Probably everyone has heard of Cubism before, but do you know what 'Analytical Cubism' is all about? This first phase of the Cubist movement is perhaps the most important and revolutionary art movement of the early twentieth century and changed how we perceive the world. You will learn everything you need to know about this art movement and, most importantly, how to recognize it here!
The first phase of Cubism: Analytical Cubism
Cubism was invented by the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso and his French friend Georges Braque around 1908. The work of the French painter Paul Cézanne, who is perhaps best known for his carefully composed still lifes or views of Montagne Sainte-Victoire in Aix-en-Provence, was very inspirational for Picasso and Braque when they started to experiment with different ways of representing the visual world. This quest has concerned artists for centuries. But what they were to find changed the course of art deeply.
Cézanne famously said that everything in art is formed from a sphere, cone, and cylinder, and one can easily find this principle in his compositions. His apples and pears have a certain abstract and geometrical quality to them. But Picasso took Cézanne's visual experiments one step further and Analytically dissected what he saw into its geometrical forms or cubes. Cubism was born and became the basic principle of the most revolutionary innovation in the visual arts of the twentieth century. This process of Analytically dissecting the visual world led to 'Analytical Cubism,' a phase of Cubism between 1910 and 1912.
The first fruit of Picasso's experiments was his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon created in 1907, now on show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which is considered the first cubist painting. The painting shows five artistic female nudes posing for an imaginary viewer. However, Picasso's picture already indicates the characteristics of Analytical Cubism art definition with the primary fragmentation of the women's bodies into cubic forms and the reduction of the color palette to broken tones such as brown, gray and blue.
Around 1907, at the same time as Picasso, Georges Braque was also working on his first designs in which objects, color, and space were reduced to their respective basic elements. Although there was never, as in Futurism or Fauvism, a manifesto or theoretical writings, Cubism introduced a new order of thought in the visual arts, which subsequently spread to sculpture and architecture.
The importance of Analytical Cubism
The importance of Analytical Cubism cannot be underestimated for the development of art and paved the way for other abstract art styles such as Russian Constructivism. This movement broke with all conventions and rules artists have followed for centuries. Analytical Cubism left the importance of light and perspective — the governing principles of the art of the past centuries - radically behind. This further departure from more traditional artistic values was responsible for pushing painting, and art, forward. Such advances were perceptible in many art forms, such as sculpture and architecture.
The difference between Analytical and Synthetic Cubism
From 1912 onwards, Cubism completely detached itself from the concrete object and worked only with individual geometric forms that were combined Synthetically, i.e., without a motif, to form 'new' objects. Whereas Analytical Cubism breaks down concrete objects into their individual forms depicted from various viewpoints, Synthetic Cubism was interested in exploring the two-dimensionality of objects through collage techniques, for example.
Paintings from this phase of Cubism often only show geometric forms, which are freely combined into new creations, some of which also flow into each other. Synthetic Cubism is often much more "colorful" than its predecessor, working with overlapping areas of color set off by strong contours. The use of pure colors is also a popular stylistic device of Synthetic Cubism. Many art scholars argue that the sheer liberty of creation employed by Synthetic Cubists contributed to the development of subsequent avant-garde movements.
Notable painters of the movement
Analytical Cubism art had an impact on the work of many artists. The most notable amongst them were Robert Delauney, Juan Gris, Jean Metzinger, Franz Marc, Lionel Feininger, and many more, developing their very own approach to Cubism. Here's an overview:
Robert Delauney is considered the primary representative and theoretician of Orphism, also known as Orphism, a form of Cubism emphasizing color. Together with his wife, the artist and craftswoman Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Robert Delaunay became one of the most influential avant-gardists of Paris.
The Spanish artist Juan Gris mainly painted still life, e.g. his "Guitar on the Table". Before he turned to Cubism, he painted in the style of Art Nouveau. However, in 1908 he met Pablo Picasso and became aware of Cubism.
Jean Metzinger was highly influenced by the work of the post-impressionists, which found expression in the mosaic-like color patterns of his paintings in the years between 1905 and 1908 and can be regarded as his first artistic high point. With their precisely placed patches of color, these late Neo-Impressionist paintings already form a bridge to his later Cubist works, as the tendency towards construction and the preference for a clear pictorial order are already evident here. His painting style became increasingly geometric, and his conception of the new pictorial design was supported by his artistic exchange with Braque, Picasso, and Gris.
You might be surprised to find Franz Marc in this list to represent Analytical Cubism. Franz Marc himself could not escape the fascination of Cubism and was strongly influenced by this new style in his further artistic development. Franz Marc's "Tiger" is an excellent example of how expressively Marc applied the newly acquired Cubist techniques and transformed them into his own expressive pictorial language.
Picasso and Braque — the Cubist friends
One year after the creation of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso and Braque started working closely together to develop the cubist style further and push its boundaries. Together, they experimented and explored the functions and processes the eye and brain take in images and process them. They worked so closely together and had such a regular and fruitful exchange that some of their paintings almost look alike.
The series of paintings they created during this time serve as precious testaments to closely examine their visual developments and the problems they solved. During this period, their representations became closer to geometric shapes and increasingly distanced themselves from reality, accompanied by a renunciation of colorfulness favoring monochrome shades of black, grey, beige, and ochre.
Analytical Cubist Style: Specifics and Techniques
As the term implies, Analytical Cubism focuses on analyzing what is depicted and its exploratory fragmentation into individual fragments. The starting points of Analytical Cubism were the rejection of a fixed point of view and the associated principle of simultaneity. Multiple views of the object to be depicted were now shown simultaneously, whereby the individual faceted forms were placed in diverse, rhythmic relationships to each other and their surroundings. The form thus finally lost its fixed outline and its volume; it was, as it were, newly constructed from interpenetrating individual views.
The concentration on the form also entailed using tondo or oval formats that could reduce the background area. An apparent reduction of the coloring was also the consequence, which was now limited to broken tones (brown, grey, bluish) combined with white or black lines for partial delimitation. The ductus in Analytical Cubism art is usually open and painterly, and the motifs often focus on everyday objects.
Favorite motifs used
When analyzing the traits of Analytical cubism, recurring elements such as pipes, playing cards, musical instruments, glasses, bottles, pitchers, paintings of people and their faces, and newspapers can be discovered.
But how come artists seem to have been particularly interested in this kind of object? As cubist paintings were usually very complex compositions, artists liked including things that were easily recognizable by the beholder to encourage them to decipher the other elements of the composition.
Hermetic Cubism
The most complex period of Analytical Cubism was called 'Hermetic Cubism.' The word 'hermetic' is often used to describe mystical or mysterious concepts. It is particularly fitting here because it is almost impossible to figure out the subject matter in this phase of Cubism due to the high degree of abstraction the artists had reached. 'Hermetic Cubism,' however, was just short-lived and, around 1912, was again interested in the object and showing its materiality. As a result, the first material collages were created in this context, such as Picasso's "Still Life with Cane Chair Weave."
Conclusion
After this short exploration of the background of those complex paintings of Analytical Cubism, you will be able to spot them immediately. Keep your eyes open for crystalline structures depicting the same object from multiple viewpoints in monochrome tones and a pipe here and there, and you are all set! Enjoy exploring the world around you for traces of this art movement, one of the most revolutionary there has ever been.