Oil on canvas - Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas As the art historian, Daniel Robbins has written, "We see the artist's volumetric approach to Cubism and his successful union of a broad field of vision with a flat picture plane." As Gleizes himself wrote, he was most interested in "an analysis of volume relationships," wanting to convey solidity and structure, and it was this emphasis on synthesizing the materiality of the world according to the sensations the artist felt that contributed not only to Cubism but also toward further abstraction. Gleizes felt that the figure was not important in itself but functioned only as a "figurative support," as he wrote, to be "subordinated to true, essential qualities that correspond to the plastic demands of painting." Here, the woman’s clothing and body become cubic volumes, sculpted in cylindrical forms, creating not so much the sense of layered planes of vision, as layered planes of dense materiality. The reductive color palette, combined with the angled planes of multiple perspectives, creates a blurring between the interior of the room and the exterior view and between the figure and her surroundings. Behind her, a window opens onto a view of the landscape beyond. She concentrates on the unfolded paper or cloth she holds in her lap. ![]() A woman sits in a room between two vases filled with flowers. The monochromatic and abstracted treatment of a traditional genre scene created a scandal when it was shown at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, where viewers thought the painting outlandish. Oil on canvas - Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands At the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, Le Fauconnier’s work made him the public face of the new avant-garde art, and his monumental approach to an allegorical subject and his preoccupation with volume and weight were important influences upon Salon Cubism. The figures are meant to embody the earth’s abundance, as if they too had materialized from the same substance. While patches of red and blue throughout the composition create movement through the image, the underlying greys and browns further unite the figures and the landscape as seen in the similarity between the woman’s shoulders and arms and the cubic mountains in the upper right of the painting. The faceted bodies of the figures and the landscape convey a common density and weight. Le Fauconnier does not depict the scene from multiple perspectives as would be typical of Picasso and Braque, but instead he analyzes the volume of the figures and landscape. ![]() The figures occupy a landscape in which a lake with boats, the spires of a castle, mountains, and a city street can be glimpsed, and the foreground is littered with fallen fruit. A nude woman bears an oversized platter laden with fruit on her head, and a nude child with his arms full of apples stands next to her. Le Fauconnier presents the viewer with an allegory of the plentitude of nature and the fertility of womanhood in the large-scale oil painting. While they still painted portraits and genre scenes, their subject matter tended to be more "epic" and more allegorical, pointing to Cubism’s ability to merge traditional ideals and modern life. While Salon Cubists helped to move painting further into abstraction, their paintings were never completely abstract.Bergson held that consciousness of an object or an experience consisted of "several conscious anized into a whole, permeat one another, gradually gain a richer content." Salon Cubists encouraged the subjectivity of experience by requiring the viewer to complete, to resolve the various perspectives, into the "total image," as Jean Metzinger referred to it. Simultaneity was also closely linked with Henri Bergson’s notion of duration, or psychological time, which highlighted the subjectivity of experience.This distortion also suggests that space and form are inextricably bound. ![]() Eschewing traditional one-point perspective that had ruled Western painting’s depiction of reality, the Salon Cubists depicted reality with fragmented, overlapping, and translucent planes to suggest a higher reality, a fourth dimension. The goal of the painter was to give the viewer the most information about an object by depicting multiple vantage points at the same time. The idea of simultaneity, or mobile perspective, was a main tenet of Salon Cubism.The Salon Cubists, however, exhibited publicly in the Salons and felt a greater desire to communicate their aesthetic ideas with the public and were more attuned to public reception. Picasso and Braque formulated the foundations of Cubism in artistic conversations in their studios with the stipend provided by their dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, they were able to experiment out of public view.
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