Analytical or hermetic cubism

Analytical or hermetic cubism (1909-1912). Georges Braque in 1908. In 1909 Braque and Picasso strengthen their friendship and manage to develop the new trend. Together they created the two tendencies of Cubism. The first is analytic cubism (1909-1912), where the painting is almost monochrome in gray and ocher. The colors at this time were not interesting because the important thing was the different points of view and the geometrization, not the chromatism. They were developing a "new language" that analyzes reality and breaks it down into multiple geometric elements. The points of view multiplied, leaving definitively the unity of the point of view of the Renaissance perspective. The "steps" are introduced into the painting, defined as slight interruptions of the contour line. Large volumes are fragmented into smaller volumes. Among the works of this phase of Cubism is the Portrait of Kahnweiler (1910, Art Institute of Chicago). This period is also called hermetic cubism, because by the amount of points of view represented, some works seem almost abstract. The hermeticism is reached because the planes end up becoming independent in relation to the volume so that it is difficult to decode the figuration, to mentally reconstruct the object that those planes represent. The color did not help, being practically monochrome and often conventional, unrelated to the authentic color of the object. The image represented, in short, was illegible, almost impossible to see, except for some objects such as a pipe, or newspaper letters, which make it possible to distinguish what is being represented. It is in this phase when cubism is presented in public. But not by the work of Picasso and Braque, who exhibited privately in the Kahnweiler gallery, but by other painters who knew the work of those in their workshops. They appeared at the Salón de los Independientes in 1911. In his room 41, works by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay appeared. They provoked the scandal and rejection of the public and critics. This led to the construction of a doctrinal work of the first hour explaining the findings of the new trend. Thus, the first theoretical study of Cubism was done in 1912 Gleizes and Metzinger: Du "Cubisme" ("On cubism"). Apollinaire, for his part, wrote Les peintres cubistes ("The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations") in 1913. There were other adhesions, such as that of the patron Gertrude Stein or the dealers such as Ambroise Vollard and Henry Kahnweiler. Other poets, in addition to Apollinaire, defended the new style: Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob. In addition to the rejection of the traditionalists of painting, there were later critics who came from the avant-garde itself, focused on two problems posed by Cubism: its statism and its adherence to the figurative. In fact, especially the futurists objected to Cubism that in their works the movement was absent, being that the current world is essentially dynamic. Gino Severini, who is considered the most Cubist within Futurism, criticized him in Del Cubismo al Clasicismo (1921), although over time (1960) he recognized that he owed much of his technique to cubism. Some Cubists were sensitive to this criticism and created works influenced by futurism, as did Marcel Duchamp with his first version of Nude going down a staircase (1911, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arensberg). On the other hand, although at the time it was not easy to demarcate the cubism of abstraction, today it is evident that they are still subject to a figurative representation of real things. They continued representing chairs, bottles or human figures, although they decomposed them in planes and geometric volumes. They did not deviate from representing reality, but wanted to represent it in the picture with a new language. The path traced by Picasso and Braque was soon followed by painters Juan Gris (José Victoriano González) and Louis Marcoussis, the former influenced by Picasso, the latter by Braque. Gray, third great name of cubism. This Madrilenian lived in Paris drawing for magazines and newspapers. From 1911 he became interested in the problem of light on objects, creating paintings with naturalistic lighting, in which the oblique and parallel light rays hit each other on rigid forms, as can be seen in his Picasso Portrait of 1912. He He said he had adopted "analytical" cubism, multiplying points of view and using bright colors. By 1912, Braque and Picasso had already made collages, and Gris began to introduce different materials in his works, such as wood or upholstery, either by imitating them or by gluing them (El lavabo, 1912). Braque, on the other hand, influenced the Polish Marcoussis (Ludwig Markus). More orthodox and less original than Gris, he created a work with intense colors and sometimes close to futurism. It started in 1912