Cubism
...introducing elements of collage. It makes sense that the ultimate conclusion of Cubism was to introduce elements of the real world when what they were attempting to do was create something and not produce a mere imitation. Pablo Picasso, born in Spain, was the co-founder of Cubism. He was a rebel from the start and as a teenager was already frequenting cafes in Barcelona where intellectuals gathered. He soon went to Paris, the capitol of art, and was influenced by Lautrec, Manet, and Courbet. Before emerging himself in Cubism, he dabbled in realism, caricature and experimented with colour, known as the Blue and Rose periods. Picasso was profoundly influenced by the Fauvist painter Henri Matisse and the self-taught primitive painter Henri Rousseau. Slowly, Picasso incorporated the simplified and stylized forms of Matisse and Rousseau into his own works. The accepted defining work of the transition between pre-Cubism Picasso and post-Cubism Picasso was a portrait of Gertrude Stein. She has a mask-like face made of strong forms and shapes compressed inside a restricted area. Shortly after, the first Cubist piece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 was created by Picasso. Of course, Picasso did not develop this style himself. Georges Braque, born in France, worked very closely with Picasso. Picasso even took to calling Braque “ma femme” or my wife, and their styles of painting were so similar that it is difficult to distinguish between the two in the early years. Braque developed his painting skills working with his father who was a house decorator. He moved to Paris in 1900 to study and was soon drawn, as Picasso was, to Fauvism. Around 1908, Braque shifted his attention from the Fauves to the paintings of Paul Cezanne.. Braque's interest in Cézanne's strangely distorted forms and unconventional perspective led him to paint in the manner that came to be called Cubist. In the following years he studied the effects of light and perspective, and the ways in which painters convey them on a two-dimensional surface. He sought to break through these conventions of painting. In his village scenes, for example, Braque frequently reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, but also rendered its shading so that its volume seemed to be contradicted. That is, it looked both flat and three-dimensional. In this way Braque called attention to the very nature of visual illusion and artistic representation. The definitive first Cubist painting is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It is oil on canvas, 8' by 7.8'. The painting began as a scene with five prostitutes and two men. However the painting evolved as he worked on it; Picasso painted over the clients, leaving the five women to gaze out at the viewer, their faces terrifyingly bold and solicitous. There is a strong undercurrent of sexual anxiety. The masks in the painting were influenced by the African and Oceanic collections he saw in the Musée d'Ethnographie du Tro...