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Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They were joined by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger to revolutionise European painting and sculpture, while inspiring related movements in music, literature and architecture.
Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. The term is broadly used in association with a wide variety of art produced in Paris (Montmartre and Montparnasse) and near Paris (Puteaux) during the 1910s and throughout the 1920s.
One primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of three-dimensional form in the late works of Paul Cézanne. Retrospectives of Cézanne’s paintings were held from 1904-1907.
In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from a single viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.
[1545-34]
![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons
| Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (originally titled The Brothel of Avignon) is a large oil painting created in 1907 by Pablo Picasso. It depicts five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d’Avinyó (Calle de Aviñón), a street in Barcelona. Each figure is confrontational, menacing and none is conventionally feminine with angular and disjointed body shapes. The left figure has Egyptian facial features. The two adjacent figures are shown in the Iberian style, while the two on the right are shown with African mask-like features. [Source: Wikimedia commons] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les | 1907 | Oil/Canvas | Genre Painting |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-10] | |
MOMA, Museum of Modern Art, NY USA | 244 x 234 |
Braque had moved away from his early Fauvist style of painting which incorporated the use of bright, expressive colour and was beginning to use more geometric shapes like Cezanne. Braque was inspired to create this large female nude after seeing Picasso’s painting of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at Picasso’s studio. Braque’s Large Nude was quite a departure from the usual artistic styles and depiction of women. Without using clear lines, Braque had formed his female nude from geometric shapes and used colour to create the illusion of volume, lines, mass and weight. His nude appears reclined and twisted to the side, lying upon a sheet or towel. He used a limited palette of colours, mainly browns and greys to create an image that was a complete contrast to his early pictures of brightly painted landscapes. This Large Nude painting marked another step toward his journey into Cubism with Picasso. [Source: georgesbraque.net] | ![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Large Nude | 1907-8 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Braque, Georges | 1882 – 1963, aged 81 | French painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-11] | |
Cuttoli Collection, Paris | 140 x 101 |
![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons | Ambroise Vollard was one of the great art dealers of the 20th century. He championed Paul Cézanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, Gauguin and Henri Matisse. Vollard’s downcast eyes, apparently closed, the massive explosion of his bald head, multiplying itself up the painting like an egg being broken open, his bulbous nose and the dark triangle of his beard are the first things the eye latches on to. They are recognizable. At least that’s the way your mind, through habit, composes the details into information. But what head? What beard? Above Vollard’s eyes is a broken architecture of shards of flesh- or brick-coloured painting; planes that have been started and stopped, as if in a slow-motion exaggerated cartoon of the movement a painter makes between looking up, recording on canvas the detail he sees, looking back. The process of the painting reveals itself with gross, physical explicitness, and in doing so, creates a kind of caricature; Picasso monstrously transfigures the aspect of Vollard’s head, its massive dome, that most impresses him. [Source: pablopicasso.org] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Ambroise Vollard, Portrait of | 1909-10 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-12] | |
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Ulitsa Volkhonka, 12, Moscow, Russia, 119021 | 93 x 66 |
When Georges Braque abandoned a bright Fauve palette and traditional perspective in 1908, it was the inspiration of Paul Cézanne’s geometrized compositions that led him to simplified faceted forms, flattened spatial planes, and muted colors. By the end of that year, Braque and Pablo Picasso, who first met in 1907, began to compare the results of their techniques and it became obvious to both artists that they had simultaneously and independently invented a revolutionary style of painting, later dubbed Cubism by Guillaume Apollinaire. During the next few years the new style blossomed with stunning rapidity from its initial formative stage to high Analytic Cubism. The hallmarks of this advanced phase, so-called for the “breaking down” or “analysis” of form and space. [Source: guggenheim.org] | ![]() Image source: guggenheim.org |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Piano and Mandola (Piano et mandore) | 1909-10 | Oil/Canvas | Still Life |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Braque, Georges | 1882 – 1963, aged 81 | French painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-13] | |
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128, USA | 92 x 43 |
![]() Image source: guggenheim.org | Stare at the various shades of colour and we find fragments of the violin at the bottom left side of the painting against the backdrop of what appears to be music scores, all aligned vertically along the length of the painting. Stare hard at the violin and we will see the fragmented strings and the carved S and inverted S shapes that are typical of violins. Stare harder and the pieces seem to float before our eyes. The muted colours allow the play of light and shadows so that as we move from side to side or stare hard at the painting, the various pieces seem to move or merge with other pieces. Examine each piece, and we will be amazed at how detailed Braque had been in examining a violin, so that we are able to, as a violin maker would, identify the pieces that go into making a violin. [Source: georgesbraque.org] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Violin and Palette (Violon et palette) | 1909-10 | Oil/Canvas | Still Life |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Braque, Georges | 1882 – 1963, aged 81 | French painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-14] | |
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128, USA | 92 x 43 |
In this painting a figure is shown sitting in a high-backed arm chair. It is an early example of cubism. Picasso brings different views of his subject together in the same picture. As a result, his seated figure appears fragmented and abstracted. Despite this revolutionary approach to perspective Picasso’s use of light and the pose of his figure reveal a commitment to the traditions of portraiture. [Source: tate.org.uk] | ![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Seated Nude (Femme nue assise) | 1909-10 | Oil/Canvas | Abstract |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-15] | |
Tate Galleries, Millbank, Westminster, London SW1P 4RG UK | 92 x 73 |
![]() Image source: pablopicasso.org | In 1910 Picasso and Fernande Olivier spent a summer vacation in Cadaques, and this was where Woman with Mandolin originated. Having emerged from an Early Cubist phase which seemed, in part, expressive, Picasso was now in the throes of Analytical Cubism, a period during which he invested surface ornament with intrinsic value. In this picture, the characteristic fragmentation of form is carried to almost unrecognizable lengths. Only the mandolin is comparatively easy to identify in the lower reaches of the composition.’ Both the outlines of the figure and its internal drawing have been broken down into interpenetrative geometrical elements. The colouration is dominated by brown tones paling to beige. Blue-grey accents, often directly juxtaposed with dark, structural lines, imbue the painting with facet-like plasticity. [Source: pablopicasso.org] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Teller) | 1910 | Oil/Canvas | Abstract |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-16] | |
MOMA, Museum of Modern Art,, 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA | 100 x74 |
Man on a Balcony, completed the same year that Albert Gleizes co-authored an important book on Cubism with his colleague Jean Metzinger, an open declaration of the principles of Cubist painting. The composition demonstrates the Cubist style of broken lines and fractured planes as applied to the traditional format of the full-length portrait. However, the painting is sufficiently representational to allow the tall, elegantly posed figure to be identified as Dr. Théo Morinaud. The setting, a complex urban backdrop of smokestacks, train tracks, and bridge girders, is the view from the balcony of the dental surgeon’s office on the avenue de l’Opéra in Paris. [Source: philamuseum.org] | ![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Man on a Balcony (L’Homme au Balcon) – Portrait of Dr Théo Morinaud | 1912 | Oil/Canvas | Abstract |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Gleizes, Albert | 1881-1953, aged 71 | French artist | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-17] | |
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia, PA 19130, USA | 196 x 115 |
![]() Image source: franzmarc.org | The furious activity of late 1911 and early 1912 had a considerable effect on Marc’s work. In style, his paintings of 1912 clearly show the influence of the two Blaue Reiter exhibitions as well as the Futurist show which the artist saw at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin in April. In content, these works demonstrate a new and disturbing sense of restlessness, of tension, of imminence and anticipation. These qualities are evidenced in the painting Tiger, painted in March of 1912. In the midst of a landscape composed almost entirely of cubic forms rendered in bright luminous tones of red, green, violet, and orange, the animal of the title, a beast of tremendous power and size, is seen perched upon a rock. [Source: franzmarc.org] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Tiger | 1912 | Oil | Animal Painting |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Marc, Franz | 1880 – 1916, aged 36 | German painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-18] | |
Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Luisenstraße 33, 80333 München, Germany | 111 x 112 |
Robert Delaunay’s Simultaneous Windows on the City is enigmatic. Where is the city? Where are the windows? At first (and possibly second and third) glance what we see is a fractured pattern of mostly rectangular planes painted in the colours of the spectrum over both a canvas and its wooden frame. If we consider the post-Renaissance Western conception of a painting as being like a window, then we might interpret the painted frame as a window frame and the canvas inside as representing the city, but this does little to help us see a city depicted in the painting. [Source: khanacademy.org] | ![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Simultaneous Windows on the City | 1912 | Oil/Canvas | Abstract |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Delaunay, Robert | 1885-1941, aged 56 | French painter | Cubism – Abstract |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-19] | |
Hamburger Kunsthalle, Glockengießerwall 5, 20095 Hamburg, Germany | 46 x 40 |
![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons | In 1906 Juan Gris traveled to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and participated in the development of Cubism. Just six years later, Gris too was known as a Cubist and identified by at least one critic as ‘Picasso’s disciple’. Gris’s style draws upon Analytic Cubism—with its deconstruction and simultaneous viewpoint of objects—but is distinguished by a more systematic geometry and crystalline structure. Here he fractured his sitter’s head, neck, and torso into various planes and simple, geometric shapes but organized them within a regulated, compositional structure of diagonals. The artist further ordered the composition of this portrait by limiting his palette to cool blue, brown, and gray tones that, in juxtaposition, appear luminous and produce a gentle undulating rhythm across the surface of the painting. [Source: artic.edu] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Pablo Picasso, Portrait of | 1912 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Gris, Juan (José Victoriano González-Pérez,) | 1887 – 1927, aged 39 | Spanish painter | Cubist |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-35] | |
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago USA | 93 x 74 |
Sometime between October and December 1912, Pablo Picasso made a guitar. Cobbled together from cardboard, paper, string, and wire, materials that he cut, folded, threaded, and glued, Picasso’s silent instrument resembled no sculpture ever seen before. In 1914 the artist reiterated his fragile papery construction in a more fixed and durable sheet metal form. These two Guitars, both gifts from the artist to MoMA, bracket an incandescent period of material and structural experimentation in Picasso’s work. [Source: moma.org] | ![]() Image source: moma.org |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Guitar | 1913 | Cardboard/paper | Sculpture |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-20] | |
MOMA, Museum of Modern Art,, NY USA |
The Fiddler, 1912 by Marc Chagall is on show at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam NL. This painting, done in Paris, depicts a fiddler against the background of a town resembling Chagall’s childhood shtetl, Vitebsk. It recalls aspects of Chagall’s life in Russia, integrating both Christian and Jewish elements and practices. The fiddler hints at Chagall’s upbringing among the Hasidim who used music and dance to bring a community together and inspire religious devotion. Fiddler on the Roof, the musical and cinematic adaptations of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, borrowed their names from the painting. [Source: facinghistory.org] | ![]() Image source: marcchagall.net |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Fiddler, The | 1913 | Oil/Canvas | Landscape |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Chagall, Marc | 1887 – 1985, aged 97 | Russian-French artist | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-21] | |
Kunstsammulung Nordrhein-West Falen, Grabbepl. 5, 40213 Düsseldorf, Germany | 188 x 158 |
![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons | Fernand Léger begins working in a cubist style under the influence of Cézanne and later Picasso and Braque. However, much more emphatically than his examples, he depicts figures and objects in volumes, such as the cone, the sphere and the cylinder. The cylinder appears so often in his work that a French critic even called him a ‘tubist’ instead of a cubist. In this painting Léger combines cubism with the aesthetic of the machine. The soldiers are not people of flesh and blood, but look more like robots with their robust, geometric shapes and their arms like steel forged pipes. The recurring elements are reminiscent of the machinery of war. The alternation of small and larger areas of colour also lends the painting dynamism. [Source: krollermuller.nl] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Soldiers Playing at Cards | 1917 | Oil/Canvas | Abstract |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Léger, Fernand | 1881 – 1955, aged 74 | French artist | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-22] | |
Kroller-Muller Museum & Sculpture Garden, Otterio | 130 x 195 |
This painting came about as a result of two main factors. First, Leger’s service as a stretcher-bearer in the French army during The Great War, which inspired him to create a type of art that would appeal to all social classes. Second, his fascination with the world of machines. Even during the war, during which he was gassed at Verdun, he was dazzled by the steel workings of the French 75 mm field gun. In simple terms, Leger hoped to produce a style of modern art that would capture the machine-based dynamic of modern life and inspire the public. [Source: visual-arts-cork.com] | ![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Mechanic, The | 1920 | Oil/Canvas | Abstract |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Léger, Fernand | 1881 – 1955, aged 74 | French artist | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-23] | |
National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa | 0 |
![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons | Three Women offers a machine-age update to a time-honored subject in the history of painting: the group portrait of female nudes in repose. In this monumental canvas, a self-possessed trio, flanked by a black dog, luxuriates around a coffee table in a chic, modern apartment. Their bodies consist of clusters of spheres and sharply contoured forms precisely shaded so that their silver and ochre skin as well as their slick, sideswept hair gleam like sheet metal. The features of these anonymous, impassive women, who gaze unflinchingly at the viewer, appear interchangeable, like mass-produced machine parts. The concatenation of bodies offsets a lushly vibrant domestic interior filled with brightly colored decor, stylized furniture, and an acutely slanted, dazzlingly patterned floor. The gridded background of interlocking angles and curvilinear forms gives the painting a shallow, mural-like appearance. [Source: moma.org] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Three Women (Le Grand Dejeuner) | 1921 | Oil/Canvas | Abstract |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Léger, Fernand | 1881 – 1955, aged 74 | French artist | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-24] | |
MOMA, Museum of Modern Art, 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA | 184 x 252 |
![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons | In 1920 Juan Gris moved to the coastal town of Bandol-sur-Mer, where in 1921 he did most of the paintings in his “open window” series. The painter would complete the series with a few paintings done some months later in Céret. At that point, then, the group can be considered closed, although Juan Gris was to return to the subject from time to time in later years. Although the authorship of this iconographic model lies entirely with Juan Gris, it should not be forgotten that the open-window theme had already captured the interest of several of the artist’s contemporaries, such as Delaunay and Matisse, although their approach was conceptually very different. Analysing the compositions of some of these other artists, one arrives at the conclusion that, like Juan Gris’ works, these are paintings that somehow manage to bring in the atmosphere outside the enclosing frame of the picture. [Source: museoreinasofia.es] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Open Window (La fenêtre ouverte) | 1921 | Oil/Cbv | Landscape |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Gris, Juan (José Victoriano González-Pérez,) | 1887 – 1927, aged 39 | Spanish painter (Catalan) | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-25] | |
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Calle de Santa Isabel, 52, 28012 Madrid, Spain | 66 x 100 |
At the left of a bare and boxlike space, a masked Pierrot plays the clarinet. At the right, a singing monk holds sheet music. And in the center, strumming a guitar, is a Harlequin, in Picasso’s art a recurring stand-in for the artist himself. Pierrot and Harlequin are stock characters in the old Italian comic theatre known as commedia dell’arte, a familiar theme in Picasso’s work. The painting, then, has a whimsical side, epitomized by the near-invisible dog: its head is about halfway up the canvas on the left, one of several subtle browns, and we can also make out front paws, a hind leg, and a jaunty tail popping up between Harlequin’s legs. Overall, though, the work’s sombre background and large size make the musicians a solemn, even majestic trio. [Source: moma.org] | ![]() Image source: pablopicasso.org |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Three Musicians | 1921 | Oil/Canvas | Abstract |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-26] | |
MOMA, Museum of Modern Art, 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA | 201 x 223 |
![]() Image source: visual-arts-cork.com | This was the one figure painting produced by Leger in 1923, a year in which he was involved in many activities other than painting – writing, designing for the Ballets Suedois, and working on Marcel L’Herbier’s film, L’Inhumaine. It was preceded by a small oil of the torso of the larger figure, and a squared-up drawing, both of which are dated 1922. [Source: visual-arts-cork.com] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Nudes against a Red Background | 1923 | Oil/Canvas | Abstract |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Léger, Fernand | 1881 – 1955, aged 74 | French artist | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-27] | |
Kunstmuseum, Basel | 99 x 147 |
Le Rêve (The Dream) by Picasso, then 50 years old, portraying his 24-year-old mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter. It is said to have been painted in one afternoon. It belongs to Picasso’s period of distorted depictions, with its oversimplified outlines and contrasted colours resembling early Fauvism. The erotic content of the painting has been noted repeatedly, with critics pointing out that Picasso painted an erect penis, presumably symbolizing his own, in the upturned face of his model. [Source: pablopicasso.org] | ![]() Image source: prodiart.com |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Dream, The (Le Rêve) | 1932 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-28] | |
Private collection | 130 x 97 |
![]() Image source: tate-org.uk | Endless Rhythm 1934is a large, vertically orientated painting by the French artist Robert Delaunay. Three coloured disks painted on a pale blue ground move rhythmically in a strong diagonal from the bottom left to the top right of the canvas. The main body of each disk is made up of thick undulating black and white lines. The black line connects with the white causing a twisting effect which sends the eye around the composition in an endless loop. A further sense of movement is created by a central line of red, greens, blue and yellow which ripples through the centre of the disks, disrupting but also linking their forms. The blue and yellow of this line is echoed in the thin lines of each colour traced delicately around the bottom and top disks. The round centre of each disk is split into two hemispheres of alternate colour – the soft blue of the ground and a muted grey. The intersection of these hemispheres forms the only straight line in an otherwise soft, curving composition. [Source: tate.org.uk] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Endless Rhythm | 1934 | Oil/Canvas | Abstract |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Delaunay, Robert | 1885-1941, aged 56 | French painter | Cubism – Orphism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-29] | |
Tate Galleries, Millbank, Westminster, London SW1P 4RG UK | 162 x 130 |
![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons |
Picasso painted Guernica at his home in Paris in response to the 26 April 1937, bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country town in northern Spain which was bombed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of the Spanish Nationalists. [Source: Wikimedia commons] The government of the Spanish Republic acquired the mural Guernica from Picasso in 1937. When World War II broke out, the artist decided that the painting should remain in the custody of New York’s Museum of Modern Art for safekeeping until the conflict ended. In 1958 Picasso extended the loan of the painting to MoMA for an indefinite period, until such time that democracy had been restored in Spain. The work finally returned to this country in 1981. [Source: museoreinasofia.es] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Guernica | 1937 | Oil/Canvas | History Painting |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-30] | |
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Calle de Santa Isabel, 52, 28012 Madrid, Spain | 349 x 777 |
Weeping Woman is based on an image of a woman holding her dead child. It is taken from Picasso’s anti-war mural, Guernica. Picasso painted both works during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). It was in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica. Hundreds of people were killed. The figure of the Weeping Woman is based on artist and photographer Dora Maar. Maar photographed Picasso’s making of Guernica. [Source: tate.org.uk] | ![]() Image source: tate.org.uk |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Weeping Woman | 1937 | Oil/Canvas | Portrait |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-31]
| |
Tate Galleries, Millbank, Westminster, London SW1P 4RG UK | 60 x 49 |
![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons | Thie was painted in 1941 and depicts Dora Maar, (original name Henriette Theodora Markovitch) the artist’s lover, seated on a chair with a small cat perched on her shoulders. The painting is listed as one of the most expensive paintings, after achieving a price of $95 million at Sotheby’s on 3 May 2006. It is currently the sixth highest selling painting by Picasso. [Source: Wikimedia commons] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Dora Maar au Chat | 1941 | Oil/Canv | Portrait |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-32] | |
Private collection | 128 x 95 |
Throughout his career Fernand Léger created numerous images of women and parrots in a variety of media, including painting, printmaking and sculpture. [Source: racstl.org] | ![]() Image source: Wikimedia commons |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Two women, two sisters, The (Les femmes au perroquet) | 1952 | 0 | Portrait |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Léger, Fernand | 1881 – 1955, aged 74 | French artist | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | [1545-33]
| |
Musée National Fernand Leger, 255 Chemin du Val de Pôme, 06410 Biot, France | 50 x 65 |
![]() Image source: wikimedia commons | Don Quixote is a 1955 sketch by Pablo Picasso of the Spanish literary hero and his sidekick, Sancho Panza. It was featured on the August 18-24 issue of the French weekly journal Les Lettres Francaises in celebration of the 350th anniversary of the first part of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The painting is of Don Quixote de la Mancha, his horse Rocinante, his squire Sancho Panza and his donkey Dapple, the sun, and several windmills. The bold lines, almost scribbles, that compose the figures are stark against a plain, white background. The figures are almost laconic and deformed, and are dramatic. [Source: pablopicasso.org] |
TITLE: | YEAR: | FORM: | GENRE: |
Don Quixote | 1955 | Drawing | History Painting |
ARTIST: | DATES: | ORIGIN: | MOVEMENT: |
Picasso, Pablo | 1881 – 1973, aged 91 | Spanish painter | Cubism |
LOCATION: | SIZE (cms): | ||
Unknown | 36 x 28 |
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