A Brief Word on Other Varieties of
Cubism
A number of artists begin to use cubist
ideas shortly after encountering the work of Picasso and Braque: Metzinger,
Gleizes, Delaunay, Leger, Gris, Malevich and other Russian artists.
In a sense, they all take cubism in their own, relatively unique directions.
We might want to note that with these artists, what we are seeing is cubism
becoming a "style" or pictorial aesthetic, in most cases devoid of the
semiological goals which Picasso had and the painterly goals which Braque
had. That doesn't mean that these other artists should be ignored,
but that they are using what they saw in the cubist experiments of Picasso
and Braque for other reasons.
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analytic or "true" cubism: the
standard definition of analytic cubism describes it as a record or analysis
of the perceptual experience of an object over time; characterized by faceting
of objects, multiple points of view, architectonic composition, grid-like
structure uniting object with background (Picasso and Braque)
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synthetic cubism: almost the
reverse process of the above--a record of the materialization of an object
as it emerges from planes and shapes (Gris, Leger, Picasso in the late
1910s). The collages (papiers colles) are more likely to be synthetic than
analytic.
Leger's truly synthetic cubism (synthetic
because he unites several influences) is the direct pictorial influence
for Malevich's cubofuturism. Where Picasso and Braque break forms
down into flat, somewhat geometric shapes, Malevich and Leger use volumetric
parts to replace the coherent unified whole. Despite the volumetric
character of the individual parts within the painting, their work is are
still committed to the denial of illusionist space in the painting.
Ultimately, Malevich concludes that cubism abandoned its own implications
and pursues the a-logical implication of cubism in his Cow and Violin.
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| Leger:
Nude Model in Studio, 1912-13 (combines Cezanne, futurism and synthetic
cubism) |
Malevich:
The Knife Grinder, 1913 (cubo-futurism; shows the influence of Leger) |
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| Metzinger:
Composition, 1917 (an artist who uses cubism as a pictorial strategy but
conceptually, has little in common with cubism) |
Gris: Fantomas,
1915 (his style is sometimes called "synthetic cubism": instead of fragmenting
or splintering his forms, the objects emerge from the abstract shapes) |
Malevich believed that cubism failed
because the viewer could not succeed in bringing the fractured images into
a visual unity and so the depicted object became incomprehensible.
As a result, he said, the logical conclusion was that logic must be abandoned.
Depicting a subject should be replaced by the depiction of a variety of
pictorial units (by which he meant planes of color) in an asymmetric unity.
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| Malevich:
Cow and Violin (oil on wood, 1913) |
Orphic cubism: movement is
created through color; color, not geometry, is the form and the subject
(Robert and Sonia Delaunay; the American artists Morgan Russell and Stanton
MacDonald-Wright)
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| Delaunay:
Circular Forms: Sun, Moon, Simultane 1, 1912-13 (orphic cubism) |
Delaunay:
Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon, 1912/13 |
Precisionism: the American
adaptation of cubism-- a machine-age or industrial-age view of the landscape,
emphasizing clean or precise edges in the rendering of forms (Sheeler
and Demuth are the best-known of these artists although there are others).
The objects are not fractured or displaced in any way; essentially an overlay
of refracted planes of light creates the visual effect of cubism.
In the U.S., we might attribute this interest to photography as well as
to cubism, the more so since Sheeler was also a photographer and treated
similar subjects in both paintings and photographs.
 |
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| Charles
Demuth: My Egypt, 1927 (American cubism, more commonly known as "precisionism") |
Charles
Sheeler: Upper Deck, 1929 (like Demuth, a precisionist) |
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| Steichen:
Maypole, 1932 (photograph) |
Sheeler:
untitled, 1927 (photograph) |