Since I know nothing about art, I thought it would be a really rewarding experience to write about it. My hope was that after researching modern art for hours, I would really understand it and then be able to take an interest in other art periods and forms. However, the first book I went to told me this: “It must be remembered that no book on modern art can claim to be a ‘definitive guide’, since art historians can’t even agree on who was the first ‘modern’ artist” (Kerrigan 10). Perfect. I realized if experts cannot come to a conclusion, then I could just describe modern art in terms of Modernity, as we discussed it in class. I ended my search on describing modern art right there. After regrouping and regaining my courage, I decided to refocus my idea. Rather than focus on the entirety of modern art, I’d like to concentrate on Pablo Picasso and his influence on modernism as it relates to Bloomsbury Rooms.
If I am going to focus a blog (a word, by the way, that I had to add to my Microsoft Word dictionary) on the works and influence of a single modernist artist, I should get to know him a little. I feel bad for this guy if he really had that many names, but we all know that Wikipedia is renowned for its accuracy. I headed to www.picasso.com where I was disappointed to find his birth and death dates attached to his career as an artist. Once I dug a little deeper, I realized nothing about his personal life is really relevant to my blog other than the fact he was Spanish and worked in France, which, as we know, were countries that colonized Africa in the early twentieth century. Perhaps this is where Picasso got his inspiration of African masks in his art? I will get to that…
If even I know Picasso had a “Blue Period” during his career, I am assuming I don’t need to discuss these details. However, for my own sake, I need to clarify that some of the quotes obtained from Bloomsbury Rooms mention or quote Henri Matisse, a French Fauvist artist, and Roger Fry, member of the Bloomsbury Group and art critic (yes, I really do need to treat this like Modern Art 101). Both artists believed strongly in the simplicity of art, which is demonstrated in Picasso’s works in “primitive” forms. Christopher Reed, author of Bloomsbury Rooms, discusses the influence of Picasso on the Omega showrooms.
Christopher Reed mentions Picasso’s work as influential to the Bloomsbury Rooms throughout the text. More specifically, he states, “Especially influential in [Bloomsbury designs] were Picasso’s ‘assemblages’: three-dimensional combinations of various materials” (116). This image is presented to us on page 120:
Assemblage with Guitar Player, 1913
Picasso’s assemblages represent Fry’s ideal of the “rejection of craftsmanship in favor of an ideal of spontaneous expressiveness,” which “define[s] ‘the ideal world of art’ as ‘the outcome of a free spiritual activity,’ in contrast to…‘the craftsman’s pride in his skill” (Reed 121). The skill required to create the work is less important than the will of the artist to express creativity. Indeed, Assemblage with Guitar Player represents this quality, as it expresses an idea without skill. Reed also states, “In the essay, [‘Notes of a Painter’], Matisse mocks the idea that artists could learn ‘rules’ of art, insisting instead on ‘expressions’ that are ‘honest’ because ‘purely instinctive’” (121). Using a guitar as a three-dimensional representation of a guitar? Now that is instinctive.
Picasso’s use of materials also expresses Fry’s notion of art as “spontaneous expressiveness.” In Assemblage with Guitar Player, the materials used do not at all look like they were prepared in advance for this creation. To me, the work suggests Picasso used materials he could find in almost any living space, not just that of an artist. Aside from the large canvas, my apartment includes all the materials I would need to create something similar, and I am by no means a professional artist. I could be described as “starving” like some of them since all of my money goes toward textbooks.
Anyway, even though Reed claims such assemblages were highly influential to the designs of the Bloomsbury Rooms, I feel other works of Picasso’s better represent the themes and motifs of the rooms represented in the “A Modern Eden” section of Bloomsbury Rooms:
What Bloomsbury found in Paris around 1910 was the now familiar modernist concept of the ‘primitive,’ a single category of a collective and anonymous aesthetic that lumped together European folk art with indigenous crafts of Africa, the South Seas, Asia, and the Americas, the appreciation and application of which marked certain educated European men as modern. Picasso, for instance, concurrently with his discovery of African art, championed the work of the untrained Parisian painter whose nickname, ‘Le Douanier’ [the customs agent] Rousseau, signaled his working-class status. (Reed 125)
The use of African masks in artwork especially represented this “anonymous aesthetic” quite literally. This simplified representation of the face allows artists such as Picasso to focus on shape rather than emotion, exemplifying the simplicity desired by Modernists. Additionally, Picasso’s interest in the working-class artist represents the “purely instinctive” aspect of art that Matisse argues is “honest.” To Picasso, Rousseau is the personification of art as “the outcome of free spirituality,” as described by Fry. Rousseau and other working-class artists made a living in another profession, yet still created artwork to express the aforementioned spirituality.
The Omega showrooms, which featured images of plants, landscapes, and imagery of Biblical stories, show the effort of the Bloomsbury group to “confine [themselves] to the simplest forms, banishing for the time being the too long misused vegetable kingdom, or if we used plant forms choosing those of the simplest and most abstract kind…” (Reed 147). The Omega showrooms exhibited a curtain with the image of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This is most certainly the most primitive subject available to our modern world and can be argued as abstract if we consider the Bible a collection of fictitious stories representing moral qualities. Incorporating Adam and Eve into the Omega showrooms combines primitive subjects with the primitive forms discussed by Reed.
Picasso features the primitive and abstract by incorporating the strong and simple shape of the African mask into his artwork:
http://wizeonesgiftshop.com/images/KE088~African-Masks-Posters.jpg
Example African Masks
http://www.sfmoma.org/images/artwork/large/91.178_01_d02.jpg
Tête de trois quarts, 1907
Tête de trois quarts demonstrates the simple shape of the African mask combined with unfinished lines and basic shading. Much of Picasso’s artwork exhibits these same qualities, taking inspiration from African crafts and combining them with bold strokes that could make a home on a cave wall.
The primitivism and abstraction described by Fry and Matisse is presented as an opposing view to societal standards prior to the Modernist movement. Fry clearly discusses the desire of the Bloomsbury group to stray from the art standards of the past, and Matisse denies that art should be rule-governed. However, Patricia Leighton, author of “The White Peril and L’Art negre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism,” believes that by incorporating African crafts into European art, Modernist artists were incorporating social commentary into their works. She states, “An awareness on the part of Picasso and his circle of the colonial exploitation that brought African art into the domain of French culture suggests additional levels of meaning in modernist uses of primitivism” (609). Leighton’s view of Picasso’s use of African art creates a contrast to the view of Fry and Matisse by implying the art is a representation of the European view of the Africans as barbarians.
Leighton notes, “[Modern artists] embraced a deeply romanticized view of African culture (conflating many cultures into one), and considered Africa the embodiment of humankind in a precivilized state…” (610). While works of Picasso do suggest a merging of different cultures by combining mediums of European art with the forms of African art, the art does not blatantly express African civilization as precivilization. The term precivilization seems to suggest that a collective people is undeveloped, uneducated, and the subject of domination. However, Modernist artists would argue that African cultures are more enlightened than those of Europe because they express themselves in the simplest of forms. To the modern artist, African art exemplifies their ultimate goal: an art form uninfluenced by the ornate and over-the-top decorations of the Victorian era.
It may be legitimate to argue that Picasso took an interest in African masks as a result of French and Spanish colonialization, but it is unsound to place him in the category with colonizers. Leighton does suggest, “…the modernists did not extend… social criticism to a radical critique of the reductive view of Africans that was promoted for colonial justification” (610). However, by stating that the modernists did not extend this notion, she is still suggesting that modernists agreed with this said “reductive view.” Picasso’s work clearly shows an appreciation and not contempt or disdain. In fact, quite the opposite: if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Picasso is expressing a respect and admiration of the art and cultures of Africa.
Leighton fails to incorporate the Modernist views we discussed in class about the simplification of forms. The modern artist’s goal was to attain a clarity previously lost in the ornate forms of the Victorian period. Picasso, Fry, and Matisse would argue that modern visual art is the representation of this clarity, for it breaks down previous conventions by incorporating the primitivism or untouched nature, biblical allusion, and African culture. Additionally, these artists emphasize the instinctive aspects of art, in which the artist is not bound by arbitrary rules and can be inspired by raw materials and the things mostly untouched by humankind.
The Omega showrooms gather inspiration from Picasso’s notion of primitivism in its use of the ultimately primitive subject: the creation of man. Adam and Eve, as first man and first woman, represent the ideal of the modern artist: a mind untainted and unbounded by the standards of one society or culture. Adam and Eve also represent abstraction, which Reed states as an important aspect of the Bloomsbury Rooms’ designs. Picasso’s influence on the Bloomsbury group is apparent in these crucial ideals of the Modernist movement.
"When I was the age of these children I could draw like Raphael. It took me many years to learn how to draw like these children."--Pablo Picasso
For your own entertainment and enjoyment: www.mrpicassohead.com
To answer your question, yes I did make a million of these while writing this blog! Oh, procrastination…
Works Cited:
Kerrigan, Michael. Modern Art. London: Star Fire, 2005. Print.
Leighton, Patricia. “The White Peril and L’Art negre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism.” The Art Bulletin. Vol. 72, No. 4. College Art Association: Dec. 1990. Pp. 609-630. 2 Dec. 2009.
Reed, Christopher. Bloomsbury Rooms. London: Yale U.P., 2004. Print.
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