Large Nude (1908) by Georges
Braque. |
In contrast, Braque and Picasso thought
that the essence of an object could only be captured by showing it from
multiple points of view simultaneously. So, they abandoned the idea of
a single fixed viewpoint and instead used a multiplicity of viewpoints.
The object was then reassembled out of fragments of these different views,
rather like a complex jigsaw puzzle. In this way, many different views
of an object were simultanously depicted in the same picture. In a sense,
it's like taking 5 different photographs of the same object, then cutting
them up and reassembling them in an overlapping manner on a flat surface.
Such fragmentation and rearrangement of
form meant that a painting could now be regarded less as a kind of window
on the world and more as a physical object on which a subjective response
to the world is created. As far as artistic technique was concerned, Cubism
showed how a sense of solidity and pictorial structure could be created
without traditional perspective or modelling.
Thus the Cubist style focused on the flat,
two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, and rejected the traditional
conventions and techniques of linear perspective, chiaroscuro (use of
shading to show light and shadow) and the traditional idea of imitating
nature. Instead of creating natural-looking 3-D objects, Cubist painters
offered a brand new set of images reassembled from 2-D fragments which
showed the objects from several sides simultaneously. If Fauvists and
Impressionists strove to express their personal sensation of a particular
object or scene, Cubists sought to depict the intellectual idea or form
of an object, and its relationship to others.
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