this is the cubism room at the scottish national gallery of modern art it's one
of my favorite rooms in fact cubism is quite a difficult art to
understand i think a lot of people would look at it
brown bit difficult might just walk on don't
don't these are some of the most revolutionary
exciting new works this is a high point in western culture so for nearly 500
years we've got single point perspective which
really involves a one-eyed person looking out of a window it's all done
with maths and you've got a fixed point so here we've got
george brock french artist born in 1882 and pablo picasso 1881 in spain two
artists who forged this cuber style which completely revolutionized
the visual arts they turned over 500 years of tradition
and they did it by accepting that you've got two eyes
if you look through one eye and the other eye you'll see a slightly
different version of things and you move around
things so here we've got a still life with scissors bobbin
various things and they're sort of cut up to imply that an
artist has actually moved around it with picasso's work as well
not only is he doing that but he's using different techniques
he's using uh a sort of realist technique here
um to paint this bottle he's painting the bottle from the side
and then he's painting the top from above painted some white paint
and then in the wet paint he's scratched the glass
with the back of the brush here he's using a paint that's normally used for
sheds some of it he's just leaving pure pencil
or charcoal so it's as if he's saying that not only
can you approach your subject from a number of
different angles but you can do it in a number of different techniques
it's totally revolutionary it has an effect on
architecture poetry literature cutting things up reshaping them doing
them again over here we've got works by metzange
who was one of the he was called a salon cubist a rather
derogatory term but picasso and brock didn't show their
works at the regular major exhibitions in paris this all
happens in paris met sanjay is one of their first
followers he does and he becomes very well known for a
more sort of polite kind of cubism if you like
as does delony robert deloney again he sees the um initiative
that's been made by brock and picasso and he brings a new
spin to it particularly in terms of color he calls these works
simultaneous which really means that he's
incorporating things that might have happened at different times of the day
or different times of the month or year into one single painting so it's
incorporating the idea of time and he's also doing it this highly
colored way it shows a group of french and welsh rugby players jumping
for throw-in rugby is a very modern subject at this
time it's not something you sort of watch on tv
this is a new biplane that was very very new at this time it was made by
this firm called astra and this is the eiffel tower
again it's new it's made in the 1880s still hasn't been
up in paris for very long and here we've got deloney's name which is
rather cleverly and humorously incorporated into the
hoarding behind the rugby players this is by louis bob popova a woman
artist who comes to paris and studies with mech changes in 1912
she immediately understands cubism and takes it into a slightly different
path very russian the russians were interested in the idea of
particularly abstraction they didn't want any anything to do with
old-fashioned sort of pre-revolutionary art they wanted to make an art sort of
from scratch start with a tabula rasa and uh make
everything new and that's what papova is doing in
this extraordinary picture
there are a few sculptors who got involved with the cubist movement
if you think about it it's an unusual thing to do if
cubist painting that we've seen here is really about trying to
translate a three-dimensional experience onto a flat two-dimensional plane
sculpture doesn't really need to it's already three-dimensional it's
almost as if they've taken a three-dimensional world put it onto two
dimensions and he's folding it back out into a
three-dimensional sculpture but it's a fabulous thing you only
notice it's a figure if you just saw around here the little eye
once you realize that's an eye you know that's the head this has got to be the
body legs and so on down here and it's done
with this beautiful um texture this would have been created in
clay and then sent off to a bronze caster and they'd make the
bronze out of it it's like probably a unique bronze
talk a little bit now about sonia taloni this is actually earlier
it's called the prose of the trans-siberian express
and it's 1913. this is actually a book if that was folded together in
concertina fashion it sort of flips nicely within that little wallet
at the top it's a poem by a friend of hers called
blaise syndromes about making a train trip from
vladivostok to paris i think there are 400 lines and it's done in 12 different
typefaces coming straight out of the cubist style
that picasso and brock have developed but giving it this idea to do with
memory and also intense color sometimes this is
called autism and over here there's an extraordinary
painting by fern on leger who used he was very friendly with picasso and
brock one of the great second wave of cubists his spin on
cubism is associated with a machine he was often called
a tubist which i think is rather nice sort of ism a tubism um a kind of joke
but it stuck and he was in love with the machine he
thought the machine was going to liberate
everyone from household drudgery wars would finish
and the the machine would solve everyone's problems
a really utopian thing which is the same with popover
sort of by banishing figurative references you're sort of joining the
workers and um marching on to a glorious new
future but mistaken he may have been in terms
of his glory of the machine it's certainly
a glorious painting
so
you