Art
Along with Georges Braque, Fernand Leger and Pablo Picasso were firmly at the forefront of the cubist movement in modern art. Cubism sprouted from Picasso's experimentations with collage, along with Braque, but later morphed into an interpretive and expressive style of painting that heralded many related movements in abstract modern art including futurism. As Fitz puts it, Picasso used the cubist style to express the things he could not see, but which he knew were there; the things that everybody is "certain of seeing," but which are not depicted on a traditional canvas (228). As a result, Picasso reinvented painting, and reinterpreted what the function of painting was. Leger deserves credit also, for he too pursued the " quest for a means by which to accurately describe three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional canvas," (Spector). Leger and Picasso developed totally unique and distinct brands of cubism, even if their formative influences were similar. For example, Spector notes that both Picasso and Leger built on the work of Paul Cezanne, who began to deconstruct shapes and forms for more probing insights into how objects can be represented on a two-dimensional plane. Paintings like Picasso's 1908 and 1910 versions of Femme a la mandolin and Leger's 1912 Le modele nu dans l'atelier reveal the similarities and the differences, the convergences and divergences, between the styles and techniques of these two cubists.
Comparing these paintings directly, it is apparent that Picasso...
Picasso's 1908 Femme a la mandolin is clearly cubist, but it is far from being a fully abstract work of art. Likewise, the 1910 version of the woman with a mandolin is still representational, even if it is creeping towards eventual abstraction. The paintings depict a woman playing a mandolin quite clearly. Although Picasso chooses to depict the woman without facial features, and the mandolin without strings, both subjects are clearly discernable. There is also part of a piano keyboard in the background of the 1908 version, contributing to the overall composition. Picasso did include more purely abstract paintings in his portfolio, but Femme a la mandolin is not one of them.
Leger's 1912 Le modele nu dans l'atelier, on the other hand, is purely abstract. Were it not for the title of the painting, the viewer would have no idea that Leger intended there to be a subject matter other than form, line, and color. The title belies the essentially nonrepresentational nature of the painting, which exhibits classic techniques of abstraction: "objects and figures are decomposed into arrays of semiautonomous geometrical forms, color is distributed in complementary relationships, and the picture surface is animated by linear oppositions," (Lanchner, Leger, Hauptman, Afron and Erikson). However, Leger's later body of work includes cubist and futurist representations that are not fully abstract. Like Picasso's Femme a la mandolin, much of Leger's…
