The Birth of Cubism

Painted in 1909, L’église de Carrières-Saint-Denis dates from the early moments of Cubism. It is in the late landscapes of Braque’s transitional period that the bare bones of the movement truly consolidated. Now, he had advanced on Cézanne in rendering form in two dimensions, and he needed only his return to his studio in Paris and his collaboration with Picasso for full-blown Cubism to be born. Pepe Karmel has related about the period from 1909-1910, “the dialogue between Picasso and Braque seems to have been most intense.” (E. Braun and R. Rabinow, Cubism: The Leonard Lauder Collection, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2014, p. 43).Braque’s most important artistic…

Over the last three weeks I have shown a few of the watercolour sketches made by Paul Signac (1863-1935), which may have come as a surprise if you’ve previously only known his pointillist oil paintings. In this article I look at how those watercolour sketches changed in response to Signac’s exposure to the late watercolours of Paul Cézanne.

Although I’ve been unable to find many good images of Signac’s early watercolour sketches, the following seems to be fairly representative of those he painted in the nineteenth century.

Paul Signac (1863-1935), Harbour (1894), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Harbour (1894) is one of the many sketches he made of the harbour of Saint-Tropez while he lived there, which appear to have been primarily intended to lead to finished oil paintings in pointillist style.

Paul Signac (1863-1935), Rotterdam (1906), watercolour and graphite, 25.4 x 40.6 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art…

It’s almost August, time for those of us in the northern hemisphere to abandon the sweltering cities and go to indulge in a bit dolce far niente where it’s more comfortable. While we’re doing that, let’s put aside all those busy paintings of active people. Our art needs to chill out too.

The Italian phrase dolce far niente means (literally) sweet doing nothing: it’s the very enjoyment of being idle, the indulgence of relaxation, blissful laziness. If ever there was a hallmark of a painting from the Aesthetic movement, surely it’s a canvas titled dolce far niente. This weekend, I look at paintings with that title, and a small selection of others that stand out for their blissful laziness.

Prior to 1800, there don’t appear to have been any significant (surviving) paintings with the title Dolce Far Niente, and relatively few other contenders.

Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805–1873) Dolce Far Niente…

Thanks for Visiting 🙂

~Sunnyside

In the first of these two articles showing paintings of the first act of this play, the fairies attending Titania had just sung her to sleep, allowing Oberon to drop the herbal juice onto her eyelids, which would make her fall in love with the first creature she saw when she woke up.

Richard Dadd (1817–1886), Titania Sleeping (c 1841), oil on canvas, 59.7 x 77.5 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Richard Dadd’s Titania Sleeping from about 1841 is another elaborate example of faery painting with its intricately detailed human-like creatures. The naked queen has just fallen asleep at the mouth of a grotto. Framing that scene are toadstools, morning glory flowers, and an arch of bats.

Robert Huskisson (1820-1861), The Midsummer Night’s Fairies (1847), oil on mahogany, 28.9 x 34.3 cm, The Tate Gallery (Purchased 1974), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate (2017), CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0…