What Abstract Art Style Did Pablo Picasso Invent?
If you have ever closely noticed Picasso’s abstract art faces, you will surely see some relevance to reality in it.
Picasso’s abstract art never reached the extreme levels as the pioneering minds like Delaunay, Mondrian, and Kandinsky did. Their idea was more bent on the fact that art could exist on its own, with complete separation from the representations of the real world. Picasso was focused more on showing how you can take references from real life yet make it look abstract and innovative.
Even though the idea can be dated back to Plato, the birth of abstract art is now considered to be in 1910, when Picasso was experimenting with Cubism. However, like Kandinsky’s Black Box, true abstract art did not appear until a few years later.
Picasso and Cubism
For the longest time, Picasso was working with Georges Braque, who was also an artist. While experimenting on new ideas with him, Picasso founded the Cubism movement. It was with him that Picasso reached his most abstract work, deserting traditional viewpoints of art, including some of Picasso’s abstract faces.
While these faces became quite a popular treat for his viewers and art critics at the time, it was not very well credited. Most people thought this kind of art was baseless. His cubist movement, however, had two phases.
The first phase of the cubist movement was popularly known as Analytical Cubism. In this process, one had to rearrange a clear image by mixing up the elements on the canvas. This further left behind a somewhat obscure yet discernable picture of the subject.
You can find traces of such processes in some of Pablo Picasso’s abstract paintings, such as the Seated nude. As Analytical Cubism developed gradually, he started dissecting his subjects further. This led to the movement reaching its peak and gave fruition to Picasso’s famous abstract art, Still Life with Bottle of Rum, in the year 1911.
In that painting, the still life figure was abstracted to a point where it became an overlapping pane of spindly lines, which were painted in a pallet of blacks, greys, and browns.
The next phase of Cubism was even more interesting and was known as Synthetic Cubism. In this, Picasso incorporated the already existing elements to form a larger collage. Similar to the earlier phase, Pablo Picasso’s abstract art in this phase would seldom cater to the replication of reality.
Instead, it took reference from it but later finished the collages with simple lines and shapes, often with cut-out paper and other materials.
Some of the most famous abstract paintings by Picasso at this time include Bottle of Vieux Marc, Guitar, and Newspaper and Glass. These paintings diligently emphasize the importance of flat shapes and materials, which blatantly represent their own artificiality.
The fundamental principle of abstract art, as put by Picasso, was to it is expressive in its own terms, without trying to mimic reality.
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