How Cézanne Influenced Cubism

Even though Cézanne’s painting project was very different from Picasso’s, Cubist painters including Braque, Metzinger and Picasso himself all said that Cézanne’s work profoundly influenced them.

 

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibemus Quarry, c.1897, Baltimore Museum of Art

 

In fact, the painting that gave Cubism its name is directly connected to Cézanne, first through its title, as Cézanne often painted the small village called L’Estaque in the south of France, and then through its lines and colors, which strongly evoke Cézanne’s work.

 

Georges Braque, Houses at L’Estaque, 1908, Museum of Fine Arts, Bern

 

 

Paul Cézanne, Bibemus Quarry, c.1895, Museum Folkwang, Essen

 

Braque also painted this scene of L’Estaque, equally reminiscent of Cézanne:

 

Georges Braque, Viaduct at L’Estaque, 1908, Centre Pompidou, Paris

 

The Cubist painters saw two key elements in Cézanne’s work, especially in his late paintings, which influenced them the most.

First, geometry.

 

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904, Philadelphia Museum of Art

 

Paul Cézanne, The Grounds of the Château-Noir, c.1904, National Gallery, London

 

Even though Cézanne was mainly trying to create volume through color planes, the Cubists saw in Cézanne a tendency to represent nature with geometric shapes, which is central to the early development of Cubism.

 

Pablo Picasso, Brick Factory at Tortosa, 1909, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg

 

The second element is perspective. In many paintings by Cézanne, it looks as if each object has its own independent space with its own point of view, which goes against the traditional single-point-of-view linear perspective introduced in the Renaissance.

 

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples and Oranges, 1895-1900, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

 

The Cubists followed Cézanne in breaking the traditional rules of perspective, and then went further by introducing multiple views of the same subject from different perspectives at the same time, which is another feature of their style. A good example is the cup in this painting, seen both from the side and from the top:

 

Jean Metzinger, Tea Time (Woman with a Teaspoon), 1911, Philadelphia Museum of Art

 

The development of Cubism was also inspired by other art forms, such as Cycladic art and African art, but Cézanne played a key role for Cubist painters, despite major differences in their approach to nature and painting.

Actually, Cézanne’s work was so influential that he has not only been called a father of Cubism, but also a father of modern art itself.

Picasso at the Ballet

Picasso’s less familiar works include the sets and costumes he designed for modern ballets, which gave him the opportunity to create his largest painting, as well as mobile works of modern art.

 

Donlon Dance Company in Parade ballet, 2009— Photo by Holger Badekow

 

Picasso’s most famous contribution to the ballet is his collaboration with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on Parade, a 1917 ballet about circus life for which Picasso designed all the sets and costumes.

 

Pablo Picasso, Chinese Conjurer Costume for Parade ballet, 1917, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

This costume was used on the cover of the ballet’s program, in a watercolor version also by Picasso:

 

Pablo Picasso, Chinese Conjurer from Parade ballet, 1917, Victoria and Albert Museum, London — © ADAGP Paris and DACS London

 

And the inside of the program featured Picasso’s watercolor of the costume for one of the Acrobats:

 

 

Parade is also the source of Picasso’s largest painting, the ballet’s stage curtain:

 

Pablo Picasso, Stage Curtain — Parade ballet, 1917, Centre Pompidou, Paris

 

Lachmann, Picasso [with a hat] and his Assistants Sitting on Parade Stage Curtain, 1917, Musée Picasso, Paris — © RMN-Grand Palais / Madeleine Coursaget

 

He also worked on the Ballets Russes’ The Three-Cornered Hat in 1919 and Pulcinella in 1920:

 

Pablo Picasso, set design for The Three-Cornered Hat, 1919, Musée Picasso, Paris

 

Bolshoi performance of The Three-Cornered Hat with Picasso’s set and costumes, 2005 — © Bolshoi Moscow

 

Europa Danse performance of Pulcinella with Picasso’s set and costumes, 2007 — © M.Loginov

 

At the time, Picasso was not the only major visual artist creating for modern ballets. Other contributors include painters Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia and Giorgio de Chirico, photographers and film-makers such as Man Ray and René Clair, as well as writers such as Jean Cocteau, which perfectly illustrates the diversity of influences shaping modern art forms at the beginning of the 20th century.

Ancient Influence on Modern Art

When you look at this kind of sculpture, it’s hard not to think of modern art:

 

 

This particular head, however, was carved over 4,000 years ago in the Cyclades, a group of islands off the coast of Greece. It is the head of a canonical figurine from around 2800–2300 BC, kept at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens.

Cycladic culture developed around 3000 BC and for over one thousand years produced sculptures that had a strong influence on modern artists such as Picasso, Modigliani, Brancusi and many more.

Here is the Cycladic head that inspired Romanian sculptor Brancusi to create his series of female muses, for example:

 

Head of female figure, c.2700–2300 BC, Louvre Museum, Paris

 

Constantin Brancusi, Sleeping Muse, 1910, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

 

Constantin Brancusi, The Muse, 1912, Guggenheim Museum, New York

 

Cycladic art is obviously characterized by its geometric stylization of the human form, especially in female figures:

 

Standing female figure, c.2600–2400 BC, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

 

Standing female figurine, c.2600–2400 BC, The British Museum, London

 

Female figure, c.2400 BC, Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

The simple geometry of Cycladic art appealed to modern artists in search of pure forms, and along with other forms of primitive art, such as African and Cambodian art, it gave them inspiration for sculptures, drawings and paintings:

 

Amedeo Modigliani, Head of a Woman, 1910, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

 

Amedeo Modigliani, Caryatid (detail), 1913, The New Art Gallery, Walsall

 

Pablo Picasso, Woman with Joined Hands (study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), 1907, Picasso Museum, Paris

 

In the most stylized cases, Cycladic figures are almost abstract:

 

“Violin” figurine, c.2800 BC, The British Museum, London

 

However, surface analysis has revealed that Cycladic sculptures were originally painted in bright blues and reds, among other colors. This means that eyes and other features were probably painted onto the stone, resulting in a much less abstract look than what we see today.

Just as Ancient Greek statues lost their colors and influenced the Neoclassical taste for pure white marble, so too did Cycladic art influence the rise of pure geometry in the early 20th century.

And that’s the influence of ancient forms on Modern art.

The Dove and the Olive Branch

Why is the olive branch a symbol of peace in the West, and what has the dove got to do with it? The answers take us far into the past, before the Bible, then bring us back to the modern age with Picasso.

 

Pablo Picasso, Dove, 1949, Succession Picasso/DACS 2010

 

Because it is one of the most easily tamed birds, the white dove has been a symbol of peace, innocence and love since Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and it was the bird associated with Aphrodite / Venus, the Goddess of Love, in Ancient Greece and Rome.

As for olives, they are such an important crop for countries around the Mediterranean Sea that the branch of the olive tree has been a highly positive symbol in their cultures since ancient times.

According to mythology, the city of Athens was named after the goddess Athena because it was her who gave the people of Athens their best gift — olive trees, which produced the city’s most precious oil. This actually featured on their coins:

 

Athenian Coin, c.430 BC; Left: Athena wearing olive leaf wreath — Right: Olive branch and owl, the bird that always goes with Athena — Source

 

 

The olive tree was so important that the reward for winning an event in the ancient Olympic Games was not a gold medal, but a wreath of olive leaves with which the winner was crowned, just like Athena on the coin above.

The olive also appears in many ancient texts in relation with peace. In Virgil’s Aeneid, for instance, the main character holds an olive branch to offer peace, and in other texts there are records of Roman generals holding up an olive branch to ask for peace after being defeated in battle.

These symbols were used in Judaism as well and put together in the Old Testament story of Noah’s ark. After the Flood, Noah released a dove from his ship and when it came back, it was holding an olive branch in its beak, showing that there was land again. The dove also appears in the New Testament and in Christian art as a symbol of the Holy Spirit of God, the innocence of Mary, and as a messenger from God.

 

Nicolas Poussin, The Annunciation, 1657, National Gallery, London

 

So a combination of tameness, precious crops, mythological and religious factors from the ancient world brought the olive branch and the dove together. Their association then went beyond the religious, especially with the World Peace Congresses that took place after World War II, which used Picasso’s doves as logos.

 

Poster for the first World Peace Congress, 1949

 

Poster for the 1962 Peace Congress

 

Picasso created many variations of his dove with olive branch, and it became one of the signs of the peace movement of the second half of the twentieth century, adding one more chapter to a story of symbols that began over three thousand years ago.

Portraits of Vision

Ambroise Vollard was a visionary art dealer in Paris from 1893 to 1939, the one who discovered and supported the work of Cézanne, Gauguin, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Picasso, just to name a few.

As Picasso is reported to have said, even the most beautiful woman who ever lived never had her portrait painted by as many great artists as Ambroise Vollard did:

 

Paul Cézanne, Ambroise Vollard (1899), Petit Palais, Paris

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Ambroise Vollard with a Red Scarf (1900), Petit Palais, Paris

Pierre Bonnard, Ambroise Vollard (c.1905), Kunsthaus, Zurich

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Ambroise Vollard (1908), The Courtauld Institute of Art, London

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910), Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Ambroise Vollard as a Toreador (1917), Nippon Television collection, Tokyo

Pierre Bonnard, Ambroise Vollard with his Cat (c.1924), Petit Palais, Paris

 

Shown here in chronological order, the portraits do not simply illustrate Vollard’s visionary role in the careers of these artists. From Cézanne to Cubism, they also illustrate one of the most innovative periods of western painting — the beginning of modern art — and the vision of the artists who made it happen.