Cubism

Cubism was an avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture in the early 20th century.

Synthetic cubism

The second phase of cubism, beginning in 1912, is called "synthetic cubism".

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These works of art are composed of distinct superimposed parts — painted or often pasted onto the canvas — and are characterized by brighter colours, something that they had previously tried to reintroduce, but were unsuccesful in doing so in a smooth transitory way. Unlike analytic cubism, which fragmented objects into its composing parts or facets, synthetic cubism attempted more to bring many different objects together to create new forms.

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This phase constitutes the birth of the collage and of papier collé. Picasso invented the collage with his Still Life with Chair Caning, in which he pasted a patch of oil cloth painted with a chair-caning design to the canvas of the piece. Braque, interested by Picasso's technique, first employed papier collé in his piece Fruitdish and Glass. Papier collé consists of pasting material to a work much in the same way as a collage, except the shape of the patches are objects themselves. For example, the glass on the left in Fruitdish and Glass is a piece of newspaper cut into the shape of a glass.

Related Topics:
Collage - Papier collé

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While Braque had previously used lettering, the two artist's synthetic pieces began to take the idea to a new extreme. Letters that had hinted to the objects, became objects themselves. Newspaper scraps are among the most usual items the artists pasted to their canvases. They went further by adding paper with a wood print, or other types of scraps. Later they pasted advertisements, as well. This helped reintroduce color into the cubist works.

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Besides employing mixed media, Picasso and Braque varied their paint applications with decorative painting techniques such as combing, faux graining and adding sand for texture. They often drew objects and added shadows with graphite or charcoal, mixing drawing and painting techniques. Picasso especially made use of pointilism and dot patterns to suggest transparent planes and to differentiate space.

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