Harlequin (Kunstmuseum, The Hague) | |
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Year | 1913 |
Dimensions | 88.5 cm (34.8 in) × 46.9 cm (18.5 in) |
Location | Kunstmuseum Den Haag |
Accession No. | 0333238 |
Arlequin is a 1913 painting by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The painting can loosely be considered a portrait of a harlequin, but through the lens of Picasso's cubist style, where "Picasso paints a figure from several angles at once, dividing it into rectangles and circles." The painting is a considered an example of 'synthetic cubism', a development from Picasso's earlier 'geometric cubism'. Within 'synthetic cubism' elements of collages were included and the image appeared slightly closer to reality than the abstractions of geometric cubism. [1]
The painting hangs in the Kunstmuseum, The Hague, Netherlands.
The painting was acquired by the Kunstmuseum in the 1950s. In the 1990s, then director Rudi Fuchs wished to sell the painting so that funds could be made available for improving the museum collection in other areas. According to Fuchs, "The other two (Arlequin and Sibyl) are from much later and do not fit in with the rest of the collection.". [2] Other museum directors in the Netherlands were strongly opposed to the sale, and it never went through. [3]
Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most notable contributions were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque's work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso.
José Victoriano González-Pérez , better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter born in Madrid who lived and worked in France for most of his active period. Closely connected to the innovative artistic genre Cubism, his works are among the movement's most distinctive.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War.
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related artistic movements in music, literature, and architecture. In Cubist works of art, the subjects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form—instead of depicting objects from a single perspective, the artist depicts the subject from multiple perspectives to represent the subject in a greater context. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. The term cubism is broadly associated with a variety of artworks produced in Paris or near Paris (Puteaux) during the 1910s and throughout the 1920s.
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The Kunstmuseum Den Haag is an art museum in The Hague in the Netherlands, founded in 1866 as the Museum voor Moderne Kunst. Later, until 1998, it was known as Haags Gemeentemuseum, and until the end of September 2019 as Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. It has a collection of around 165,000 works, over many different forms of art. In particular, the Kunstmuseum is renowned for its large Mondrian collection, the largest in the world. Mondrian's last work, Victory Boogie-Woogie, is on display at the museum.
Picasso's Rose Period represents an important epoch in the life and work of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso which had a great impact on the developments of modern art. It began in 1904 at a time when Picasso settled in Montmartre at the Bateau-Lavoir among bohemian poets and writers. Following Picasso's Blue Period – which depicted themes of poverty, loneliness, and despair in somber, blue tones – Picasso's Rose Period represents more pleasant themes of clowns, harlequins and carnival performers, depicted in cheerful vivid hues of red, orange, pink and earth tones.
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Cubist sculpture developed in parallel with Cubist painting, beginning in Paris around 1909 with its proto-Cubist phase, and evolving through the early 1920s. Just as Cubist painting, Cubist sculpture is rooted in Paul Cézanne's reduction of painted objects into component planes and geometric solids; cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Presenting fragments and facets of objects that could be visually interpreted in different ways had the effect of 'revealing the structure' of the object. Cubist sculpture essentially is the dynamic rendering of three-dimensional objects in the language of non-Euclidean geometry by shifting viewpoints of volume or mass in terms of spherical, flat and hyperbolic surfaces.
The Accordionist is a 1911 oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso. The painting portrays a seated man playing an accordion. The division of three-dimensional forms into a two-dimensional plane indicates that the painting is in the style of Analytical Cubism, which was developed by Picasso and Georges Braque between 1907 and 1914. The painting is now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
Proto-Cubism is an intermediary transition phase in the history of art chronologically extending from 1906 to 1910. Evidence suggests that the production of proto-Cubist paintings resulted from a wide-ranging series of experiments, circumstances, influences and conditions, rather than from one isolated static event, trajectory, artist or discourse. With its roots stemming from at least the late 19th century, this period is characterized by a move towards the radical geometrization of form and a reduction or limitation of the color palette. It is essentially the first experimental and exploratory phase of an art movement that would become altogether more extreme, known from the spring of 1911 as Cubism.
Femme au miroir, Femme à sa toilette or Lady at her Dressing Table, is a painting by the French artist Jean Metzinger. This distilled synthetic form of Cubism exemplifies Metzinger's continued interest, in 1916, towards less surface activity, with a strong emphasis on larger, flatter, overlapping abstract planes. The manifest primacy of the underlying geometric configuration, rooted in the abstract, controls nearly every element of the composition. The role of color remains primordial, but is now restrained within sharp delineated boundaries in comparison with several earlier works. The work of Juan Gris from the summer of 1916 to late 1918 bears much in common with that of Metzinger's late 1915 – early 1916 paintings.
Crystal Cubism is a distilled form of Cubism consistent with a shift, between 1915 and 1916, towards a strong emphasis on flat surface activity and large overlapping geometric planes. The primacy of the underlying geometric structure, rooted in the abstract, controls practically all of the elements of the artwork.
Portrait of an Army Doctor is an oil-on-canvas painting created during 1914–15 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. Painted at the fortress city of Toul (Lorraine) while Gleizes served in the military during the First World War, the painting's abstract circular rhythms and intersecting aslant planes announce the beginning of the second synthetic phase of Cubism. The work represents Gleizes's commanding officer, Major Mayer-Simon Lambert (1870–1943), the regimental surgeon in charge of the military hospital at Toul. At least eight preparatory sketches, gouaches and watercolors of the work have survived, though Portrait of an Army Doctor is one of Gleizes's only major oil paintings of the period.
Brick Factory at Tortosa is a 1909 oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso, which he created during a visit to Horta de Sant Joan in Catalonia. It depicts a landscape of a factory and palm trees, which are presented in a simplified, geometric style. The work belongs to Picasso's African Period and is considered a Proto-Cubist work. It is held in the collection of The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.
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