Free shelves and Big Idea #197 is Cubism

After Marcel- Found Object

Free is nearly always good and yesterday as I walked up to the allotment entrance I saw an item  proclaiming itself as this. The shelves are going to be used (I'm sure) either as a half way house before planting out or for spare parts.


Cubism

Cubism is described as one of the most influential visual art styles of the early twentieth century. It was developed by  Georges Braque (French artist 1882–1963)  and Pablo Picasso (Spanish artist 1881–1973)  in Paris between 1907 and 1914. Braque painted   L'Estaque ( 1908) which was inspired  Cézanne.


Braque -Viaduct de l'estaque

An  art critic, as has often been the case for new movements gave it a name- Cubism  he was called   Louis Vauxcelles.   Vauxcelles called the forms in the highly 'abstracted' works "cubes." 

Cubist painters did not believe that art should only copy nature, and did not follow traditional techniques of perspective and modelling. They  recognised the limitation of the two dimensions of the canvas and  reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms which they then realigned within a shallow, relief-like space. Cubism use multiple or contrasting vantage points.



Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) by Picasso shows the influence of  the African art as
well as Cézanne Cubism was  inspired by  Primitivism and non-Western sources that included items  that Picasso had seen when  he visited the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris.
The video below tells more on this major work.
While Picasso and Braque created this new visual language, it was also developed by other  painters, including  Juan Gris.