WHAT DO YOU UNDERSTAND BY THE TERMS ANALYTICAL AND SYNTHETIC CUBISM? TO WHAT EXTENT DO THESE LABELS HELP OR HINDER THE READING OF THE CUBIST IMAGERY?
...ting these objects as he saw them, but as he 'knew' them. The notion of Simultaneity, later to be adopted by the Futurists, may have influenced Picasso's and Braque's development of multiple perspectives. Simultaneity was the wholesome expression of an individual's sense of self in an increasingly growing and impersonal world brought about predominantly by industrialisation. The artist was therefore caught between his own minute fragmentary perceptions of the world and the pace and speed of technological change and modern urban life. Picasso's and Braque's use of multiple perspectives may have reflected recognition of this notion and their subsequent attempts to make whole the fragments of their perceptions. Multiple perspectives may also have reflected a recognition of another notion that the memory, and thus subconscious, played an active role in conscious perceptions. These perspectives, as the sum of the artist's subconscious and conscious perceptions, would then embody a more accurate reality. The notion of the Fourth Dimension may also have influenced Picasso's and Braque's Cubist analyses. The Fourth Dimension represented an infinite space extending itself in all directions at any given moment. It was the 'space' that endowed objects with their natural proportions; a dimension that could not be visualised. To incorporate the Fourth Dimension in painting, Picasso and Braque may have painted objects as they 'thought' them. That is, the way they intuitively felt the objects should be painted, as opposed to the visual constriction in which they saw them. This may have led to the emergence of multiple perspectives more intuitively rather than as a summation of 'simultaneous' fragments. It is important to consider these various notions in trying to trace the influences on particular aspects of the Cubist technique, considering that all these notions were circulating at the time of Analytical Cubism and had a clear metaphorical relevance. The dawning of this new era in modern art came with Picasso’s oil painting Les Demoiselles D’Avignon completed in 1907. African sculpture, with its bold shapes and lines, had a great impact on Cubism. This was unusual as artists borrowed from a completely different culture. The horrific expressions and simplistic design of many of the masks inspired Picasso. He became interested by Iberian sculpture dating from pre-Roman times. They attracted him by their unorthodox proportions, their disregard for refinement, and their rude barbaric strength. These influences rapidly gained an important place in his work, and led to the sculptural distortions of nudes painted on his return to Paris. The paintings of Cezanne became familiar to Picasso. Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to recapture primitive art. The painting depicts five naked prostitutes in a brothel; two of them push aside curtains around the space where the other women strike seductive and erotic poses—but their figures are composed of flat, splintered planes rather than rounded volumes, their eyes are lopsided, staring or asymmetrical, and the two women at the right have threatening masks for heads. The space, too, which should recede, comes forward in jagged shards, like broken glass. The new style depended in particular on a simplification of form and a clarification of the methods by which it was depicted. With a disregard for classical tradition, distortions were used freely to emphasise volume and convey emotional sensation. In African art he had found a conceptual art which was not based on immediate visual reactions to a model. The original impact had been violent. It had forged the first real link between African art and Western ideas and it was followed during the two years that succeeded the painting of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. At this point Braque and Picasso began to clarify and systemise a new conception of the painters’ experience. They felt that they should analyse an object, break it down to shapes, flatten them, change colours, and reassemble them so that they could be conceived from all angles. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective. Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1916 Braque also recognised the potential of simplified representation, flattened angular mass and lack of aerial perspective or traditional lighting. He too was influenced by Cezanne’s interest in the hidden structure of his subject. In 1908, Braque went to L’Estaque to paint a series of landscapes which used similar colours to Cezanne’s and the same motif locations which Cezanne had studied. It is these works which, when eventually displayed, drew a scathing review from an art critic, which said that the ‘artist despises form, reduces everything - places, figures and houses, to geometrical schemes, to cubes’ (Louis Vaucelles in ‘Gil Blast’). In Braque’s Analytical Cubist oil painting Violin and Pitcher. with its representation of space, he has seemingly turned a still life into the form of a landscape, providing a sense of solidity whilst violating traditional systems of illusionist procedures. The subject matter is quite characteristic of both Analytical and Synthetic Cubism; a motionless scene depicting the interior of a cafe or a living room with a drinking vessel on a table, with a musical instrument which symbolised both the pursuit of leisure and a symbol of anti-naturalism - as music was considered one of the most abstract of mediums e.g. contemporary developments within the visual expression of music like Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. The colours used are virtually monochromatic using a limited earthy palate and tonal variations of various browns, greys, beiges and blacks. Georges Braque Still Life with Violin and Pitcher, 1909-10 Braque’s reasons for adopting this monochromatic scheme differed slightly from Picasso’s; he understood that colour would unsettle the spatial sensations of the image, whereas Picasso thought colour was secondary to the sculptural properties of his subjects. Avoiding the conventions of one-point perspective, in use since the Renaissance, Braque and Picasso would make studies of an object by viewing it from multiple perspectives in order to understand the sum view of their subject, then represent this three-dimensional knowledge in a two-dimensional manner. Braque wanted the viewer to metaphorically walk around inside his paintings. Synthetic Cubist observation was generally represented in a more simplified form. Picasso said: ‘I don’t paint what I see, I paint what I know.’ Therefore we are witnessing an analysis of an object, hence Analytical Cubism. Unlike Impressionism, where we witness an instant, here we witness a composite of instances. This use of plurality of viewpoints is evident in the two main objects in the painting. Firstly the violin, especially evident at its neck, string positioning and its base, secondly in the pitcher with its curious partially poured opening and spatially inverted side. At the top of the picture is a nail or tack, which has been painted quite naturalistically with a shadow from a light source high up on the left. This use of lighting seems at odds with Cubist theories until combined with the second use of shadows featured on the page beneath the nail. This time the lighting source is from two other directions, perhaps representing multi-views of light itself. Braque was just about the only Cubist who still included an aspect of lighting in his work. It is evident that Braque is subverting any logical traditional use of lighting. This was a device Braque invented in order to emphasise the object quality of the painting itself. He would later use oval canvasses in order to give a similar illusion. This further elevated Cubism's separation from traditional art forms and indicated the direction that Synthetic Cubism would take. In keeping with early Cubist works, the facets or fragments, each representing a different view, were coloured in order to differentiate one from another and assist in the overall visual effect of the work. Perspective is rejected but still replaced with an alternative form of pictorial depth. Areas of empty space had now become just as vital as those with content, hence there being no predominance tonally between background and subject, just the exaggeration of highlight on featured objects or motifs. Straight lines give a sense of geometry to the painting, curved lines are used exclusively for the symbolisation of object characteristics, everything else is rendered sharply. This idea was expanded later, as whole objects were reduced to mere details, suggestions of characteristics as it were, sometimes barely enough for the mind to grasp what the subject was and these were placed in a wash of geometrical lines. By this stage, space and mass itself had become of equal importance with the subject matter. These symbolic suggestions would be of great importance for the Synthetic Cubist experiments to come. Synthetic Cubism developed a new technique called papier colle, which proved to be an important discovery. There was a return to colour, and texture became very important. The difference between the two phases of Cubism may also be defined in terms of picture space: Facet Cubism retains a certain kind of depth, the painted surface acts as a window through which we still perceive remnants of the familiar perspective space of the Renaissance. This space lies behind the picture plane and has no visible limits; it may contain objects that are hidden from our view. In Collage Cubism, on the contrary, the picture space lies in front of the plane of the tray. Space is created not by illusionistic devices such as modelling or foreshortening, but by actual overlapping of layers of pasted materials. Picasso’s Bowl With Fruit, Violin and Wineglass is a challenging example of Synthetic Cubism. Contrasting immediately with Analytical Cubism, this work is void of virtually any painterly content except for some crude use of black water-colour representing the back of a chair on the bottom left, a frail chalk representation of strings and what appears to be a textured white oil paint, possibly roughly shaded with charcoal, which acts...