Picasso, Einstein, Bergson: New Perceptions of Space, Light and Time

The development by Georges Braque (1882-1963) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) in the 1910s can be linked not only to collaboration and interchange between the two artists of Bohemian Paris, but also to other contributing phenomenon. Both artists admired Paul Cézanne, whose flattened planes and shifting vantage points anticipated the moves of the next generation. We know that Picasso was also inspired by African and Iberian sculpture as providing an alternate way of conceptually representing space and form. In this session, however, we will focus on two foundational shifts in understanding how time and space affect perception—the theories of Henri Bergson in Matter and Memory (1896) and Albert Einstein’s articulation of the theory of relativity, published in 1905. Bergson postulated that perception occurs over extended periods of time rather than at a single moment and, therefore, what we know is based on accumulated layers. His focus on time as an element of perception informed the development of Futurism in Italy, articulated in a series of manifestos published after 1908 and visualized in the paintings and sculptures of artists, including Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) and Gino Severini (1883-1966). The Futurists layered moments of movement into single images in order to convey the pace of the city and the possibilities of technology. Their movement gives evidence of overlap with Cubism as well as influence, especially after the Futurists journeyed to Paris in 1912. Art Historians identify two trajectories in Cubism, Analytic and Synthetic, both which abandon traditional perspective and depictions of dimensionality, but do not share the same concern with showing lapsed time as the Futurists. Other groups develop variations on Cubism; especially interesting in light of the themes of this course, Orphism moves away from the analytic abstractions on limited palette of Picasso and Braque, choosing to depict the city, like the Futurists; using a bright palette, like the Fauves and Neo-Impressionists; but also employing multiple, layered viewpoints, like the Cubists.

Marie Laurencin. Perfect Little Girls. 1913. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by author.

Psychology and Art around 1900

At the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud publishes both his On Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Three Essays on Sexuality (1905). His lectures, while more significant as agents of change in future generations, reflect general developments that link art with the developing science of psychology. Freud studied with Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, a neurologist who claimed, lectured with demonstrations and published with photographs, his theories of hysteria as a catch-all diagnosis for a variety of different physical symptoms. His use of performance and photography fits into a general development in the 19th century where the models of art and science overlapped, were generally women, and were often presented as naked. Furthermore, the diagnosis of hysteria originated in the misconception of “the wandering womb” and led to a range of cures proposed to treat numerous physical conditions of women by addressing their sexuality. Art and science also intersected in the increased interest in dreams. Artists such as Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) and Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) depicted sleeping subjects in reverie with erotic overtones. Most of Freud’s scientific career was in Vienna, where the exhibitions of the Vienna Secession, like the Beethoven exhibition of 1902, demonstrated an interest in altered states of consciousness. In Vienna as well, Otto Weininger’s dualist theory of masculine creativity and rationality as opposed to feminine destructiveness and irrationality correspond with the increasing evidence of the femme fatale by artists such as Gustav Klimt.

Gustav Klimt. Judith II (Salomè). 1909

Masks and Totems

Many artists from the European Avant-Garde drew from ethnographic collections for inspiration for their art. Visual and textual evidence of fascination with “L’Art négre” can be found in the works of Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Maurice Vlaminck and Pablo Picasso. As Joshua Cohen explained in his article for the June 2017 Art Bulletin, Derain made drawings of specific Maori objects from the collection of the British Museum that related to his own artistic concerns, while Matisse’s exploration of volume and light from African objects that he collected can be seen in his Blue Nude, Memories from Biskra. In this session, we look at the tradition of carving in the Maori culture and specifically the integral relationship between the carved objects, the building of which they were part, and how those objects performed in their context. Additionally, we explore a specific aspect of West African artistic culture, the performance of African masks in the Baule culture. In both instances, in the Maori and with the Baule people, at the time of artistic appropriation by European avant-garde painters at the turn of the century, the colonial legacy was fraught. Many of the Maori objects became available for European collections because they had been dispossessed from the land on which the buildings sat. The Côte d’Ivoire also was experiencing a new wave of colonial activity, as speculators who could no longer profit from the gold mines of South Africa, due to the Boer Wars, had moved into the region as a potential place for mining.

Baule Mask,
This photo was taken by Roman Bonnefoy ( Romanceor [parlons-en]).

Matisse, the Fauves and Brancusi

An art history lecture does not usually group together Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Constantin Brancusi ((1876-1957), yet around the turn of the century the painter and sculptor should be considered within the ideas of the Parisian avant-garde—simplification, the move away from pictorial narrative, and an exploration of concepts. Matisse’s Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (1907) and Brancusi’s marble Sleeping Muse I (1909-1910) experiment with a subjective experience of the human figure, which we read as gendered female, as memory, dream or inspiration rather than as optical representation of the model.

Matisse’s nude demonstrates his concurrent interest in Africa as a source of inspiration and relates to the development of the Fauve art movement, with which he is associated. This movement gained its name at the Salon de l’Automne in 1905, a modern exhibition with night hours illuminated by the latest in electrical lighting. The radical young “Fauves” or wild beasts, as a critic dubbed them, were grouped together in a small room. Their non-descriptive color and their messy brushwork stood out from like Édouard Vuillard’s Music (1905), celebrated for its inspiration to reverie, or Henri Rousseau, The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope, (c. 1905), with its primitive and imaginative style. Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra not only demonstrates the non-descriptive use of color by Matisse, but also his fascination with and appropriation of African sources.

A corner of the Brancusi Gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Constantin Brancusi briefly studied with Auguste Rodin, yet Sleeping Muse I and the Kiss (1916) demonstrate differences with the French teacher and its most noted avant-garde sculptor at the turn of the century. Brancusi’s sculptures move toward extreme abstraction yet retain their origins in nature or the figure. His ideas of how his sculpture should be encountered by the viewer in situ or through photographs relate to the markets for curios, the idea of the ensemble and an interrelationship between different art forms.

A Spectacle for the New Century: The Exposition Universelle of 1900

By the end of the 19th century the art of the avant-garde positioned itself against the Academy and the establishment. American expatriate painter James McNeill famously removed traditional criteria for evaluating the worth of a painting--the amount of labor, the moral message, its adherence to conventional aesthetic laws--to claim value derived from his personal experience and expertise, with a goal of 'art for art's sake', and the aspiration that painting convey an experience equivalent to listening to music. In Paris, the center of Modernism, Impressionist painters of the 1870s painted "modern life", taking their subjects from the reconfigured streets of the city designed by Baron Haussmann. The phenomenon of the World's Fair shifted the idea of the spectacle from the streets to the fairgrounds and invited paying visitors to experience everything from fine art to colonial peoples hired to perform their indigenous culture in exhibits and theaters. As Debra Silverman has argued, the 1889 World's Fair, symbolized by the Eiffel Tower, reflected the optimistic embrace of technological progress. The 1900 World's Fair, however, manifested an ambivalent relationship between art and science, engineering and design, and colonial culture in a period of growing nationalism. Paris 1900 is a well-documented website by Arthur Chandler if you want to read more. 

This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.15645.
This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information.