Cubist artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque Essay (Essay Sample)

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For the Cubist artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Jokes, Puns and Visual games played an important role in their development of a groundbreaking new artistic style. Discuss
Artists do not just come up with abstract ideas and productions. At some point in life each and every artist draws inspiration from certain aspects of nature that inspires them to come up the various artistic creations. Pablo Picasso and George Braque are regarded the fathers of analytic cubism, an artistic painting style that is primarily characterized by extensive use of geometric shapes and tendencies by the artists to lean towards monochromatic use of color. Analytic cubism is therefore thought of as an improvement of the general cubic art, an influential art movement that begun in the 20th century. An insightful journey into the genesis of analytic cubism reveals that the two great artists, artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, draw their inspiration from day to day jokes, Puns and Visual games as to come up with most influential form of cubic art.
Analytic cubism was regarded as an avant-garde art movement that brought a revolution in painting art and whose effects went on t o change the faces of European painting, contemporary architecture, music and even to some extent, literature. When Pablo and Braque were establishing the foundations of analytic cubism in France in 1910 – 1920 to set the style off as an official form of painting, almost all countries in Europe had picked up the style to inspire offshoots similar to he styles of Futurism and constructivism. While subjects and objects in cubism were broken down into cubes to resemble their abstract form, analytic cubism introduced the element of not only cubes but geometric shapes and lines.
The oxford dictionary of contemporary English defines a pun or paronomasia as a kind of word play that presents words with multiple meanings. This is achieved through exploitation of similar-sound words or multiple meanings of words with an intention of creating either humor or some rhetoric effect. There is a strong relationship between puns and analytic cubism. Pablo and Georges harnessed the multiple meanings that can be brought about by joining various geometric shapes and combined the same with the various interpretations that can be drawn from monochromatic colors to come up with analytic cubism. For example, in Ambroise Vollard, Pablo used extremely dark colors unlike the contemporary bright colors to clearly bring out the lines and geometric shapes. Someone could have easily interpreted this for a color mix-up or an attempt to conceal certain elements of the portrait hence the multiple meanings as the case with puns. Similarly, he also used a brighter color on the forehead to bring out a folded and flattened head, a depiction that can never fade with time. Combined efforts by Pablo and Braque seemed like a real pun for the major reason that while Pablo, who had a great interest in Gauguin’s work and African masks, was busy exploring Cézanne’s ideas, Braque on the other hand had a great interest in animations and thus celebrated contemplation. The fact that the two artists with diverse interests were working together thus seemed more or less an actual pun.
A joke is defined as a certain statement that someone utters or something that one does whose major intention is o cause amusement and laughter. Jokes, therefore, are basically found everywhere regardless of the seriousness of the environment. How then can one be inspired by jokes to come up with analytical cubism? When Pablo Picasso painted the portrait of Ambroise Vollard in 1909, he dissembled a human figure and then reproduced it, through a painting, in a series of flat geometric plates that overlap and join each other at angles. What seemed like a joke in the entire portrait was the fact that a human face was reconstructed from cubes! Georges Braque on the other hand took the joke far when he tried analytic cubism in his village. He kept on reducing the architectural structure of his paintings into geometric forms that resemble cubes and then shaded the painting in a fragmented manner that it looked like both flat as well as three dimensional. The two examples given above illustrate that the two artists never had a concrete idea an mind but kept on experimenting in a what seemed like jokes to perfect on their artistic style. At the end of it, the entire artistic style, analytic cubism resembled a joke because there is no way a human painting can be divided into three dimensional jokes unless one is joking.
Visual games are often interactive and contain static graphics generated through anime-style art or times video footages. According to Pablo Picasso, there is a lot of creativity in visual games and that is what interested him. The presentation of live characters I visual games is in itself an art. Hence, Pablo and Braque wanted to have a replica of visual games characters but in still images and paintings. Drawing such characters on paper wouldn’t bring out the creative aspect as intended by the two artistes and hence, they continuously experimented on how best to present the humor and creativity of such characters in still paintings. When coming up with analytic cubism, Pablo and Bra...