ARTH 12A Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Georges Braque, Portuguese Guitar, Academic Art
11 May 2018
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May 11, 2018
“European Modernism” Notes
Reactions/Questions
•
Van Gogh’s Bedroom
• Blue is actually purple – colors can change over time
Cubism
• Fracturing of form and space (visual)
• Painting as a language (representational system)
• 2 “flavors”
o Analytic cubism
o Synthetic cubism ≈ collage
• Is mostly about experimenting
o Limits of painting as a representational system
o Subject matter = conservative
• Doesn’t last but work produced is super influential
• Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Picasso
o Picasso’s father was in art academy so he could draw
o Really big image
o Experiment he paints doesn’t reflect true ability
o Means “Ladies of Avignon Street” = red light district
o All women are looking at viewer/inviting viewer b/c they are
prostitutes (very open and vulnerable positions)
o Faces of women are all the same → not individualizing them, saying
they’re all the same
o Fruit is consumable like their bodies
o Lady on far left is manager = too old for actual work but manage
other prostitutes
o Painting explicating makes the viewer male
o Faces look like their borrowed from late roman sculptures or
African masks (France has a lot of artifacts from Africa as a product
of colonialism)
o Women are signaled as primitive b/c of African masks
o Color of painting doesn’t mix with form/shape, Picasso separates it
o Arbitrary shading, no light source
o Taking academic art head on
• The Portuguese by Georges Braque, 1911
o Very hard to read
o Form – broken up planes, not too much color, light to dark (value
changes), warm and cool tones, color is really died down
o See lettering but hard to read
o Title tells us picture is of a Portuguese guitar player at café that
Braque used to hangout
o Unpacks visual system that’s used in West for 2D representation for
3D things
o Doing this is 1911 where book was published about how languages
work the same way as art
▪ Also book about how mathematics was a system of
representation as well
▪ People suddenly realizing that system of representation are
just system, no natural connection
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