TELEFONICA CUBIST COLLECTION

TELEFONICA CUBIST COLLECTION

February 4 – May 31,  2015

The extraordinary Telefónica Cubist Collection, possibly the most important Cubist collection held by a private institution in Spain, begins with the artist Juan Gris and highlights the diversity of Cubist proposals and techniques over time.

BACKGROUND

Cubism constitutes the primary centerpiece of twentieth-century art, the culmination of a process that originated in Impressionism and that paved the way for abstraction. Cubism responds to the changes in mindset and perceptions of reality stemming from new concepts such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, Freud’s research on the unconscious, the discovery of African Art, the arrival of aviation, the use of mass telecommunications, and influential developments in mathematics and physics.

The three fundamental figures of the Cubist movement are Picasso, Braque, and Juan Gris. The first two artists created the movement from 1908 to 1914. Juan Gris would rework Cubism after 1913, achieving greater purity, harmony, and a theoretical grounding for the movement.

Cubism inaugurates a revolutionary way of painting that rejects Naturalism and Renaissance perspective in art. The first period known as Analytic Cubism, takes objects and space as its subject matter. Based on fragmenting reality into geometric shapes, this form allowed different viewpoints and features of the same object to be incorporated simultaneously onto a flat, two-dimensional surface. Analytic Cubism would evolve into a greater examination of the represented object by incorporating stenciled letters, signs, and object fragments that reinforce its relationship to reality. It would also converge with the use ofpapier collé and collages by introducing newspaper clippings, painted paper, and fabrics into the canvas. The flat forms of these overlapping elements would foster an evolution intoSynthetic Cubism, which takes up superimposed, colored forms. The three artists Picasso, Braque, and Gris would participate in this progression, but Juan Gris came to develop it with greater rigor, order, and clarity, definitively influencing Cubism’s transformation and survival.

THE EXHIBITION. The exhibition is organized in three different areas::

1.- JUAN GRIS

Juan Gris, the purest of the Cubists, reworked the movement by developing a rigorous notion of painting that could endow each piece with unity. He created highly structured works from rigid, geometric compositions, combining them with his inclusion of plastic rhymes to contribute a sense of excitement or calm to the piece.

In 1906, Gris landed in Paris where he rented a workshop in the same building where Picasso lived, the setting where Analytic Cubism would develop. In 1912, he exhibited his paintings with the greatest harmony, rigor, and unity, shaped by fragmenting the image, his restrained use of color, and rigorous geometric forms.

Gris would gradually develop his own method coupling the role of the imagination with the strict norms of composition that he discovered. This was a formula that would help him establish the structure, the painting’s architecture. From it, in the abstraction of geometry and the field of color, the subject matter of the piece would be born from the need to objectify the viewer. Gris “qualified” these flat surfaces by introducing signs and traces in order to guide the viewer’s eye through poetic relationships: “To make the color white a plate; red, a bottle; black, a shadow…” As the inventor of plastic rhymes or aesthetic metaphors, his canvasses conceal symbolic play in the correlations between forms and figures—a way of painting poetics.

By the 1920s, color comes alive in his work, making the pieces more lyrical, more naturalist to include outdoor scenes, organic life, and curves, in a dichotomy between a light naturalism and the Cubist assertions for painting.

2.- THE CUBIST MOVEMENT IN PARIS. 1914-1924

Several artists joined the century’s first historical avant-garde movement, adopting a Cubist aesthetic from the outset. Others would join later on. Before the war, Juan Gris maintained close ties with many of them, with whom he would share his theories. These models and their solutions contributed by Gris are located in works by artists in the Telefónica Cubist Collection: Herbin, Lhote, Gleizes, Metzinger, María Blanchard, Marcoussis and Valmier. Except for Herbin’s canvas from 1912, all of these pieces were created during Synthetic Cubism or the movement’s second period. Generally, these works highlight the dialectic between permanence and change, the motif of geometric abstraction and the plastic possibilities for color, asserting their aesthetic qualities. Their reference to reality is more legible and their combination of abstract planes, more random and dynamic.

From 1914 to 1924, this setting in Paris would see new publications, among them, The Cubist Painters by poet G. Apollinaire, which would serve as a false manifesto, or On Cubismwritten by Gleizes and Metzinger, which established the theoretical “armor” for the new formulation as the authors laid out their theory of flat forms and multi-dimensional perspectives.

3.-  INTERNATIONAL EXPANSION TO SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA

Several artists and poets who participated in Cubism played a main role in modernizing Spanish and Latin American art by carrying and transforming the movement from one side of the Atlantic to the other, where Gris made a lasting impression. Cubism’s different derivations show that its identity cannot be reduced to one formula alone, given that its capacity for transformation turned it into a lasting aesthetic legacy over time.

The Telefónica Cubist Collection includes works from very diverse artists. In Spain, the work of Manuel Ángeles Ortiz reflects the inheritance of Synthetic Cubism between linear classicism and pictorialism. Daniel Vázquez Díaz, influenced more by the nascent Cubism of Braque and Picasso, entails a kind of landscape illusionism. Joaquín Peinado reflects the Cubist assimilation of the Parisian School. In the work of Uruguayan artist Rafael Barradas, one can observe the introduction of the Cubist movement into Futurism, and likewise in pieces by Argentine Emilio Pettoruti. Xul Solar, also an Argentine artist who resists classification, incorporated several influences into Cubism. Brazilian artist do Rego Monteiro,a post-Cubist who works with a colorfully synthetic economy, is influenced by the primitive roots of Brazil.

Poet Vicente Huidobro and painter Joaquín Torres-García deserve separate mention for their significance, as both formed part of a Universalist tradition within the classicism derived from Juan Gris’s hypotheses. Gris would influence Spain through his theoretical and literary facets as his “method” would lead him to be the mentor for Huidobro’s Creationismor Literary Cubism—a movement that would influence the first Spanish avant-garde movement, Ultraism. Over time it would grow into Joaquín Torres-García’s Universal Constructivism. These are styles for synthesis that simplify forms and promote abstract, geometric relations imposed upon a structure that grant unity to the piece.

Juan Gris established the geometric armor for his compositions: architecture. Beginning with these abstractions, Gris devised relationships, rhymes, chords, colors, and textures, and composed his work in which colors turn into objects. This poetic dimension of painting would influence Huidobro. Moreover, Gris included the first printed text in his work, which dialogs poetically with plastic forms.

By the end of 1911 and thereafter, Huidobro would come into contact with Gris in Paris. In a comparable way to Cubist elements in painting, he established new relationships between words with decomposing linguistic elements from both a semantic and syntactic point of view, as well as from a disposition to the graphic arts in his use of calligramme, or other combinations of written words on the page. Poetry was thus incorporated into the plastic arts.

Uruguayan artist Torres-García would take up this legacy, whose impact can be seen inConstructive Universalism. His process resembles Juan Gris’s own—first, structure; then, geometry; later, the sign; and finally, spirit. Torres-García would define Juan Gris as “the perfect geometry, and for this reason, the purest of the Cubists. The purest creation within a perfectly regulated system.”

DOCUMENTARY

The exhibition concludes with the documentary Juan Gris. Cubismo y Modernidad by José Luis López-Linares, focused on Gris the artist, his work, and trajectory, presented as the most significant figure to have defined a new Cubism.

MULTIMEDIA GUIDE

A free multimedia guide in Spanish can be downloaded from the app Fundación Telefónica available in the App Store and Play Store.

To access the guide click in “Audioguía”, “Guía Multimedia” and “Colección Cubista de Telefónica”