Monday, July 16, 2018

Museums: National Gallery of Art #14 (Part 2 of 2)

In yesterday's blog post, we saw some of Cézanne's later paintings and his innovative use of perspective.

A couple of years after Cézanne's death, friends Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso saw Cézanne's paintings and his technique.  They were inspired.  They seized on Cézanne's technique of portraying multiple perspectives, and they pushed it toward abstraction.

The result was dubbed Cubism.  According to French art critic and Cubist artist Jean Metziner: "In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from a single viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context."


Below are examples of early Cubist paintings by Braque and Picasso.   



Georges Braque, unlike Pablo Picasso, embraced the Cubist style throughout his life.  The ever-evolving Picasso embraced Cubism for a while and then moved on to other styles.  Below are some later paintings by Braque in the Cubist style.  Enjoy.   




Thanks for visiting the National Gallery with us.

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