Vintage Ladies in Cubist Exhibitions: Pablo Picasso's Cubist Women and Judith Butler's Performativity

As a prominent figure in the history of painting, Pablo Picasso has bestowed upon the world his uniquely striking paintings in different styles, the most revolutionary of which being his Cubist art. The representation of women occupies a significant space in Picasso’s Cubist works. While the painter’s style is highly revolutionary, rejecting the accepted principles of painting, the subject matter does not change as such: nude women are objectified with a cubist look. Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity which examines the roots of naturalized concepts of gender, has been applied to Picasso’s representations of women in his cubist paintings. This research examines the way naturalized definitions of gender have found their way into Picasso’s paintings.  By applying the Butlerian concept of gender performativity to a number of Picasso’s cubist artworks, we try to indicate how stereotypes of gender linger in the discourse of modernism. Analyses lead to the conclusion that although the cubist style of painting is an experimentation in form, hardly any avant-gardism can be traced in the representation of gendered identities in Picasso

The use of newspaper in Pablo Picasso's papiers-colles of 1912-1913

Thesis (B.A.) in Art History -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1990.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 27)Microfiche of typescript. [Urbana, Ill.]: Photographic Services, University of Illinois, U of I Library, [1990]. 1 microfiche (32 frames): negative.s 1990 ilu n

Cezanne, the Unknowing Father of Modern Art

In this paper, Cezanne\u27s life and work are discussed with emphasis on his influence on the Modern Movement in Art. Questions are raised concerning the interpretation of his work both by art historians and artists. This, in turn, casts doubt on some of the premises of Modernism. It is important to realize that Cezanne had a great respect for the art of the old masters and, had he lived, would probably have been abhorred by modernist developments. To understand Cezanne\u27s complex attitude, his background is extensively dealt with in a biographical section. His relationship with the realist novelist Emile Zola is also important in this respect. Emile Zola also played an active role in the Impressionist controversy in the 1860\u27s when Cezanne first moved to Paris. Cezanne\u27s involvement with the Impressionists, particularly Pissarro, led to his rejection of literary content for a concern with formalism. Since this aspect of his work is most important in his influence on Modernism, it is discussed in detail. It involved a rejection of conventional perspective in which the illusion of space is created through drawing in favor of space realized through the use of color. In Cezanne\u27s work, the drawing results from observation in which objects are seen as flat outlines of shapes. This problem is discussed with reference to views by various critics, most notably Erle Loran in his analysis of Cezanne\u27s compositions. Theories arising from Cezanne\u27s work are open to question because of the contradictory nature of Cezanne\u27s own words and because Cezanne favored an intuitive approach through working directly from nature. This point is reinforced by numerous quotations from Cezanne\u27s letters. Cezanne\u27s inability to form a consistent theory does not deny the validity of his art, but demonstrates that painting is a visual language. In addition to this, the reliance on theories has been damaging to art since it has encouraged eclecticism and, hence, weakened individuality. To strengthen this point, the parallel between Modernism in Painting and Architecture is mentioned. The shortcomings of the latter have become clear in the second half of the twentieth century. They largely result from the use of dogmas continually expressed by the leading Modernist architects. Cezanne\u27s principle of gaining knowledge from direct experience of nature and through testing any theories in the presence of nature is presented as the most valid way of working

Modern Global Art Groups' Effects on Graphic Design

The modern era in defining the features of formal and expressive construction and achieves its functional and aesthetic goals. Hence, the research aimed to clarify the formal and organizational variables of graphic designers and their expressive performance and to compare their impact on the methods of artistic movements in the modern era. The research was based on the descriptive analytical approach of a group of samples, from which it came out with a set of results and conclusions, namely: Modern arts contributed to finding new performance standards for the aesthetic process in design, which was limited to the aesthetics of drawing and its techniques to express it to the techniques of collage and photo montage towards expressive metaphor using previously untouched materials. Achieving the formal organization of the elements with the background, whether through mathematical and engineering logic or as a coincidence industry, led to a transformation in the design process and the emergence of a new spatial relationship that directly affected a clear transformation of the design

Cezanne, the Unknowing Father of Modern Art

In this paper, Cezanne\u27s life and work are discussed with emphasis on his influence on the Modern Movement in Art. Questions are raised concerning the interpretation of his work both by art historians and artists. This, in turn, casts doubt on some of the premises of Modernism. It is important to realize that Cezanne had a great respect for the art of the old masters and, had he lived, would probably have been abhorred by modernist developments. To understand Cezanne\u27s complex attitude, his background is extensively dealt with in a biographical section. His relationship with the realist novelist Emile Zola is also important in this respect. Emile Zola also played an active role in the Impressionist controversy in the 1860\u27s when Cezanne first moved to Paris. Cezanne\u27s involvement with the Impressionists, particularly Pissarro, led to his rejection of literary content for a concern with formalism. Since this aspect of his work is most important in his influence on Modernism, it is discussed in detail. It involved a rejection of conventional perspective in which the illusion of space is created through drawing in favor of space realized through the use of color. In Cezanne\u27s work, the drawing results from observation in which objects are seen as flat outlines of shapes. This problem is discussed with reference to views by various critics, most notably Erle Loran in his analysis of Cezanne\u27s compositions. Theories arising from Cezanne\u27s work are open to question because of the contradictory nature of Cezanne\u27s own words and because Cezanne favored an intuitive approach through working directly from nature. This point is reinforced by numerous quotations from Cezanne\u27s letters. Cezanne\u27s inability to form a consistent theory does not deny the validity of his art, but demonstrates that painting is a visual language. In addition to this, the reliance on theories has been damaging to art since it has encouraged eclecticism and, hence, weakened individuality. To strengthen this point, the parallel between Modernism in Painting and Architecture is mentioned. The shortcomings of the latter have become clear in the second half of the twentieth century. They largely result from the use of dogmas continually expressed by the leading Modernist architects. Cezanne\u27s principle of gaining knowledge from direct experience of nature and through testing any theories in the presence of nature is presented as the most valid way of working

Fragments of times and spaces : collage in the theatre of Vs. E. Meyerhold, 1906-1926

The (re)discovery of collage by the Cubists and futurists was one of the most significant artistic developments of the last century. Collage practice was embraced by artists and intellectuals as more than a formal process involving the combination of image fragments using glue. From Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, through the Dadaists, the surrealists, and on into the era of post-modernity, collage has become a metaphysical expression of a world in flux, characterised by relativity and uncertainty.Often working in close personal contact with the avant-garde artists, theatre director Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold was intimately involved with the political, social and cultural upheavals of the early twentieth century. This thesis argues that Meyerhold's work with the artists of the avant-garde has been under-investigated in English language scholarship, and that the influence of artistic developments on his aesthetic extends beyond the well-documented instances of causal cross-over (for example, in stage design). Seeing the lack of scholarship relating Meyerhold's work directly to the collage device as an oversight, this thesis constructs a collage-based model through which the director's theatre can be read.Collage in Meyerhold's theatre is initially identified in the construction of the mise-en- scene. By 1926, the device emerges as the organizational principle underlying the performance as a whole, shedding light on the form and function of the director's aesthetic. Particularly significantly, through collage, Meyerhold's theatre is seen to engage with the questions of subjectivity and objectivity in the audience experience, and, in line with anti-positivist developments in philosophy, radically deconstructs the objective as a category. In addition, through collage, Meyerhold's theatre finds vital points of contact with today's performance practice which often engages with the multiplication of spatial and temporal frameworks through the use of multi-media techniques

Carl Einstein's Negerplastik: early twentieth-century avant-garde encounters between art and ethnography

The thesis focuses on the work of the author and critic Carl Einstein (1885 -1940), a key figure in the history of early twentieth-century art and literature. Introducing new archival material from the Berlin Ethnological Museum, the British Museum and a number of other sources, it offers a thorough re-examination of the circumstances and cultural practices that shaped Einstein's antagonism towards the itinerant `primitivism hubbub' and contemporary prejudice, and retrieves what is his most incisive intervention into the discourse on art and primitivism: his book Negerplastik (1915). Reconnecting Negerplastik to Einstein's early art-criticism in the context of pre-1914 German Kulturpolitik and in the often highly competitive circles of the intellectual avant-garde, the thesis investigates his hitherto neglected role in staging the first two exhibitions in Germany which, during 1913, presented African sculpture alongside avant-garde painting - and Picasso's Cubist work - at the Neue Galerie in Berlin. In what is described as a `visual turn', it analyzes Negerplastik and its audaciously modernist visualization of non-western sculpture, and argues that by making the ethnographic 'curio' an object of theory Einstein, as it were, 'invented' the aesthetic category of African art. The thesis brings together material that, although embedded in the period's documents and chronicles, has largely gone unnoticed. Yet evidence, such as the critical reaction to Einstein's 1913 African exhibitions, his letters to his friends Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Ewald Wasmuth, or the material gathered between 1925 and 1930 for a joint project with the British Museum's keeper Thomas A. Joyce is central to understanding the historical significance of Negerplastik and Einstein's ethnographic encounter. Ethnography provided the basis for some of his most compelling art-critical texts in the journal Documents. It informed the development of his concept of an Ethnologie du blanc which transgressed academic disciplines and epistemic tradition, and engendered a 'visual turn' that, by leaving the images to do the work of language, operated as Einstein's `silent' critique of modernist sculpture. The thesis concludes by contending that, between 1916 and 1918, Negerplastik served as catalyst, and matrix, for a number of avant-garde reconfigurations of African sculpture in which the objects' photographic framing re-confirmed this sculpture as art. It addresses aspects of Einstein's role within the discourse on art and cultural difference, which - despite the now sizeable secondary literature devoted to him - have not been sufficiently examined

The interaction of space volume and frames, with their associated images and illusions : paintings, illustrations and thoughts.

Thesis. 1978. M.Arch.A.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.Bibliography: leaves 117-118.M.Arch.A.S