Tag Archive | Cubist

Modern Art Monday Presents: Juan Gris, Still Life with Checked Tablecloth

Sep11

Still Life with Checked Table Cloth
Photo By Gail

Juan Gris (1887 – 1927), a master of disguised images, presents a table brimming with coffee cups, stemmed wineglasses, a large white-footed fruit compote (see from the side and from above) containing thickly painted grapes, a bottle of red wine, a bottle of Bass extra stout ale with its distinctive red diamond logo, a newspaper, and a guitar. Yet, Still Life with Checked Tablecloth (1915) has another equally compelling identity: a Bull’s head. The coffee cup at lower center doubles as the animal’s snout, black-and-white concentric circle at left is a “bull’s eye,” the bottle of ale is an ear, and the sinuous edge of the guitar is the horn. The letters “EAU” on the wine label, which ostensibly stand for “bEAUjolais” can just as easily represent “taurEAU” (Bull).

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC

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Modern Art Monday Presents: Stuart Davis, Percolator

Jun26

Percolator
Photo By Gail

Influenced by the Cubist language of flat, overlapping planes and wedges, Stuart Davis (1892 – 1964) used geometric shapes in related colors to create this still life, Percolator (1927). Here, he deconstructs the cylindrical forms of a mass-produced, percolator coffeepot and renders the everyday object both abstract and undefinable. By choosing an industrially produced consumer product as his subject, Davis put a new spin on the spatial innovations of the previous decade’s European avant-garde art movements.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Fernand Léger, Woman with a Cat

Jun13

Woman with a Cat
Photo By Gail

Woman with a Cat (1921) belongs to group of monumental female figures that Fernand Léger (1881 – 1955) painted throughout the 1920s. Motionless and frontal, this nude might be made of stone or metal, evoking at once a classical sculpture and a futurist robot. While Léger’s subject is rooted in European, particular French, artistic traditions, his streamlined style reflects contemporary design aesthetics that the painter’s friend, the architect Le Corbusier, advocated and popularized.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Stuart Davis Edison Mazda

Nov16

Edison Mazda
Photo By Gail

In the early 1920s, in response to the industrial age and increasing consumerism, Stuart Davis began to incorporate commercial goods and advertising graphics into his art. Edison Mazda (1924), with its flattened space and collage-like composition, resembles the Cubist still lifes of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. But rather than portraying pipe racks and candlesticks, Davis includes a contemporary manufactured object: a blue, seventy-five watt light bulb.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Wasp and Pear By Gerald Murphy

Jul13

Wasp and Pear
Photo By Gail

In 1922, upon discovering the cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris in the window of a Paris gallery, Gerald Murphy told his wife, “If this is painting, then this is what I want to do.” Soon after, he ended his career as landscape architect and turned to painting.

In Wasp and Pear (1929), Murphy combined an abstract background with an anatomically detailed but highly stylized wasp, pear, leaf and honeycomb. The artist credited “the large technically drawn and colored charts of fruits, vegetables…[and] insects” in a classroom where he has studied during his military training as his inspiration.

Gerald Murphy (1888 – 1964) painted only fourteen known works, seven of which remain.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

3D Print Mosaic Bust of Benjamin Franklin

May6

Ben Franklin
Photo By Gail

I think this is my favorite photo I took at the 3D Print Show: a fantastically detailed bust of Ben Franklin. Look at the startling realism around his eyes — amazing! I also love how this was done with a variety of different colored filaments to create a mosaic cubist motif that’s just mind-blowing.

Modern Art Monday Presents: The Baluster By Fernand Léger

Dec1

Fernand Leger The Baluster
Photo By Gail

Though Fernand Léger built his reputation as a Cubist, his style varied considerably from decade to decade, fluctuating between figuration and abstraction and showing influence from a wide range of sources. Léger worked in a variety of media including paint, ceramic, film, theater and dance sets, glass, print, and book arts. While his style varied, his work was consistently graphic, favoring primary colors, pattern, and bold form.

Léger embraced the Cubist notion of fracturing objects into geometric shapes, but retained an interest in depicting the illusion of three-dimensionality. Léger’s unique brand of Cubism was also distinguished by his focus on cylindrical form and his use of robot-like human figures that expressed harmony between humans and machines.

Influenced by the chaos of urban spaces and his interest in brilliant, primary color, Léger sought to express the noise, dynamism, and speed of new technology and machinery often creating a sense of movement in his paintings that captured the optimism of the pre-World War I period.

In its embrace of recognizable subject matter and the illusion of three dimensionality interspersed with or often simultaneous with experiments in abstraction and non-representation, Léger’s work synchronizes the often competing dualities in much of twentieth-century art.

(Above Courtesy of The Art Story Dot Org)

The Baluster, painted in 1925, is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and is on view in Painting and Sculpture I, Gallery 7, 5th Floor.