Art Along With Georges Braque, Fernand Leger

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 and Leger used differing degrees of abstraction. 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 work exhibits the features of abstraction, while still retaining a semblance of subject.

Both Leger and Picasso are concerned with the role geometric forms play in a composition. Arcs and curves, for example, feature prominently in both Picasso's Femme a la mandolin and in Leger's Le modele nu dans l'atelier. The term "cubism" is not an absolute designation that precludes the artist from including curvilinear elements. Rather, the "cube" implies three-dimensionality, and that three-dimensionality can be readily and successfully achieved by depicting rounded objects, spheres, and the natural curves of the human body as well as straight lines. In fact, the more curvilinear elements an abstract work contains, the more organic the overall impression will be due to the fact that the natural universe contains no true straight lines.

Picasso does include a few straight lines in Femme a la mandolin, but those lines represent man-made elements like the piano keyboard and the walls behind the woman. Her head, and the body of the mandolin, are rendered with arcs and curves. In Le modele nu dans l'atelier, Leger presents both straight lines and curves. The curves symbolize the presence of the nude model; while the straight-edged elements symbolize the canvases, walls, and other man-made elements in the artist's studio. Thus, Picasso and Leger use a similar technique to convey different motifs and ideas.