analytic cubism

welcome back everyone so for this session which is for June 11th we're going to talk only about cubism and I have to say right up front that this is the readings and this material a pretty far and away the hardest of all the readings in the semester so please don't be discouraged it comes early on I mean cubism is is a movement that unfolds over the first latter half of the first decade into the second decade of the 20th century so it does come early but please don't be discouraged I'm hoping that the the two lectures which I'll try to keep a little bit more brief will help you with the readings either if you read before and then watch the lecture or if you watch the lecture and then read hopefully I mean I'm able to put it in a more bite-sized more everyday kind of speech so one of one of the reasons cubism is so difficult is because it's been studied to death and there's so many different competing interpretations it's a whole landscape of different contending readings of these of these paintings what they meant what they really are and so on and so forth so there's a lot there and some art historians have gone very theoretical with their interpretation so I'm gonna I hope to make it you know a little bit more user-friendly a little bit more speaker Li all while trying to try and explain these difficult theories to you so let's see how it goes so we're gonna start with analytic cubism because it comes first you have two phases of cubism analytic is first and then synthetic comes second and we're not really gonna so much talk about why one is called analytic why one is called synthetic the book goes over that more or less just briefly these paintings in analytic cubism they look like the painters are analyzing the world to death they're giving you lots of information in almost this fragmented form so that's the width that's where the term analysis analytic came from when it came hi Jackson that's my cat he's going interrupt us every once in a while so that's where the term analytic comes from you'll see synthetic has to do with introducing foreign materials materials that are not deemed to be or before then were not deemed to be art materials in heart so that's more or less the terms but let's let's leave the terms aside and let's just go straight to some of the ideas in the history because I find that to be more and more interesting and more important so with the analytic cubism I like to start with a few a few technologies and forms of media that we're starting to emerge in the latter part of the 19th century early 20th century that influenced a lot of artists this won't just be for cubism but it has a profound effect on the way artists and not just artists everybody saw the world understood conceptions of time and of space and one of these would be a chronal photography so photography's invented in 1827 and of course it's an account of a revolutionary moment in in representation but someone like a tangerine male and another part is another photographer named Muybridge who you might know started working with Crono photography which you might know more as like stop-motion photography or something like this right this is a beautiful example of mallies the cono photography kronole meaning time chrono photography of this Pelican that's sort of making its way down maybe onto the water and so you're seeing it in successive frames and to our eyes maybe this doesn't seem so radical so revolutionary but just imagine that this is before the invention of film this is before anyone had ever seen a moving image and so it's as if you're seeing all on one negative let's say what how many pelicans are there one two three four five six you're seeing six different separate moments in time all at once all right so this is radical and even more so you're able to see the world through photography through this fragment fragmentation of time this is the beginnings of of in sports if anybody watch the sports this is the very beginnings of like slow-motion all right so you're able to see the world in a way that with the normal human division you'd never be able to see you couldn't you would no one could see a pelican flying like this in such a methodical frame-by-frame sort of way for us it would more or less be a blur and so this is this is a radical new way of seeing the world that is going to influence not only perhaps the Cubist's but definitely the futurists and some other artists that we that we discussed this semester so notice that with Maui here time-space is starting to fragment it's starting to expand and we're starting to have a new vision of time of time and space through this new medium but of course there's nothing like film to express this newfound understanding of time and the image and space as something manipulable and fragmented that you can then see in some ways all that well all that wants or in the case of films sometimes what you're dealing with is moments that are fragmented but they look as if they're seamless within the image so a great example is a very very early film by a by George me a the astronomers dream from 1889 ta that the Lumiere brothers invent film just one or two years before 1896 1897 one of the first films shown was just a very short clip of a locomotive coming forward towards the camera and the audience had never seen a film before so half the audience freaked out and ran out because they thought they were gonna hit get hit by a locomotive so this tells you how how new this visual language was for people it's old hat for us right people are on the hunt tick-tock I've never actually seen tick-tock button like you know these little moving in a trains of like the stupid little things of everyday life they might not be stupid this is like second nature it's all over the place but in the latter part of the 19th century early 20th century this is a radical new language of being able to represent the world in time and cuts so let me show you this it's a very brief it's a very brief film it would have been silent it's called the astronomer screen it would have been silent at the time but someone as often this is often the case with silent film there's a score headed on top so it's short so I'll show you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so it's a it's a the astronomers dream you know the scientists who all of a sudden it's moving more of a nightmare for him the world isn't this trustee thing that he can measure anymore it's constantly changing it's not dependable and of course the malaise conveys this conveys this through cuts right so the illusion of chairs and desks and whatever else suddenly disappearing is simply a cut and in time and so with film you have two different temporalities in some way so you have the illusory temporality the time of the film itself which for us was like what three minutes so and which seems seamless like the flow of life that were experiencing right now as human beings but then the time of the film itself is highly fragmented right these are all separate moments in time filled and then stitched together to seemeth as if they're they're seamless through these cuts so this is quite a radical conception or reekin ception of representation of space and of time and of the image and we know that the Casso and a lot of these friends fellow artists and poets and writers at the time they were definitely seeing these early films and they must have been in some ways and influenced unpainted in the early half of the in the early anthem of the 20th century as was chrono photography right which you know there are things that are that that we have in common here and we also know that a friend of Picasso's was interested in the fourth dimension which I don't know not to get to interstellar here if anybody seen interstellar but theories of the fourth dimension which were pretty current at this time had to do with in the same way that that we experience the world in three dimensions so we see I mean we can touch things in three three dimensions there's the idea that maybe there's a fourth dimension where not only do you see things you know and in three dimensions but you can see them in multiple points in time so the fourth dimension would be it would be the ability to see the world at the same time from different times right so there was a folding visiting card that one of the artists one of the friends of Picasso you know they go to cafes together I forget his name now but he liked William James a pragmatist philosopher and an American philosopher of American pragmatist who had this folding visit car and experiment and it's one of these illusions where you you get the sense and depending on how you're looking at it that the card is either coming out at you or receding in the back although of course it's a static image it's not changing and so there's a way in which here not even through photography or through a moving image like film you get the sense that at the same time you're seeing you're seeing an image in two different ways and it might even be moving in your in your eye depending on how you look at it and so Picasso it's said that he was interested in these theories of the fourth dimension and he may have included it remember in our last session I said that a lot of people have made quite a bit out of the chests of this Demoiselle and people have read that her chest is in fact something of reproduction of misfolding visiting-card from William James and so here you would have a proto kiss gesture along the lines of some of the first ways in which cubism was read namely that cubism was a way in which to see the world through multiple perspectives which means which means almost inherently multiple positions multiple moments in time so you see this is why I introduced this session with chrono photography with film and with the the the optical illusion from William James because they all share this in common and you're seeing an image that that is somehow conveying to you multiple moments in time and also multiple perspectives right so the earliest interpretations of Cubism so by guillaume apollinaire very famous french poet a friend of picasso but not just him some other lesser-known Cubist's who were working in the guise of Picasso and Braque the Peto Cubist's they also shared this interpretation they basically said that human vision is impoverished like we can see the world in three dimensions but it's always from a single vantage point we can never overcome this we can never let's say I mean are you sitting on a chair or you have a computer in front of you like I do right now you can only ever see it from one perspective of course you can shift you can move to one side or the other and then you get it from another perspective but you've changed in time so you can't get it simultaneously so the earliest interpretations of cubism were that these cubist paintings that Braque and Picasso were doing in 1910 1911 were basically giving you the world from multiple perspectives all at once so you're getting more perspectives so what visually are we talking about here these are analytic cubist works I show you two from from the chapter but there are so many of them the Met actually has a really nice collection of early cubist work so once that opens ups hopefully that'll open up some day soon and all be safe to go you'll be able to see more of these but this is Picasso a portrait of a very famous collector and friend of Picasso and Braque Daniel Henry Kahnweiler from 1910 and so you see how you have more or less a traditional subject matter a portrait - a guy sitting there with his looks like his hands were folded it's kind of smiling at you but whoa is it is it or is it rendered in a way that's completely different from anything you've used - when it comes to portraiture even from someone like Matisse where you still had a figure in one moment in time however much abstract that you still had the finger from one vantage point and it was more or less clear what the contours of the body were here with this sitter Picasso is giving you this almost fragmented conception well no not almost fragmented it feels completely and like an explosion of fragments of the of the of the sitter you get a bit of the face you get a bit of the hands but the body and the the environment was probably sitting in a in apartment or maybe in a cafe they love to go to cafes it's all fragmented and all these little cubes all these little geometric shapes which is where the term right around this time came from I'm one of the critic new Evoque said said these are all like little cubes so cubism stuck I mean here you have another one block I don't want to oversell Picasso here you know Picasso is such a huge name looming over early twentieth century art it's not the last time we're going to talk about him but Barack is equally important for this adventure they undertake together in this new pictorial language of cubism at the time in 1910 1911 early 1912 in some ways Brock is even more important sometimes Brock gets to certain insights even more quickly than than picasso so Brock is is really important here it's also important to remember that they worked almost in tandem and sometimes they wouldn't even sign their paintings as if they were sort of exploring this new form of painting together and so the earliest interpretations of these works was that you're getting Kahnweiler and this person not just from one vantage point but from multiple perspectives it's the same thing with the Portuguese Portuguese is a guitar player in a bomber here so you're not just seeing like Picasso's man playing a guitar from his bloop here you're not just seeing it from one perspective you're seeing from multiple perspectives and so this was the way in which cubism was understood and I think it's still like you know if anybody talks about cubism today and like common knowledge usually it's just thought oh yeah that these were they showed you all these nice it means mold perspectives at once that's what cubism was about and there are some scholars that agree with this very early assessment of cubism that in fact you are getting multiple perspectives and some some some even say that some even note that during this time you know 1905 is an important date for the history of science this is when Einstein publishes his first paper on relativity these are also the decades in which quantum mechanics are starting to be developed by physicists someone like Max Planck around 1910 and so I'm not gonna go in class I usually make a kind of a long analogy here but I don't want it I don't want to go down a rabbit hole and I just want to give you the basics I'm fascinated by physics in another life I would have made me done a PhD in physics or something like that instead of philosophy in art history but it's good to be interested in lots of things even if you remain an amateur like me when it comes to science but around this time you do have the theory of relativity that comes along in which Einstein is basically basically saying existence the universe there is no single perspective and in fact the perspective you have on the world even space and time which both curve and are malleable in onion physics is relative it depends on your position in space in space and time so the conception of against space and time is really starting to change here and that's at the bluest scale of the very very large in quantum physics this is the scale of the very very small where you have elementary particles this is the subatomic that behave in ways that are really different from our everyday experience of reality and of matter matter is by and large empty space for further quantum for quantum physics and things like a little electron behave in ways that are that are quite different than let's say a stone that we just throw on the floor and where we were it's dependable that it will gravity will take over and it will accelerate towards the floor and a kind of constant eventually at a constant rate so we're starting to get a radical reconsent the same moment that painters are starting to completely reorient their understanding of painting and so some have said some of argue that Picasso basically although he would never have read Einstein would never of really known these theories it would somehow through painting he intuited he intuited the theory of the relativity through these multiple relative perspectives within the canvas of the analytic of these analytic paintings so that might be interesting but most art historians take issue with these interpretations so both the early interpretation of these cuba's works as showing you multiple perspectives and also the idea that somehow picasso intuited scientific breakthroughs of the early 20th century through these paintings our historians have a somewhat more limited in I mean it makes sense a more art specific way of interpreting these paintings it has much more to do with painting as a language itself for art historians and the merit of these theories is that well it does seem to align a bit more with what Picasso and Braque said themselves about what they about what they were doing and so for art historians it's not about multiple perspectives all at once it's not about the theory of relativity it's much more about reconciling the two two features of painting that are inherent to painting that no other painters had ever tried to reconcile before in the history of art and so that's the fact that a painting inherently is an illusory space a space of representation so think of the Mona Lisa the Mona Lisa is a flat surface but you don't see the flatness at all you see the Mona Lisa and you see the landscape in the background and you really actually forget about the flatness of the canvas and going back to the history of all the way back to the Renaissance this is what single point perspective painting has always been like it's a flat plane that you forget about and you have this illusory window into another world and so you have an illusory space so what Picasso were doing is they were dissatisfied with his history they wanted to show the material the very real literal flatness of what they were working on so this is why the figures and the subjects in their paintings it's as if they've been steamrolled and flattened and they're the the bodies and all the still lives and everything else that are that are in the paintings they'd like exploded into little shingles that that have been totally flattened so that you'd create almost like a grid like flat surface in the painting and so what happens there you get a sense of oh wow okay this is paint the this is a grid-like flat surface so they're calling attention to the material of the canvas and of the paint which inherently is flat right but this is the crucial part here because when Prok did not want to go to abstract painting like we're gonna see actually pretty soon they wanted to retain some of the illusion of painting which is inherent the painting right they they thought painting had to be in some ways mimetic it had to be um had to have some depth and so what what they're doing here they're trying to almost do like a happy middle so you get the flatness through this this cubist fragmentation of the subject but it's a very shallow one right so you have all these different shadings and planes that are tilting up and down left and right think of almost like a topographical map you know those maps that actually have ridges think of this almost like a shallow landscape but not with the unified light source and not too far in so they're simultaneously showing you a little bit of depth and and the flatness of the of the canvas and so that's the way in which most art historians have have interpreted these not the scientific interpretation not the multiple perspectives thing but the fact that Picasso and Braque were trying to do something that was that's almost impossible and no one had done before analyzing painting not only for its illusory capabilities its ability to represent the natural world but also to call attention to its material support to the very real canvas and paint and lines and so on and so forth all right so it's almost like there's a fancy word for this dialectic where you have two terms that are almost in constant tension with each other and in this case in cubism they don't really resolve they're in constant tension you're constantly seeing these as flat but also seeing a little bit of depth as if there is a shallow recession into space with some of these tilted planes and fragmented features and so we'll end this first this first half by talking about that the transition painting one of the one of the key works that move us towards the synthetic cubism which will be the second half of the the second half of the of the class and that's Picasso still life with chair caning and so what you have with still life in chair caning it's an oval canvas and it's still using some of the earlier fragmentation of the Cubist the Cubist style but he's also added foreign objects objects that are not really considered to be art objects so one is a rope notice the Rope is basically like providing the frame and another is an oil cloth reproduction of chair caning so think of like you know outdoor furniture or something like that you you you you have this like chair caning that would support you as you're sitting on the chair so that's what this is right and then all of this is is painting a still life with the the jewel not the newspaper in French but you're only getting the jus they like to do these puns in these works and then you know these fragmented Cuba's still lifes so like a maybe like a candle or a bottled wine or a glass and whatever and so you have painting but you also have these new lean non art materials that before would never been deemed to be art Hart had only been sculpture made of marble or bronze and painting had always been painting so this is a pretty mmm this is pretty radical work with in the history of Western European modernism so that will lead us to the synthetic but this work too is undergoing attention or at the dialectic in the way I just explained to you but not so much attention between literal flatness and the illusion of depth but Picasso here is interested in another almost impossible reconciliation of terms and that's between scene and think about it the whole history of painting from the rena strum from 19 and 1907 or whatever before them was in all the way back to the Renaissance painting had been purely visual right for the most part it's purely visual you're simply using your your your vision and so Picasso it starts to do some interesting things here because he's he wants to he wants to it's as if he thinks that that's an impoverished understanding of painting that painting could actually supply feeling to other senses of the body because we're always we smell we touch we feel we see like we're multi-sensory creatures when we're looking at at a painting or whatever it might be when we're looking at the world so in this transitional work towards synthesis and synthetic cubism Picasso maybe was trying to reconcile two other things that is the purely visual but also the fact that when they're where in the world it's not just their vision that we're using we're also touching things we're also feeling the world and we also kind of feel you know if you're at the edge of a cliff or something like that you sort of feel this vertiginous thing like you feel your body you feel the world sort of receding away from you he's trying to do these two things and how does he do it in some ways it's quite simple he gives you a painting that's a still life which you know is in this case it's fragmented but it's somewhat traditional you're seeing it even if it's flattened and has a little bit of of depth like they like the earlier paintings but he also gives you the sense that you're looking down that maybe you're even in some way seated right because this this starts to look like a table this starts to look like maybe the top of the table or a chair and so at the same time you're seeing the still life but you're also maybe looking down and seated at the still life as if you're at this cafe which of course you know as I said before Picasso and all these Bohemians in Paris the cafe was the place to be to discuss and to talk and to drink and to experiment with things so it's as if here the reconciliation is between the visual and the haptic between seeing and touching or feeling and I'm not going to go into this too much because I'll just go I'll just go over time for the first half but he's definitely influenced by Cezanne so Cezanne already did this in certain ways in his wonderful paintings of the latter part of the 19th century so in this basket of apples you're getting you're getting a still life as you're seeing it but you're also in some ways sort of feeling it as if you're in the space as if like the table through the peripheral vision that we all have all around our eyes in this case the lower part it's as if the table is sort of coming down and and drooping a little bit as if we're kind of sitting just above it right so so in this basket of apples Cezanne some theories say that he's giving you a phenomenological approach to painting that you're not only seeing it your your whole body is kind of sensing the painting as we do in the real world so maybe both Cezanne and picasso are trying to do the impossible which is through painting mimic not only how we see the world but how we feel it how we touch it how we smell it and everything else right that is the whole sensorium of being the type of beings that we are so I hope that makes sense of the chapter a little bit more I hope I put it in more everyday terms for you and then after our break we'll go to the even more tricky and more challenging part of cubism which is synthetic cubism in which again I hope I will make sense of it for you so talk to you a bit

Channel: Arnaud Gerspacher

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Id: LOnCE-ksQFU

Length: 32min 24sec (1944 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 08 2020