Still
Life with Open Window, Rue Ravignan
(oil on canvas, 1915)
Philadelphia
Museum of Art
Still
Life Painting
Cubism
was the the
first abstract art form
and the most revolutionary art movement of the 20th century.
It was originally conceived and developed in France by
Pablo
Picasso and Georges Braque around 1907, but other artists
soon adopted the style. The Spanish artist Juan Gris (his
real name was José
Victoriano González-Pérez),
a friend and neighbour of Picasso in Paris, was the best
of these and he refined the cubist vocabulary into his
own instantly recognisable visual language.
Still
life was the most popular of the cubist themes as it allowed
artists to use everyday objects whose forms were still
recognisable after they had been simplified and stylised.
'Still Life with Open Window, Rue Ravignan' is a great
example of Gris' cubist style. It contains some of the
traditional objects commonly associated with still life:
a bowl of fruit, a bottle and a glass, a newspaper and
a book, all carefully arranged on a table top at a balcony
window. The objects are lit by electric light which contrasts
with the moonlit scene outside the window. The subject
may have been clichéd and predictable but its arrangement
was revolutionary.
Juan
Gris was more calculating than any other Cubist painter
in the way he composed his pictures. Every element of
a painting was considered with classical precision: line,
shape, tone, colour and pattern were carefully refined
to create an interlocking arrangement free from any unnecessary
decoration or detail.
Gris
flattens the composition of 'Rue Ravignan' into a grid
of overlapping planes. Within the structure of this grid,
he delicately balances and counterbalances different areas
of the work. Sections shift from light to dark, positive
to negative, monochrome to colour, transparency to opacity,
and from lamplight inside the room to moonlight outside.
The relationships of these juxtaposed elements leave us
with a sense of the still life group in its surroundings
- the kind of fragmented sense that our memory would retain
had we seen them for ourselves.
Before
Cubism,
all art obeyed the convention of perspective.
This was the technique that artists had used since the
Renaissance to arrange objects in space. However, perspective
only works from one fixed viewpoint and the Cubists believed
that it was a limited visualization technique which did
not reflect the way that we see the world. Their aim was
to develop a new way of seeing which reflected the complexity
of the modern age. In Cubist painting artists depict real
objects, but not from a fixed viewpoint as in perspective.
They combine different viewpoints of a subject in the
one image. The whole idea of space is rearranged –
the front, back and sides of the subject become interchangeable
elements. Cubist images combine the artist’s observation
with their memory of the subject to create a poetic evocation
of the theme.
Juan
Gris' 'Still Life with Open Window, Rue Ravignan' is a
classic example of the style which contains most of the
visual characteristics of the Cubist technique.
Juan
Gris Notes
