STW: Oval + Geometrics

Please respond to the following questions with as many quick and thoughtful answers as possible. There is no “right” answer.

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

What is it that you perceive to be on the screen. It’s okay if you don’t know the answer. Simply explain what you see?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Write down some quick observations of what you think of what is on the screen. Be thoughtful. If you like it or don’t like it explain why?

WHAT DO YOU WONDER?

Write a few quick questions about what the image or images on the screen make you wonder?

“Candlestick and Playing Cards on a Table”

Georges Braque | MetMuseum.org

Paris 1910 - "In their quest to upend tradition in art, Braque and Pablo Picasso remained somewhat ironically committed to long-established subjects in European painting: portraiture, the human figure, and still life."

Here, Braque’s still life seduces the viewer with fragments of recognizable objects.

In the lower center of the composition, a table corner emerges from the painting’s tonal palette of grays, browns, and blacks. Farther back, the base of a brass candlestick appears atop a table. To the right float two playing cards: the ace of hearts and the six of diamonds.

The oval canvas concentrates and compresses the painting’s energy."

MORE ON GEORGES BRAQUE

the cubist ART movement

Cubism was one of the most influential visual art styles of the early twentieth century. It was created by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963) in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The French art critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism after seeing the landscapes Braque had painted in 1908 at L’Estaque in emulation of Cézanne. Vauxcelles called the geometric forms in the highly abstracted works “cubes.” Other influences on early Cubism have been linked to Primitivism and non-Western sources. The stylization and distortion of Picasso’s groundbreaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York), painted in 1907, came from African art. Picasso had first seen African art when, in May or June 1907, he visited the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris.

The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that artists should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points.

MORE ON THE CUBIST MOVEMENT