Tag Archives: Cubist

Modern Art Monday Presents: Diego Rivera, Cubist Landscape

cubist landscape diego rivera photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

Cubist Landscape (1912) was inspired by a trip that Diego Rivera made to Spain on 1911, where he encountered the olive trees of Catalonia. The serrated blue ridge in the painting evokes Montserrat, a mountain in the region. The work exemplifies the idiosyncratic approach to Cubism that Rivera developed in the 1910s, when he lived in Paris. He saw these early works, which combine a sun-drenched palette with kaleidoscopic planes and abstract patterning, as a way of beginning to forge a specifically Mexican modernism. “My Cubist paintings,” he said, “are my most Mexican.”

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Marc Chagall, Cubist Landscape

Cubist Landscape
Photo By Gail

This work, Cubist Landscape (1919) by Marc Chagall (18871985)  illustrates the artist’s relationship to the Suprematist avant-garde at the time. Its disjointed geometrical shapes and use of heterogenous materials to create texture originated in Cubo-Futurism. One of the steps leading to Suprematism according to Kazimir Malevich’s theory of art, this style privileged movement, fragmented forms and bold colors. In the composition, geometric forms overtake a figure carrying an umbrella in front of Vitebsk School — perhaps a stand-in for the artist, protecting himself from the Suprematist storm. To the left of this figure, in a scene typical of Chagall’s shtetls (a small town with a large Jewish populations), a man with a goat makes a faint appearance. The artist repeats this name endlessly across the canvas, humorously illustrating the gulf between his painterly poetics and the stark Suprematist creations of his rival Malevich, who advocated collective art.

Photographed as Part of the Exhibit Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922, On View Through January 6th, 2019, at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Henri Laurens, The Guitar

The Guitar
Photo By Gail

Musical references permeate Cubist painting and sculpture. The guitar, which Picasso depicted often, is one of the movement’s most recognizable motifs. Like a Cubist painting, Henri Laurens‘ painted terracotta sculpture, The Guitar (1919), blurs, even inverts, the relationship between solids and voids; solids appear to recede, while voids assume physical presence. This effect is particularly apparent in the depiction of the sound hole and strings on the face of the guitar.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Fernand Leger, Mechanical Elements

Mechanical Elements
Photo By Gail

Fernand Leger arranged impersonal elements of a new machine age like a cheerful assembly of children’s building blocks in Mechanical Elements (1920). Initially, his infatuation with modern technology did not go over well with collectors. As the artist later recalled, “For two years, Leonce Rosenberg, my dealer at the time, could not sell any of the work from my ‘mechanical period,’ while the mandolins of the Cubists moved briskly.”

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

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

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