This groundbreaking book provides a major reassessment of the history and significance of cubism. David Cottington examines the cubist movement and sets it within the complex political, economic, and cultural forces of pre-World War I France. Cubism, as a part of the Parisian artistic avant-garde, played an integral role in the turbulent Belle Epoque. The author focuses on cubisms relation to the particular discourses?of nationalism, aestheticism, gender, the social purpose of art?that gave meaning to the experience of modernity in Paris in the decade before the war. In Part I of the book, the author discusses the "cubist conjuncture," the years that followed the collapse of the Bloc des Gauches. The Bloc, more than a parliamentary alliance, represented an effort of collaboration between the liberal middle class and sectors of the working class led by Parisian intellectuals and artists (future cubists among them). In the wake of the Blocs failure, workers withdrew into trade unionism and artists into aesthetic avant-gardism. Cottington analyzes this consolidation of the artistic avant-garde, its relation to the expanding dealer-centered art market, and the dominant and counter discourses of the day. In Part II, he considers specific aspects of cubist art and the cubist movement?from the conservative modernism of the paintings of Le Fauconnier and Gleizes to the aestheticism of Picassos papiers-collés to the collective architectural and interior design project of the "cubist house." These examples and others, Cottington concludes, reveal cubism as a contradictory and unstable constellation of interests and practices, sometimes complicit with dominant social and political forces, sometimes opposed to them, but in every case shaped by them.

This book explores the work of those artists who attempted to keep alive the expanded possibilities opened up by Cubism in Paris between 1911 and 1914. This little community of artists refused to accept that recording the war or producing propaganda was their duty. Instead, they kept faith in their independence as individuals as this war of machines threatened to rob every front-line soldier of his humanity and to draw the globe into unprecedented conflict. The vast majority of fit young Frenchmen were mobilized, so those artists left behind in Paris were either foreign or too old or unfit for combat. Pablo Picasso, then known as the inventor of Cubism, remained a prominent figure, alongside his fellow Spaniards Juan Gris and María Blanchard, the Mexican Diego Rivera, the Italian Gino Severini, the Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz and the French painters Georges Braque, Henri Laurens, Fernand Léger and Henri Matisse. One focus of this book is the sheer diversity of the work produced by these artists; another is the move made by most of them toward a more structured, architectural Cubism, especially from 1917, which could be taken as reparation against the destructive forces that seemed to have taken over the whole world.

This beautifully illustrated volume tells the story of Cubism through twenty-two essays that explore the most significant private holding of Cubist art in the world today, the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, now a promised gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The eighty works featured in this volume—by Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso‐are among the most important and visually arresting in the movement’s history. These masterpieces, critical to the development of Cubism, include such groundbreaking paintings as Braque’s Trees at L’Estaque, considered one of the very first Cubist pictures; Picasso’s Still Life with Fan: “L’Indépendant,” one of the first to introduce typography; Gris’s noirish, uncanny The Man at the Café, one of his most celebrated collages; and Léger’s uniquely ambitious Composition (The Typographer). Written by renowned experts on this subject, the essays trace the evolution of Cubism from its origins in the still lifes, portraits, and collages of Braque and Picasso through the precisely delineated compositions by Gris that prefigure the Synthetic Cubism of the war years to Léger’s distinctive intersections of spherical, cylindrical, and cubic forms that evoke the syncopated rhythms of modern life. Also included are a fascinating interview in which Leonard Lauder discusses his approach to collecting, an investigative essay on the information gleaned from the backs of the works themselves, and an authoritative catalogue that further establishes the lives of these magnificent objects. A publication to place alongside the great histories of Modernism, this comprehensive book will stand as the resource for understanding Cubism for many years to come. -

"Read this book if you want to understand me."—Pablo Picasso Conversations with Picasso offers a remarkable vision of both Picasso and the entire artistic and intellectual milieu of wartime Paris, a vision provided by the gifted photographer and prolific author who spent the early portion of the 1940s photographing Picasso's work. Brassaï carefully and affectionately records each of his meetings and appointments with the great artist, building along the way a work of remarkable depth, intimate perspective, and great importance to anyone who truly wishes to understand Picasso and his world.

Cubism was the most influential artistic movement of the 20th century, yet just what cubism was, or stood for, is still in dispute. This book offers a way beyond this confusion through a narrative of cubism's beginnings, consolidation and dissemination.

Much of how World War I is understood today is rooted in the artistic depictions of the brutal violence and considerable destruction that marked the conflict. Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged examines how the physical and psychological devastation of the war altered the course of twentieth-century artistic Modernism. Following the lives and works of fourteen artists before, during, and after the war, this book demonstrates how the conflict and the resulting trauma actively shaped artistic production. Featured artists include Georges Braque, Carlo Carrà, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Käthe Kollwitz, Fernand Léger, Wyndham Lewis, André Masson, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Nash, and Oskar Schlemmer. Materials from the Getty Research Institute’s special collections—including letters, popular journals, posters, sketches, propaganda, books, and photographs—situate the works of the artists within the historical context, both personal and cultural, in which they were created. The volume accompanies a related exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute Gallery from November 25, 2014, to April 19, 2015.

This work seeks to transform our understanding of Cubism, showing in detail how it emerged in Picasso's work of the years 1906-13, and tracing its roots in 19th-century philosophy and linguistics.

War, modernism, and the academic spirit -- Women in peril -- Mirroring masculinity -- Opposing visions -- Opening the floodgates -- To see or not to see -- Being there -- Behind the mask -- Monsters in our midst.

This examination of Braque's career features exquisite reproductions and incisive historical and aesthetic investigations of his work leading up to and during World War II. This book offers the first detailed examination of Braque's experiments with still lifes and interiors during a significant, though overlooked, time in his career. One of the leading founders of Cubism, Braque employed the genre of the still life to conduct a lifelong investigation into the nature of perception through the tactile and transitory world of everyday objects. Examining a transitional time between Braque's early Cubist works and his late grand series, this catalog considers his paintings within the cultural and political context of Europe at this time. Reproduced in vivid color, Braque's paintings are accompanied by scholarly essays that explore the rise of Braque's popularity in the US, including his first major retrospective in America, and the reception of his work of the early 1930s and 1940s by German and French critics, as well as a behind-the-scenes look at the materials and process employed by the artist as illuminated by an intensive conservation study of select important works.

Together, these essays show that although there were many points of intersection—historical, metaphorical, theoretical, and ideological—between cubism and architecture, there was no simple, direct link between them.