Www.cusd200.org



Lesson Focus: Cubism used abstract, fragmented shapes to depict several views of the same subject simultaneously, emphasizing the basic geometry or structure of the subject.

Art Focus:

• Paul Cézanne: Mont Sainte-Victoire, The Card Players, Still Life with Apples and Oranges

• Georges Braque, Woman with a Guitar

• Pablo Picasso, Le Guitariste

Materials from Art Smart Closet:

• Drawing paper (white or construction)

• Shape Stencils (these are in a plastic container in cabinet)

Materials in Classroom:

• Pencil

• Colored pencils

• Ruler

Materials from Home:

• If you are able, bring in a few objects for the students to use as “stencils” to create quick shapes: a glass to draw a circle, a small jewelry box to trace a square—this is up to you

Class Discussion (15 minutes)

Slide #1

• Today we are going to talk about a style of art called Cubism. We can also say that Cubism was an “art movement.” Has anyone ever heard of an “art movement” before?

• Just so you understand, a “movement” in art is when a group of artists agree on a certain style of art with a specific common philosophy or goal. These artists will follow certain rules to create art that is similar to one another for a period of time.

• Cubism is a style of art and those that followed it were called…can anyone guess? Cubists! Can anyone tell me something about Cubism? (Listen to student responses – this is just to see how much, if anything, they already know.)

• Super… it looks like we are off to a great start. (Determine how quickly to go through material based on what they already know.)

Slide #2

• To begin to understand what Cubism is, we are first going to talk about the French artist named Paul Cézanne who greatly influenced the beginnings of the Cubism movement.

• Paul Cézanne is important as he is known as the father of modern painting. Cézanne was known for developing the style of using geometric shapes as the basis for his paintings. He believed that everything in the world was made up of either a sphere, a cone, a cylinder or a cube. He began many of his works with these basic shapes layering thick paint with strong outlines to build form.

Slides #3 - #5

• Let’s take a look at a few examples of Paul Cézanne’s paintings; keeping in mind his use of basic shapes to create his artwork.

• In each of the paintings, look for shapes: spheres, cones, cylinders and cubes. What shapes can you find in each painting? (Have students be specific: oval shaped trees, rectangular hat, etc. Any shapes they pick out is fine—just name a few for each painting.)

Slide #6

Now I would like to tell you about two more artists. Their names are Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

• These artists studied and greatly admired Paul Cézanne’s work. It was Cézanne’s influence that led them to create this new style of art called Cubism.

• In the early 1900’s, Cubists created a new way of seeing things in art. Picasso and Braque were known as the leaders of the Cubism Movement.

Slide #7

• To help us discover what Cubism is, let’s take a look at one of Georges Braque’s paintings entitled Woman with a Guitar.

• Do you see anything in this picture that is recognizable?

Cubist paintings were abstract. The paintings did not

have a recognizable picture or tell a story.

• Looking at this painting, what do you think was important to the artist when painting it? The color, form, and texture were important. Cubist art is made for expressive or decorative purposes.

• Cubists painted what they saw through their “minds-eye” rather than real life.

• How would you describe this type of artwork? The artwork can often be described as looking like pieces of broken (fractured) glass.

• How do you feel about this painting? Do you like it? Explain.

Slide #8

• Let’s take a look at this next painting by Pablo Picasso called Le Guitariste.

• What types of shapes do you see in this painting? Cubists painted people or landscapes using combinations of basic geometric shapes.

• How might Picasso have created this picture? Picasso, like other cubists, show one image as it might be seen looking at it from a number of different ways at the same time; often times overlapping the images.

• How do you feel about this painting? Do you like it? Explain.

Slide #9

• Now, I want you to pretend that you were walking through an art gallery with a friend. You noticed these two paintings side by side and told your friend you knew that they were Cubist paintings. Your friend, looking puzzled, said “What in the world is a Cubist painting?” Pretend I am your friend and explain to me how you know that these are Cubist paintings!

Encourage students to come up with the following; these points will help them recognize a Cubist painting:

• Name the paintings and the artists: Woman with a Guitar by Georges Braque and Le Guitariste by Pablo Picasso.

• There is no real picture or story being told in either painting. The paintings are abstract.

• The paintings are made up of geometric shapes.

• The shapes are overlapping each other.

• We see many views of the same image at the same time.

• The paintings are very expressive and decorative; the focus is on color, form and texture.

Excellent work! It looks like you really have a great understanding of Cubism! Now let’s put that understanding to work! Take a look at this last painting by Pablo Picasso.

Slide #9

• Our last painting is Picasso’s portrait of a close German friend of his by the name of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who was a well-known art historian and collector.

• What recognizable objects and human features can you find in this painting? (eyes, mouth, hair, hands, maybe ears)

• What different geometric shapes did Picasso use to create this “minds-eye” expressive piece? (Depending on time, students can list as many polygons they can find: see list below.)

• What colors were used? (shades of gray, black, brown)

• Can you actually see his friend Kahnweiler in this painting? You can see overlapping shapes and only the suggestion of an image.

• Keep this image in mind as we move on to our art activity.

Art Activity (15 minutes) My Teacher in Cubism

Explanation for Presenter:

• Ask the teacher to be your model. The teacher may sit or stand and does not have to be still; movement is part of a Cubist’s creation. If the students need to, they can get up and walk around the teacher.

• Have students create a Cubist portrait of their teacher, using as many types of polygons as they can (see Picasso’s portrait for examples). Encourage students to divide their teacher’s features any way they want. (For example, a cheek or chin can be several shapes.) Students might also want to walk around the "sitter" and see how his or her face appears from different points of view.

• Encourage students to add a few of the most significant and recognizable physical features of their teacher (curly hair, eyes, a piece of jewelry, etc.). Note how little was recognizable in Picasso’s portrait.

• Hang the finished portraits in the classroom as a tribute to the teacher!

Alternative: You may want instead to have the students do self-portraits.

Note: You may want to e-mail the teacher ahead of time and ask if s/he minds sitting as a model for the class! You may also ask if the teacher would like to wear a few props, such as a favorite hat or scarf. Get creative!

Artist/Artwork Background Information: (Reference for Presenter)

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as 'Analytic Cubism,' was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1907 and 1911 in France. In its second phase, Synthetic Cubism, (using synthetic materials in the art) the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity.

In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.

Analytic Cubism is one of the two major branches of the artistic movement of Cubism and was developed between 1908 and 1912. In contrast to Synthetic cubism, Analytic cubists "analyzed" natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the two-dimensional picture plane. Colour was almost non-existent except for the use of a monochromatic scheme that often included grey, blue and ochre. Instead of an emphasis on colour, Analytic cubists focused on forms like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent the natural world. During this movement, the works produced by Picasso and Braque shared stylistic similarities.

Both painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque moved toward abstraction, leaving only enough signs of the real world to supply a tension between the reality outside the painting and the complicated meditations on visual language within the frame, exemplified through their paintings Ma Jolie (1911), by Picasso and The Portuguese (1911), by Braque.

In Paris in 1907 there was a major museum retrospective exhibition of the work of Paul Cezanne shortly after his death. The exhibition was enormously influential in establishing Cézanne as an important painter whose ideas were particularly resonant especially to young artists in Paris. Both Picasso and Braque found the inspiration for Cubism from Paul Cézanne, who said to observe and learn to see and treat nature as if it were composed of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Picasso was the main analytic cubist, but Braque was also prominent, having abandoned Fauvism to work with Picasso in developing the Cubist lexicon.

Synthetic Cubism was the second main branch of Cubism developed by Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris and others between 1912 and 1919. It was seen as the first time that collage had been made as a fine art work.

The first work of this new style was Pablo Picasso's Still Life with Chair-caning (1911–1912), which includes oil cloth pasted on the canvas. At the upper left are the letters "JOU", which appear in many cubist paintings and may refer to the popular Parisian daily newspaper Le Journal. Newspaper clippings were a common inclusion in this style of cubism, whereby physical pieces of newspaper, sheet music, and the like were included in the collages. At the same time, JOU may be a pun on the French words jeu (game) or jouer (to play). Picasso and Braque had a constant friendly competition with each other, and including the letters in their works may have been an extension of their game.

Whereas analytic cubism was an analysis of the subjects (pulling them apart into planes), synthetic cubism is more of a pushing of several objects together. Picasso, through this movement, was the first to use text in his artwork (to flatten the space), and the use of mixed media—using more than one type of medium in the same piece. Opposed to analytic cubism, synthetic cubism has fewer planar shifts (or schematism), and less shading, creating flatter space.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cubism (n)/ Cubist (adj)

The early-20th-century art movement led by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) that used abstract, fragmented shapes to depict several views of the same subject simultaneously, emphasizing the basic geometry or structure of the subject; of or relating to Cubism

Abstract (adj)

not recognizable; lacking pictorial representation or narrative content but utilizing color, form, and texture for expressive or decorative purposes

Polygon (n)

in geometry, a union of segments connected end to end. The segments are called sides. Two sides meet at a vertex (pl., vertices). The number of sides of a polygon is equal to the number of vertices.

geo (earth) - metry (to measure)

|circle |the set of all points in a plane a given distance from a given point. |

|congruent |equal measure |

|hexagon |a six-sided polygon |

|heptagon |a seven-sided polygon |

|octagon |an eight-sided polygon |

|parallelogram |a quadrilateral with both pairs of opposite sides parallel |

|pentagon |a five-sided polygon |

|similar |figures that have the same shape, but not necessarily the same size |

|rectangle |a quadrilateral with 4 right angles |

|trapezoid |a quadrilateral with exactly one pair of opposite sides parallel |

|    - isosceles |a trapezoid with the un-parallel opposite sides congruent |

|triangle |a 3-sided polygon |

|    - equilateral |a triangle with all sides congruent |

|    - isosceles |a triangle with at least two sides congruent |

|    - right |a triangle with a right angle |

|    - scalene |a triangle with no sides congruent |

Paul Cezanne 1839-1906

French painter, often called the father of modern art, who strove to develop an ideal synthesis of naturalistic representation, personal expression, and abstract pictorial order.

Among the artists of his time, Cezanne perhaps has had the most profound effect on the art of the 20th century. He was the greatest single influence on both the French artist Henri Matisse, who admired his use of color, and the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, who developed Cezanne's planar compositional structure into the cubist style.

During the greater part of his own lifetime, however, Cezanne was largely ignored, and he worked in isolation. He mistrusted critics, had few friends, and, until 1895, exhibited only occasionally. He was alienated even from his family, who found his behavior peculiar and failed to appreciate his revolutionary art.

Cezanne's goal was, in his own mind, never fully attained. He left most of his works unfinished and destroyed many others. He complained of his failure at rendering the human figure, and indeed the great figural works of his last years—such as the Large Bathers(circa 1899-1906, Museum of Art, Philadelphia)—reveal curious distortions that seem to have been dictated by the rigor of the system of color modulation he imposed on his own representations. The succeeding generation of painters, however, eventually came to be receptive to nearly all of Cezanne's idiosyncrasies. Cezanne's heirs felt that the naturalistic painting of impressionism had become formularized, and a new and original style, however difficult it might be, was needed to return a sense of sincerity and commitment to modern art.

Significance of Cezanne's Work

For many years Cezanne was known only to his old impressionist colleagues and to a few younger radical postimpressionist artists, including the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and the French painter Paul Gauguin. In 1895, however, Ambroise Vollard, an ambitious Paris art dealer, arranged a show of Cezanne's works and over the next few years promoted them successfully. By 1904, Cezanne was featured in a major official exhibition, and by the time of his death (in Aix-en-Provence on October 22, 1906) he had attained the status of a legendary figure. During his last years many younger artists traveled to Aix-en-Provence to observe him at work and to receive any words of wisdom he might offer. Both his style and his theory remained mysterious and cryptic; he seemed to some a naive primitive, while to others he was a sophisticated master of technical procedure. The intensity of his color, coupled with the apparent rigor of his compositional organization, signaled to most that, despite the artist's own frequent despair, he had synthesized the basic expressive and representational elements of painting in a highly original manner.

"Cezanne, Paul," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was an Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. As one of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art, he is best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Guernica (1937).

Analytic cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed along with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. Both artists took apart objects and “analyzed” them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque’s paintings at this time have many similarities. Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the genre, in which cut paper fragments—often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages—were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Le Guitariste

Painted during the summer of 1910 while Picasso was on holiday at Cadaques, this canvas, as though drenched by the Catalonian sun, uses distinctively Cubist means to evoke the staccato rhythms of music. Conjuring up the sound of frenzied guitar playing, the lines that articulate the canvas transform it into an artwork that moves away from figuration to become an almost abstract image.

The facets that broke up the volumes in Picasso’s previous works are fewer in number and pared down in shape. They no longer appear as an outcome of decomposition, but assert themselves and structure the canvas with a vigorous architecture of lines and angles.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (June 25, 1884 - January 11, 1979), born in Germany, was an art historian, an art collector and one of the premier French Art dealers of the 20th century. He became prominent as an art gallery owner in Paris beginning in 1907 and he was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Cubism.

Kahnweiler is considered the major dealer in, champion of, and spokesperson for Cubism. He was among the first people to recognise the importance and beauty of Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, immediately wanting to buy it and all of Picasso's works. Picasso wrote of Kahnweiler What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn't had a business sense? – compelling because at the time of the origination of his most famous works Picasso was largely unknown as an artist and destitute.

Georges Braque

Georges Braque (13 May 1882 – 31 August 1963) was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art movement known as cubism.

Braque's paintings of 1908–1913 began to reflect his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, appearing to question the most standard of artistic conventions. In his village scenes, for example, Braque frequently reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional. In this way, Braque called attention to the very nature of visual illusion and artistic representation.

Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work closely with Pablo Picasso, who had been developing a similar approach to painting. The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the movement's main innovators. After meeting in 1907, Braque and Picasso, in particular, began working on the development of Cubism in 1908. Both artists produced paintings of neutralized color and complex patterns of faceted form, now called Analytic Cubism. In 1912, they began to experiment with collage and papier collé.

Their productive collaboration continued and they worked closely together until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 when Braque enlisted in the French Army, leaving Paris to fight in the First World War.

French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term Cubism, or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture - that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas."[1] The Cubist movement spread quickly throughout Paris and Europe.

-----------------------

CUBISM[pic]

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download