GEORGES BRAQUE AND CUBISM For many years,
Picasso showed Les Demoiselles only to other painters. One of the first
to see it was Georges Braque(1882–1963), a Fauve painter who
found it so challenging that he began to rethink his own painting
style. Using the painting’s revolutionary ideas as a point of departure,
together Braque and Picasso formulated Cubismaround 1908. Cub-
ism represented a radical turning point in the history of art, nothing
less than a dismissal of the pictorial illusionism that had dominated
Western art since the Renaissance. The Cubists rejected naturalistic
depictions, preferring compositions of shapes and forms abstracted
from the conventionally perceived world. These artists pursued the
analysis of form central to Cézanne’s artistic explorations, and they
dissected life’s continuous optical spread into its many constituent
features, which they then recomposed, by a new logic of design, into a
coherent aesthetic object. For the Cubists, the art of painting had to
move far beyond the description of visual reality. This rejection of ac-
cepted artistic practice illustrates both the period’s aggressive avant-
garde critique of pictorial convention and the public’s dwindling
faith in a safe, concrete Newtonian world in the face of the physics of
Einstein and others (see “Science and Art,” page 915).
The new style received its name after Matisse described some of
Braque’s work to the critic Louis Vauxcelles as having been painted
“with little cubes.” In his review, Vauxcelles described the new paint-
ings as “cubic oddities.”^6 The French writer and theorist Guillaume
Apollinaire (1880–1918) summarized well the central concepts of
Cubism in 1913:
Authentic cubism [is] the art of depicting new wholes with formal
elements borrowed not from the reality of vision, but from that of
conception. This tendency leads to a poetic kind of painting which
stands outside the world of observation; for, even in a simple cub-
ism, the geometrical surfaces of an object must be opened out in
order to give a complete representation of it....Everyone must
agree that a chair, from whichever side it is viewed, never ceases to
have four legs, a seat and a back, and that, if it is robbed of one of
these elements, it is robbed of an important part.^7Art historians refer to the first phase of Cubism, developed jointly
by Picasso and Braque, as Analytic Cubism.Because Cubists could not
achieve Apollinaire’s total view through the traditional method of
drawing or painting models from one position, these artists began to
dissect the forms of their subjects. They presented that dissection for
the viewer to inspect across the canvas surface. In simplistic terms, An-
alytic Cubism involves analyzing the structure of forms.
THE PORTUGUESEGeorges Braque’s painting The Portuguese
(FIG. 35-14) exemplifies Analytic Cubism. The artist derived the
subject from his memories of a Portuguese musician seen years ear-
lier in a bar in Marseilles. Braque concentrated his attention on dis-
secting the form and placing it in dynamic interaction with the space
around it. Unlike the Fauves and German Expressionists, who used
vibrant colors, the Cubists chose subdued hues—here solely brown
tones—in order to focus the viewer’s attention on form. In The Por-
tuguese,the artist carried his analysis so far that the viewer must
work diligently to discover clues to the subject. The construction of
large intersecting planes suggests the forms of a man and a guitar.
Smaller shapes interpenetrate and hover in the large planes. The way
Braque treated light and shadow reveals his departure from conven-
tional artistic practice. Light and dark passages suggest both chiar-
oscuro modeling and transparent planes that allow the viewer to see
through one level to another. As the observer looks, solid forms
emerge only to be canceled almost immediately by a different read-
ing of the subject.
The stenciled letters and numbers add to the painting’s complex-
ity. Letters and numbers are flat shapes, but as elements of a Cubist
painting such as The Portuguese,they allow the artist to play with the
viewer’s perception of two- and three-dimensional space. The letters
and numbers lie flat on the painted canvas surface, yet the image’s
shading and shapes seem to flow behind and underneath them,
pushing the letters and numbers forward into the viewing space. Oc-
casionally, they seem attached to the surface of some object within
the painting. Ultimately, the constantly shifting imagery makes it
impossible to arrive at any definitive or final reading of the image.
Examining this kind of painting is a disconcerting excursion into
ambiguity and doubt, especially since the letters and numbers seem
to anchor the painting in the world of representation, thereby exac-
erbating the tension between representation and abstraction. Ana-
lytical Cubist paintings radically disrupt expectations about the rep-
resentation of space and time.
ROBERT DELAUNAYArtists and art historians generally have
regarded the suppression of color as crucial to Cubism’s success, but
Robert Delaunay(1885–1941), a contemporary of Picasso and
Braque, worked toward a kind of color Cubism. Apollinaire called
this art style Orphism,after Orpheus, the Greek god with magical
powers of music-making. Apollinaire believed art, like music, wasEurope, 1900 to 1920 92135-14Georges Braque,The Portuguese,1911. Oil on canvas,
3 101 – 8 2 8 . Kunstmuseum, Basel (gift of Raoul La Roche, 1952).
The Cubists rejected the pictorial illusionism that had dominated
Western art for centuries. In this painting, Braque concentrated on
dissecting form and placing it in dynamic interaction with space.1 ft.