Cubism was a truly revolutionary style of modern art developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques. It was the first style of abstract art which evolved at the beginning of the 20th century in response to a world that was changing with unprecedented speed. Cubism was an attempt by artists to revitalize the tired traditions of Western art which they believed had run their course. The Cubists challenged conventional forms of representation, such as perspective, which had been the rule since the Renaissance. Their aim was to develop a new way of seeing which reflected the modern age. The Cubists were influenced by art from other cultures, particularly African masks.
A good example of Cubism is the art work "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"(1907) by Pablo Picasso.
This is one of the first paintings related to cubism. In this artwork we can see the unity of different cultures and the new way of representing space and form. The scene is developed in Barcelona on a street named d'Avignon from which the title comes from. In this artpiece, 5 naked woman are shown and in the bottom almost exactly at the middle we can see some fruits. It is said that the first sketch had 2 man, a medicine student holding a skull and a mariner which represented the vanity of the body and the soul. However, those male figures were taken out by Picasso in the final piece. Each body is geometrically composed and space is compressed and doesn't follow any perspective rule. Figures are based in the different possible points of view. For instance, the woman seated on the right side can be seen from any perspective and every women eyes and faces seem asymmetrical and with strong lines around their eyes. Picasso also went back to some cultures styles. For example, the women on the left side reminds of Egyptian art, not only for her face and frontal like eye, but also for the position of her feet( one foot in front of the other). After doing some research, I found out that the second and third women from left to right are in a similar posture to Schiavo Morente by Michelangelo (1513 ca). In addition the African like mask of the faces. This shows how Picasso not only invented the different style with geometry figures, but also combined different culture styles in one artwork.
Pop Art emerged in the middle 50's and it is defined as art based on modern popular culture and the mass media, especially as a critical or ironic comment on traditional fine art values. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising and news. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. One good example of Pop art is "Campbell's Soup Cans" (1962) by Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup Cans resembles the mass-produced, printed advertisements by which Warhol was inspired, it is hand-painted, while each can’s bottom edge is hand-stamped. In this work, he mimicked the repetition and uniformity of advertising by carefully reproducing the same image across each individual canvas. He varied only the label on the front of each can, distinguishing them by their variety. Warhol said of Campbell’s Soup, “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.” Even though it looks like repetition of cans, the reality is that Warhol created a portrait of every non-frozen Campbell's soup flavor available to him in 1962. What made his works significant was Warhol's co-opting of universally recognizable imagery, such as a Campbell's soup can, Mickey Mouse, or the face of Marilyn Monroe, and depicting it as a mass-produced item, but within a fine art context. In that sense, Warhol wasn't just emphasizing popular imagery, but rather providing commentary on how people have come to perceive these things in modern times: as commodities to be bought and sold, identifiable as such with one glance
Pop Art emerged in the middle 50's and it is defined as art based on modern popular culture and the mass media, especially as a critical or ironic comment on traditional fine art values. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising and news. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. One good example of Pop art is "Campbell's Soup Cans" (1962) by Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup Cans resembles the mass-produced, printed advertisements by which Warhol was inspired, it is hand-painted, while each can’s bottom edge is hand-stamped. In this work, he mimicked the repetition and uniformity of advertising by carefully reproducing the same image across each individual canvas. He varied only the label on the front of each can, distinguishing them by their variety. Warhol said of Campbell’s Soup, “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.” Even though it looks like repetition of cans, the reality is that Warhol created a portrait of every non-frozen Campbell's soup flavor available to him in 1962. What made his works significant was Warhol's co-opting of universally recognizable imagery, such as a Campbell's soup can, Mickey Mouse, or the face of Marilyn Monroe, and depicting it as a mass-produced item, but within a fine art context. In that sense, Warhol wasn't just emphasizing popular imagery, but rather providing commentary on how people have come to perceive these things in modern times: as commodities to be bought and sold, identifiable as such with one glance
