In effect, African art favors abstract shapes over realistic forms, to the extent that even most of its three-dimensional sculptures, would portray a two-dimensional appearance.īritish soldiers with looted artifacts from Benin, 1897, via The British Museum, LondonĪfter colonial expeditions, some of the most precious and sacred objects of Africa were brought to Europe. Instead of showing a figure from a single perspective, African carvers combined several features of the subject so that they could be simultaneously seen. The malleability of these materials allowed for sharp cuts and expressive incisions that resulted in brusque linear carvings and faceted sculptures in-the-round. The impact of African art’s intense expression, structural clarity, and simplified forms inspired these artists to create fragmented geometrical compositions full of overlapping planes.Īfrican artists often implemented wood, ivory, and metal to create traditional masks, sculptures, and plaques. The pioneers of this new approach were Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who were highly influenced by their first encounters with African masks and Paul Cézanne ’s systematic paintings. However, all of these formal characteristics have also been attributed to artworks of the Cubism movement. Fernand Leger of the Salon Cubists became one of his mentors.African Art Carvers: The First Cubists Bust of a Woman by Pablo Picasso, 1932, via MoMA, New York (left) with Pablo Picasso with a Cigarette, Cannes by Lucien Clergue, 1956, via Indianapolis Museum of Art (center) and Lwalwa Mask, Democratic Republic of Congo, via Sotheby’s (right)Īfrican art has often been described as abstract, exaggerated, dramatic and stylized. And in 1950 after years of making art, he flew to fine art’s capital, Paris, to Ecole de Beaux-Arts. Poverty-stricken, Enteng the rough-and-tumble street kid worked his way into becoming an art student at the University of the Philippines in 1926, where he learned from classically-trained artists of the time like Fernando Amorsolo. It had, however, a curious persistence in the works of countless artists of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, who wished to paint in a figurative manner but who also wished to identify themselves as modern.” (Paul Johnson)īorn in 1910, Vincente Manansala or Mang Enteng as he is fondly called, was growing up in the Philippines as Cubism in Europe went from radical to fashionable modern art. By 1930 there was no artist so out-of-date as a Cubist. “Being the first form of fashion art, Cubism itself was soon abandoned by all its able practitioners, who moved on to new styles. ![]() Cubism had finally become modern in the fashionable sense. These distorted bodies and faces would eventually lead to Cubism's own analysis and fragmentation.Ĭubism’s geometry and its open forms, where space flowed in and out of figures and background and foreground blended into one another, became a style. There is the use of simplified forms in the maidens’ faces, forms inspired by the distortion in Iberian and African masks. There is the radical distortion of bodies through fragmented planes instead of the depiction of volume. By many accounts, this painting also contains many fundamental Cubist elements. Picasso’s shocking 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, on the other hand, was the proto-cubist painting. Why is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon important to Cubism? It is this recognition of a painting's flatness that Cubism's further innovated. Using Passage, his brush flattens three-dimensional space, thereby emphasizing the flatness of a painting’s surface or painting’s two-dimensional, material nature. This slippage is characterized by small intersecting planes of patchlike brushwork that blend together to create an image.Ĭezanne's Passage is considered a direct precursor to Cubism’s piercing or breaking up the volumes or outlines of objects into pieces that suggest simultaneous multiple perspectives. Cezzane also pioneered and used the technique called Passage or the visual slippage between adjacent elements. And it was Cezanne’s use of generic forms to simplify nature or his emphasis on the underlying architecture of forms that led the way for Cubism’s geometry. In 1907, the Salon d’Automne held a posthumous retrospective of Paul Cezanne’s work. ![]() This article traces the path from Cubism to Manansala and considers the latter’s unique contribution to modern art in the Philippines.īefore Picasso and Braque would become ’’roped together like mountaineers’’ developing the yet unnamed pictorial language that would be called Cubism by their supporters, there were two major influences that gave birth to their experiments - the painter Paul Cezanne and the painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. His paintings came to be known as Transparent Cubism.
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