05. Cubism 1

1906 - 1912

Music Selection: Stravinsky: Rite of Spring

Four exhibitions in Paris and a trip to the ancient Catalan village of Gosol, high in the Pyrenees, dramatically changed the direction of Picasso’s art . In Gosol Picasso, accompanied by his partner Fernande Olvier, was able to break out of his depression and became inspired by the Catalan Romanesque art he found in the churches of the Pyrenees. The four transformative exhibitions were: the collection of Iberian sculptures that were shown in the ‘Iberian Cabinet’ at the Louvre; the collection of African, Iberian and Oceanic masks and other artifacts at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro, also called simply the Musée du Trocadéro); and the seminal 1907 posthumous exhibitions of Paul Cezanne’s work at the Salon d’Automne and the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune.

The influence of these exhibitions manifest’s itself in a new approach to depicting the human form. This leads ultimately to the one of his most monumental, iconic and controversial paintings, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon , originally titled The Brothel of Avignon). Though created in 1907 Picasso only showed this painting to close friends until it was first publicly shown in 1916.

The influence and inspiration of Cezanne’s work — treating the structure of space and forms as a series of intersecting planes — led Picasso, in partnership with his friend George Braque, into the development of a radical new way to portray form that became known as Cubism. Through the use of planes they incorporated multiple points of views into one painting, while at the same time reducing their palettes to almost monochrome.

This revolution in the treatment of three dimensions on a flat surface became known as Analytical Cubism. In the example of the head of his model, muse and lover, Fernande Olivier, Picasso extended this cubist approach into sculptural form. Picasso and Braque pushed the analytical aspect of cubism to its limits, creating complex arrangements of many intersecting and overlapping planes, each plane becoming smaller and reflecting a different point of view of the same object. In these late Analytical Cubist works the object started to merge with the space around it.