#cubism

Apparently this is one of the paintings people point to when they talk about cubism pushing all the way toward abstraction — there's barely anything left that reads as a literal scene. It's tied to a procession he remembered from Spain, but almost none of that original imagery survived into what's on the canvas.

Apparently 'Fantômas' was a wildly popular pulp villain in French novels and early films back then — the kind of cheap thrill respectable painting wasn't supposed to notice. Cubists of the period put newsprint and pulp covers like this straight into their paintings anyway, which was kind of the point: you didn't need a myth or a portrait anymore, a newsstand would do.

From what I've read he painted this in the middle of the war — he was Spanish, so he wasn't called up like most of his friends in Paris, and he just kept working straight through it.

They say painters in this circle tightened up after the First World War — fewer overlapping shards, flatter shapes, something closer to order than the earlier, more splintered cubism. This one's from that stretch, and the checkerboard corner is one of the only clues there was ever a table under all this.

According to what I found, this one's from 1912 — right when cubism was at its most fractured, before things flattened out into simpler colour patches later on. Playing cards turn up constantly in paintings from this circle, apparently because a card's already a flat, printed thing pretending to sit on a table, which suited what these painters were after anyway.

She died young, in 1924, not long after she'd started moving from paintings like this one into textile and stage design.

According to the museum, the painter was hurt in a gas attack at Verdun during WWI — this one's supposed to be a tribute to pilots and flying machines in general, not a portrait of any one of them.

Delaunay painted the Eiffel Tower more than two dozen times, splitting it into fragments and colour rather than showing it whole.

Apparently he was born in Warsaw and only picked up a French name after a friend talked him into it once he'd settled in Paris and started running with Picasso and Braque — the little balloon and flag tucked in here are supposedly his own nod to the country he adopted.

Wikipedia doesn't say much beyond names — apparently this is a real family, painted by a Czech-born LA artist who mixed hard cubist edges with a hazy hill-town backdrop.

Apparently this is one of a series where van Doesburg took a nude model and kept flattening her into blocks and lines, step by step, until almost nothing human was left — part of what pushed him toward the grid paintings De Stijl is known for.

They say he mixed the loose, bright color of the Fauves with the more broken-up shapes of the Cubists, and ran with a Moscow group trying to fuse that French style with older Russian folk prints.

Gris was close with Picasso in Paris and got called his disciple early on — not exactly a compliment, from what I can tell, but he'd carved out his own geometric style by the time he painted this one.

Before he helped start De Stijl, van Doesburg apparently spent a stretch working through Cubism, breaking a room and a figure down into flat, overlapping planes like this one. It's one of the pieces people use to trace how he got from drawing people to painting nothing but lines and blocks.

They say Gris started gluing in real newspaper scraps around 1913, following what Picasso and Braque had already been doing — this one keeps a strip of actual print sitting right next to the painted glass. The oval shape wasn't the usual choice either; most still lifes from this crowd were square or rectangular.

Apparently the wood-grain pattern here is painted, not real wood or glued paper — Gris copying the collage tricks other Cubists were doing with actual materials, just with a brush. The guitar and the newspaper masthead show up together a lot in this circle's still lifes.

Le Journal was a real Paris daily, apparently the one everybody read — and this crowd of painters stuck it into picture after picture, so often it's practically a signature.

From what I could find, he'd spent years in Europe with the modernist crowd before coming home and painting ordinary American stuff this way. And a rubber plant was about as ordinary as it got — supposedly they sat in every boarding-house window back then.

The letters spelling 'DUBO' are part of a real liquor ad — cubists liked pasting bits of advertising text right into their paintings.

Nobody's sure why this canvas is named after a rabbit — the creature reads more like a stylised fish leaping through the foliage, and both readings have defenders.