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9. კუბიზმი
9. კუბიზმი
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ROBERT DELAUNAY *
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however the fuck you pronounce his last name,
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Homage to Blériot
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1912 , , . , , . “ Still Life with Chair-Caning”. ,, , “”. . JOU (journaux)
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, . From the French word coller, meaning “to stick,” a collage is a composition of bits of objects, such a
Picasso continued to experiment with different artistic styles and media right up until his
death in 1973. Celebrated primarily for his brilliant formal innovations, he was
nonetheless acutely aware of politics throughout his life. As Picasso watched his
homeland descend into civil war in the late 1930s, his involvement in political issues
grew even stronger. He declared: “Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an
instrument for offensive and defensive war against the enemy.”9 Picasso got the
opportunity to use art as a weapon in January 1937 when the Spanish Republican
government-in-exile in Paris asked Picasso to produce a major work for the Spanish
Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition that summer. He did not formally accept
the invitation, however, until he received word that Guernica, the capital of the Basque
region (an area in southern France and northern Spain populated by Basque speakers),
had been almost totally destroyed in an air raid on April 26, 1937. Nazi pilots acting on
behalf of the rebel general Francisco Franco (1892–1975) bombed the city at the
busiest hour of a market day, killing or wounding many of Guernica’s 7,000 citizens as
well as leveling buildings. The event jolted Picasso into action. By the end of June, he
had completed Guernica (FIG. 24-18), a mural-sized canvas of immense power.
Despite the painting’s title, Picasso made no specific reference to the event in Guernica.
Te imagery includes no bombs and no German planes. It is a universal visceral outcry
of human grief. In the center, along the lower edge of the painting, lies a slain warrior
clutching a broken and useless sword. A gored horse tramples him and rears back in
fright as it dies. On the left, a shrieking, anguished woman cradles her dead child. On
the far right, a woman on free runs screaming from a burning building, while another
woman flees mindlessly. In the upper right corner, a woman, represented by only a
head, emerges from the burning building, thrusting forth a light to illuminate the horror.
Overlooking the destruction is a bull, which, according to the artist, represents “brutality
and darkness.”10 In Guernica, Picasso brilliantly used aspects of his earlier Cubist
discoveries to expressive effect, particularly the fragmentation of objects and the
dislocation of anatomical features. This Cubist fragmentation gave visual form to the
horror of the aerial bombardment of the Basque people. What happened to these
figures
in the artist’s act of painting—the dissections and contortions of
the human form—paralleled what happened to them in real life. To
emphasize the scene’s severity and starkness, Picasso reduced his
palette to black, white, and shades of gray, suppressing color once
again, as he had in his Analytic Cubist works.
GUITAR (tf is this ugly ass thing)
Cubism not only opened new avenues for representing form on two-dimensional
surfaces. It also inspired new approaches to sculpture. Picasso created Guitar (FIG. 24-
19) in 1912. As in his Cubist paintings, this sculpture operates at the intersection of two-
and three-dimensionality. Picasso took the form of a guitar—an image that surfaces in
many of his paintings as well, including Tree Musicians (FIG. 24-19A)— and explored
its volume via fat planar cardboard surfaces. (FIG. 24-19 reproduces the maquette, or
model. The finished sculpture was to be made of sheet metal.) By presenting what is
essentially a cutaway view of a guitar, Picasso allowed viewers to examine both surface
and interior space, both mass and void. Tis, of course, was completely in keeping with
the Cubist program. Some scholars have suggested Picasso derived the cylindrical form
that serves as the sound hole on the guitar from the eyes on masks from the Ivory
Coast of Africa. African masks were a continuing and persistent source of inspiration for
the artist (see “Primitivism,” page 734). Here, however, Picasso seems to have
transformed the anatomical features of African masks into a part of a musical instrument
—dramatic evidence of his unique, innovative artistic vision. Ironically—and intentionally
—the sound hole, the central void in a real guitar, is, in Picasso’s Guitar, the only solid
form.
ALEKSANDR ARCHIPENKO
The Russian sculptor Aleksandr Archipenko (1887–1964) similarly explored the Cubist notion of spatial ambigu