| Artist: | Picasso, Pablo |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro | |
| Date of Work: | 1909 | |
| Nationality: | Spanish | |
| Context: | Pre-WWI | |
| Movement: | Picasso: Analytic Cubism (early stage) | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: stucco houses on a hill with a reservoir over a river below, but remember what Braque will say about Cubism: "the subject is not the object." The subject matter is not the true objective of Cubism. Rather than painting the thing itself from a one-point perspective, Picasso maps the site from the multiple perspectives of a vision that continually shifts its frame of reference. We see the scene from above (looking down on the rooftops), from below (looking up at the underneath side of the reservoir bridge), and straight-on (looking directly across from the door at center); we are looking from all these mutually conflicting points of view simultaneously! Thus, instead of mirroring the scene according to the illusions of one-point perspective (the mimetic ideal), Cubism maps the shfting frames of reference of multiple perspectives, laying them all out on the flat surface plane. Denies a sense of plasticity as any tangilbe sense of concrete mass dissolves into faceted planes in space that fuse figure and ground through "passage" (learned from Cezanne). In this early stage of Analytical Cubism, the picture turns on the contradictory principle of "volumetric flatness"--cubic volumes are suggested only to then be undermined as all forms end up as faceted planes that affirm the flat canvas surface. That is Cubism's reality: the flat canvas surface and the languages of art, not nature. Style: Picasso shatters one-point perspective into multiple, shifting frames of reference with the help of lessons learned from Cezanne's art, most notably, "passage"--the commingling of faceted planes in space that fuse figure and ground into an allover structural unity that holds the picture tightly together while dismantling the integrity of the various objects pictured, which end up highly fragmented in the process. Light and shadow add to the confusion by no longer being traceable to a single source; this is not light coming from nature but light and shadow as part of the language of art, which can break with the laws of nature to create mutually conflicting, multiple sources. Modeling in the round is thereby undermined by a light that flickers across the whole field rather than setting up a clearly defined, unambiguous focus. Picasso teases us by suggesting volume only to flatten it out later through the combined effects of passage and the eratic play of light and shadow. "Volumetric flatness" is his strategy for upsetting the traditional 3-D illusionism of Western mimesis. Context: this is the early stage of Analytic Cubism in which traces of green are still evident in a reference to nature; after 1909 all traces of green will drop out of Analytic Cubism, which will keep to a strictly disciplined, monochromatic palette of earth tones, ochres, and greys. Color drops out because it is no longer about setting an emotional mood as it was in the Blue and Rose Periods; it is now about redefining the representation of space on the flat picture plane, and color gets in the way. The Cezanne retrospective of 1907 taught Picasso much, directing him away from painting "things" to painting "passage" itself, i.e., the transition between things and the shifting of perspective. "I do not believe in things, I believe in relations," Braque would say. Cubism's shifting frames of reference, of course, parallel Einstein's 1905 development of the "Theory of Relativity," which pulls the ground out from under conccrete absolutes by showing how reality is itself relative to one's point of view in spacetime (conceived as a continuum). Picasso is not reading Einstein, but Cubism's multiple perspectives lead to the same undermining of one, absolute Truth. These ideas, added to the anti-mimetic lessons of Iberian and African Art, gave Analytical Cubism its momentum in the years directly following the Demoiselles, 1908-1909; by 1910, everything has gotten much more complex and flatter as Picasso, together with Braque, pushes Analytic Cubism to the breaking point. The invention of "collage" in 1911-12 will be the next significant turning point, shifting the frame of reference from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism. | ||
