Art And Artists

[poliphilo]

Ailz's course in 20th century art starts round about now. The first tutorial is next week; there are books full of pretty pictures all over the house and we lie in bed at night and talk about Cubism.
 
I don't get Cubism. I don't get why exactly it should be considered such a good idea to chop things into little cubes or shards or whatever those things are. I get Cezanne- who builds his paintings as if he were building a wall- and I get the primitivism of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon- and I get the pure abstraction of people like Mondriaan. But Cubism?  No. Even after 100 years there seems to be some uncertainty as to what it was all about - and I note that the artists who came up with the theory- or theories- were the second-raters like Whassisname and Whojamiflip. The guys who invented the brand- Braque and Picasso- said nothing. They just got on with it. I prefer to think of it as a transitional style, a bridge between primitivism and whatever comes next- dada or surrealism. Also rather academic and constricting- and it doesn't surprise me that Picasso got bored with it sooner rather later. Maybe Ailz, who thinks it's wonderful, will be able to persuade me otherwise.

The other artist in my life at the moment is Renoir. I'm working on a jig-saw of his Le Moulin de la Galette. It's tough. With most jigsaws you get lines and well-defined shapes,  but with Renoir it's all  blibs and blobs of colour that only resolve themselves into an image when you step a long way back. My old art teacher- Tom Griffiths- used to say that Renoir was the greatest of all painters because he painted joy. Myself, I think that Renoir is largely crap- he couldn't draw for starters- but I'll allow that a handful of his early paintings- the big compositions with lots of people having a hell of a good time- are really rather splendid. Le Moulin de la Galette is one of them.

Comments

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I think it's easier now to not get Cubism because we live in a machine/electronic age where it's common for everything to be broken down into discrete bits and rendered as series of chunks or bits. But when Cubism was around, it was still unnerving and intriguing to think that life might be able to be disassociated into parts that way.

Just my "before coffee and the baby kept me up all night so I'm tired" seat of the pants conjecture.

[mummm.livejournal.com]

I do hope that Aliz will educate you about Cubism, which is not about cubes. And your Cezanne was actually a huge inspiration in the first part of the period. (There are several types of Cubism)

It's funny that some of my former students, who as members of my Artistically-Talented classes, sometimes had a difficult time with Cubism. Most of them ended up with it as one of their favorite art periods. It certainly had a HUGE role in turning art from the realistic and tightly controlled classicism to something that became more truly ART. (Come on Aliz... YOU CAN DO IT!)

[sovay]

I don't get why exactly it should be considered such a good idea to chop things into little cubes or shards or whatever those things are.

Because if you're used to analog, digital is strange and fascinating as hell?

[petercampbell.livejournal.com]

I tend to think of cubism as being part of many things that were happening around the same time - relativity and existentialism in particular. They shared the same idea that there wasn't one fixed viewpoint, or any one particular morality, and cubism can be seen as an artistic extension of that.

Picasso did indeed get bored with it very quickly, but he was one of those artists that picked and discarded at a huge number of different styles throughout his career. It's not an invalidation of it as a movement though, and it's been hugely influential, and not just in the field of painting and sculpture.

I agree about Renoir though. Fluffy and twee are two words that come to mind, though I know that I'm being unfair to the more innovative aspects of his work there.