that were creating a pure realm of abstract form; and that they were making paintings about how paintings work. In general terms, it is true that Cubism rejects the commonplace notion that the work of art is a window on to another space, and insists that art can never deal with the world as it really “is,” but only with ways of seeing it and knowing it. (13)
The reality of photography was no more convincing to Braque and Picasso than the reality of academic art and the illusion of perspectival space. This effect of flattening, or returning the photographic space of the real world to the homogenous material of representational art. Picasso thus again returned the real space to the space of his own cubism. In an effort to “out-perform” the camera and the very notion of the real visible world. They blurred boundaries between seriousness and play, between truth and fantasy, and between the identities of things and the things themselves. (70)
Braque’s woman is in fact three views of the same woman, the three figures stand for facets of a single idea. (86)
The most striking aspect of Viaduct at L’Estaque is the layering of contours to suggest progression into distance, while leaving the precise spatial relationships between each plane unclear. (98)
Cezanne reflected at length on the task of painting, including his own fascination with accounting for the effects of slight shifts in his own viewing position. (100)
One art historian glossed it as the breaking of the contours of forms at some point so that "the planes spill or bleed into adjacent one’ Another, as “the running together of planes othwerwise separated in space.” The planes do not so much run together as “desist from their task of convergence to align with the picture plane.” (103)
Braque thought that Cubism freed painting from false illusionism. He believed it was an art of intensified relaism, which brought the world closer to the spectator, so close in fact that it was within reach. He said, “Scientific perspective is nothing but eye-fooling illusion, a trick, which makes it impossible for the artist to convey a full experience of the space, since it forces for objects in the picture to disappear away from the beholder. (110)
Picasso decided to transform his cast of characters into inanimate objects, and let their heads and torsos vanish into spaces and shadows. In convincing the reading of this transformation is that it marks a crucial shift in Picasso’s Art from narrative to iconic. (115)
The artist strives to create a maximum spatial contradiction, largely without giving up the difference between solid thing and the spaces between them. The compressed three dimension objects and space only make visual sense from one place. (118)
Having abandoned the illusion of solid three-dimensional objects in space, and substituted a play of pictoral elements such as line, shading, and texture, Picasso held his composition together with a loose or spontaneous grid-like structure. This brought the planes and lines into a kind of order, crucially unrelated to conventional compositional systems. Perspective, convincing visual illusion, and relative symbolic importance are replaced by the uneven rhythm of light, shade, and line tentatively aligned to the rectilinear edges of the canvas. The interest in mass and illusion of relief are abandoned in favor of a mysterious effect sometimes called “transparency.” (126)
If Renaissance perspective conveys the assurance that there is a correct place from which to see the world, Cubist paintings never finally declare whether there is anywhere to stand at all. The relief effects of Cubist paintings suggests a constant displacement position and ethereality meant not only that the world slips away from the image, but also that the viewer slip away from the world. (129)
Analytic Cubism come to refer to a process where three dimensional objects are broken don into fragments, corresponding to their appearance from different viewpoints in space which are then recombined in two-dimensions to produce a representation. Supposedly proceeds from observed reality to art. Although Analytic Cubism rejects single-point perspective, its combination of multiple viewpoints is thought to offer a fuller version of perceived reality. Synthetic Cubism reverses the process, reassembling the elemental shapes and fragments of Analytic Cubism in order to make new kinds of reality. (146)
What technologies of transportation meant, and what the jump-cut revealed, was that the centre of experience was time. As early as 1855, Heinrich Heine noted that “hrough the reailroads space had been abolished and the only thing left for us is time.” Everything in the world was gathered in the time of consciousness and visual experience now leapt from moment to moment and place to place, to be resolved and ordered only according to memory and consciousness.
The major works were figurative the multi-figure compositions of Leger and Duchamp were distinguished from precedents to represent movement. Duchamp’s paint—literally a strip cartoon—shows the same woman walking though five stage of undress. The reinterpretation of cubist faceting as the fragments of continuous time was facilitated through chronophotography. This expert craft involved devising methods for capturing motion in still photography either as a blurred after image of the body moving through space in a single frame, or in a series of frames representing that movement in different stages. Duchamp became particularly fascinated by what he called “ a static representation of movement” in his work He called it “elementary parallelism” reducing the moving world to parallel linear elements.
Levels of reference, or of points of reference, and simultaneity—the conception of space-time. Space time refers to the new subjective experience of the world originating in Cubism’s transparency, simultaneity, and intersecting planes. There is hovering, vertical groupings of plans which satisfies our feeling of relational space, and there is extensive transparency that permits interior and exterior to be seen simultaneously. (396)
Supposed transparency of cubism and spatial openness of modernism in architecture. All stressed the subject’s experience of moving through such buildings as the equivalent of what Metzinger had first called “mobile perspective” (396)
Fourth dimension is time experienced or duration. The human consciousness experiences space and time as “duration” , as ever-changing and heterogeneous It is after all commonplace that time “flies by” or drags depending on circumstances, and that awareness of present can sometimes be lost when reflecting on memories. By contrast, the intellect or reasoning faculty wants to represent time and space by being homogenous. Space is supposed to extend like an endless sheet of graph paper, and the present to move along a straight line of time, which could be cut into hours, minutes, and seconds. Intellect has to do this in order to make use of the world, in order to mark out the distinct edges of objects and places, at distinct times. Bergson argued that this was a fundamentally false representation of things. (193)
Le Corbusier wrote a description of his building:
You enter: the architectural spectacle at once offers itself to the gaze; you follow an itinerary and the views develop with greater variety. Large windows open up views on the exterior where you find again the architectural unity. In the interior, the first attempts at polychromy allow the architectural camouflage, that is, the affirmation of certain volumes or the contrary, their effacement. (403)
Duration:
the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances, with a chain of vibrations. Oil painting could express depth, density, and duration, thought once inexpressible and encourages us to present within a limited space governed by a complex rhythm, a true fusion of objects.
Analytical Cubism:
Was based on the analytical dissection of objects in space, breaking them down into their component parts as seen from multiple viewpoints. These fragments would then be reassembled on the canvas to create a more complete and intellectually satisfying picture than that offered by conventional perspective.
Constructions:
Construction is based on the idea of collage but extends it assemblage of heterogeneous elements to three dimensional, challenging the idea of carved or modelled sculpture.
Futurism:
These artists developed a radical form of art capturing the speed and “dynamism” of modern urban life. They focused on the city in which all things move, al things run, all things are rapidly changing. They called this “universal dynamism” or the wold of dynamic sensation., with a flux of distinct times.
Futurist: universal dynamism
Delaunay: simultaneity
Salon Cubist: mobile perspective
The space of the Cubist work was unstable, even unrecognizable; textures were treated arbitrarily , and color reduced to a minimum. Writers on cubism have offered three main explanations: that the cubists were representing what the mind knows rather than what the eye sees; that were creating a pure realm of abstract form; and that they were making paintings about how paintings work. In general terms, it is true that Cubism rejects the commonplace notion that the work of art is a window on to another space, and insists that art can never deal with the world as it really “is,” but only with ways of seeing it and knowing it. (13)
The reality of photography was no more convincing to Braque and Picasso than the reality of academic art and the illusion of perspectival space. This effect of flattening, or returning the photographic space of the real world to the homogenous material of representational art. Picasso thus again returned the real space to the space of his own cubism. In an effort to “out-perform” the camera and the very notion of the real visible world. They blurred boundaries between seriousness and play, between truth and fantasy, and between the identities of things and the things themselves. (70)
Braque’s woman is in fact three views of the same woman, the three figures stand for facets of a single idea. (86)
The most striking aspect of Viaduct at L’Estaque is the layering of contours to suggest progression into distance, while leaving the precise spatial relationships between each plane unclear. (98)
Cezanne reflected at length on the task of painting, including his own fascination with accounting for the effects of slight shifts in his own viewing position. (100)
One art historian glossed it as the breaking of the contours of forms at some point so that "the planes spill or bleed into adjacent one’ Another, as “the running together of planes othwerwise separated in space.” The planes do not so much run together as “desist from their task of convergence to align with the picture plane.” (103)
Braque thought that Cubism freed painting from false illusionism. He believed it was an art of intensified relaism, which brought the world closer to the spectator, so close in fact that it was within reach. He said, “Scientific perspective is nothing but eye-fooling illusion, a trick, which makes it impossible for the artist to convey a full experience of the space, since it forces for objects in the picture to disappear away from the beholder. (110)
Picasso decided to transform his cast of characters into inanimate objects, and let their heads and torsos vanish into spaces and shadows. In convincing the reading of this transformation is that it marks a crucial shift in Picasso’s Art from narrative to iconic. (115)
The artist strives to create a maximum spatial contradiction, largely without giving up the difference between solid thing and the spaces between them. The compressed three dimension objects and space only make visual sense from one place. (118)
Having abandoned the illusion of solid three-dimensional objects in space, and substituted a play of pictoral elements such as line, shading, and texture, Picasso held his composition together with a loose or spontaneous grid-like structure. This brought the planes and lines into a kind of order, crucially unrelated to conventional compositional systems. Perspective, convincing visual illusion, and relative symbolic importance are replaced by the uneven rhythm of light, shade, and line tentatively aligned to the rectilinear edges of the canvas. The interest in mass and illusion of relief are abandoned in favor of a mysterious effect sometimes called “transparency.” (126)
If Renaissance perspective conveys the assurance that there is a correct place from which to see the world, Cubist paintings never finally declare whether there is anywhere to stand at all. The relief effects of Cubist paintings suggests a constant displacement position and ethereality meant not only that the world slips away from the image, but also that the viewer slip away from the world. (129)
Analytic Cubism come to refer to a process where three dimensional objects are broken don into fragments, corresponding to their appearance from different viewpoints in space which are then recombined in two-dimensions to produce a representation. Supposedly proceeds from observed reality to art. Although Analytic Cubism rejects single-point perspective, its combination of multiple viewpoints is thought to offer a fuller version of perceived reality. Synthetic Cubism reverses the process, reassembling the elemental shapes and fragments of Analytic Cubism in order to make new kinds of reality. (146)
What technologies of transportation meant, and what the jump-cut revealed, was that the centre of experience was time. As early as 1855, Heinrich Heine noted that “hrough the reailroads space had been abolished and the only thing left for us is time.” Everything in the world was gathered in the time of consciousness and visual experience now leapt from moment to moment and place to place, to be resolved and ordered only according to memory and consciousness.
The major works were figurative the multi-figure compositions of Leger and Duchamp were distinguished from precedents to represent movement. Duchamp’s paint—literally a strip cartoon—shows the same woman walking though five stage of undress. The reinterpretation of cubist faceting as the fragments of continuous time was facilitated through chronophotography. This expert craft involved devising methods for capturing motion in still photography either as a blurred after image of the body moving through space in a single frame, or in a series of frames representing that movement in different stages. Duchamp became particularly fascinated by what he called “ a static representation of movement” in his work He called it “elementary parallelism” reducing the moving world to parallel linear elements.
Levels of reference, or of points of reference, and simultaneity—the conception of space-time. Space time refers to the new subjective experience of the world originating in Cubism’s transparency, simultaneity, and intersecting planes. There is hovering, vertical groupings of plans which satisfies our feeling of relational space, and there is extensive transparency that permits interior and exterior to be seen simultaneously. (396)
Supposed transparency of cubism and spatial openness of modernism in architecture. All stressed the subject’s experience of moving through such buildings as the equivalent of what Metzinger had first called “mobile perspective” (396)
Fourth dimension is time experienced or duration. The human consciousness experiences space and time as “duration” , as ever-changing and heterogeneous It is after all commonplace that time “flies by” or drags depending on circumstances, and that awareness of present can sometimes be lost when reflecting on memories. By contrast, the intellect or reasoning faculty wants to represent time and space by being homogenous. Space is supposed to extend like an endless sheet of graph paper, and the present to move along a straight line of time, which could be cut into hours, minutes, and seconds. Intellect has to do this in order to make use of the world, in order to mark out the distinct edges of objects and places, at distinct times. Bergson argued that this was a fundamentally false representation of things. (193)
Le Corbusier wrote a description of his building:
You enter: the architectural spectacle at once offers itself to the gaze; you follow an itinerary and the views develop with greater variety. Large windows open up views on the exterior where you find again the architectural unity. In the interior, the first attempts at polychromy allow the architectural camouflage, that is, the affirmation of certain volumes or the contrary, their effacement. (403)
Duration:
the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances, with a chain of vibrations. Oil painting could express depth, density, and duration, thought once inexpressible and encourages us to present within a limited space governed by a complex rhythm, a true fusion of objects.
Analytical Cubism:
Was based on the analytical dissection of objects in space, breaking them down into their component parts as seen from multiple viewpoints. These fragments would then be reassembled on the canvas to create a more complete and intellectually satisfying picture than that offered by conventional perspective.
Constructions:
Construction is based on the idea of collage but extends it assemblage of heterogeneous elements to three dimensional, challenging the idea of carved or modelled sculpture.
Futurism:
These artists developed a radical form of art capturing the speed and “dynamism” of modern urban life. They focused on the city in which all things move, al things run, all things are rapidly changing. They called this “universal dynamism” or the wold of dynamic sensation., with a flux of distinct times.
Futurist: universal dynamism
Delaunay: simultaneity
Salon Cubist: mobile perspective
posted by agnes at 11:41 PM
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