06. Cubism 2

1912 - 1916

Music Selection: Satie: Parade

From around 1912 Picasso and Braque, joined by painter Juan Gris, started to add vibrant colors and physical collage elements to their works — wallpapers, newsprint, fabrics, sand, dirt and even wicker from a chair (Picasso’s ”Still Life with Chair Caning“, considered the first example of Synthetic Cubism). They reduced the number of planes and simplified the points of views represented in their artworks, compared with their earlier Analytical Cubism works, emphasizing the role of flat shapes and materials.

They played with what was real and not, employing both techniques from the tradition of nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil painting to imitate real life as well as authentic real life collage elements. Thus these new “synthetic” works evoked questions of what was real versus what was artificial and what was art or not art. The Cubist works served as precursors to subsequent art movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, Constructivism, Orphism, and Vorticism.