Marat, a personal friend of David and a revolutionary radical, is vividly placed and is intended to sharpen the sense of pain and outrage in the viewer; thus, it is convincingly real via its use of light and shadow, almost as if David had taken a photograph of the death scene. The highest qualities of the sublime and the terrible and the emotions of awe and admiring wonder are best illustrated in the works of Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), and according to the French poet Charles Baudelaire, Delacroix "inherited from the great Republican and imperial school of David a love for poets and poetry and a strange and impulsive spirit of authenticity;" he also was the "soul-stirring translator of Shakespeare, Dante, and Byron" (Holt 216)
By 1886, the Impressionists were accepted by the art world as serious artists by most of the critics and by a large percentage of the public. Yet within a short period of time, another style emerged, being Post-Impressionism, a "more systematic examination of the properties of three-dimensional space, of the expressive qualities of line, pattern and color, and the symbolic character of subject matter" (Needham 245)
form, simplicity, proportion and restrained emotion" (Pioch, "Classicism," Internet), David remains the father of academic art produced under official patronage in 19th century France. As an artist, David "re-worked in his own individual and often non-classical style all classical and academic traditions while rebelling against the Rococo as an artificial artform;" David also "exalted classical art as the imitation of nature in her most beautiful and perfect form" (Peillex 156)
In Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso gives the women faces that resemble African masks, and twists their positions to create multi-viewpoints. Braque was excited when he saw this painting of Picasso's and realized that here too, was someone breaking with traditional Western single viewpoint perspective" (Chilvers, Cubism, ¶ 2)
His "Houses at l'Estaque" (Fig 3), demonstrated his new use of simplified form and more muted color usage. When these new type of paintings were exhibited at the Daniel Henry Kahnweiler Gallery, the critic Louis Vauxcelles gave Cubism it's name when he declared "M Braque scorns form and reduces everything, sites, figures and houses, to geometric schemes, to cubes" (Danto, 1998,¶3)
Examples such as Braque's "The Portuguese" (Fig 5) and Picasso's "The Accordionist" (Figure 6) demonstrate the Analytic Cubist period as well as how close the two artists styles were during 1911. Fig 6: Picasso, The Accordionist (1911) Fig 5: Braque, The Portuguese, (1911) Other examples of their close collaboration and similar development during this period, what Golding described as similarities "so great that even the trained and experienced eye has occasionally to pause and blink" (Golding, 1990,¶ 16) are Picasso's "La Guitariste" (Fig 7) and Braque's Woman with a Guitar" (Fig 8)
" This was a major turning point in the evolution of Cubism, according to Greenberg, in his classic essay on "Collage" in "Art and Culture." Many art critics, according to Greenberg say that Picasso and Braque used collage as a way of returning to a "renewed contact" with reality in the face of increasing abstraction in their paintings but Greenberg insists that using the term "reality" in art is highly suspect (Greenberg, 1958)
With new communications and transportation abilities, such as the telephone, telegram, airplane and cinema, as well as the scientific discoveries of Einstein's relativity theory and its concept of a space-time continuum where time and space were no longer different dimensions, these inventions and new paradigms were breaking down the so-called objective world as it had been known to previous generations. Stephen Kern looks at the period between 1880 and 1918 as reality-shattering, in his classic book "The Culture of Time and Space," where he posits that these sweeping changes created a whole new way people began to experience space and time, which in turn changed their conscious perception of the world (Kern, 1983)
Chaos can bring great change, and these tumultuous times opened up a time for vast artistic experimentation influenced by utopian ideals and the possibilities of new relationships between art and society. These artists were fueled by a desire to contribute to a new social order that would bring harmony and unity (Marquardt & Roman, 1)
Still, even in these early works, such as "Girl on a Ball" (fig 1), one can see the foreshadowing of Picasso's cubist style with the flattened space and the use of the geometric forms of sphere and ball. In this painting, one can see dialectic between the depiction of objects in space, and the affirmation of the flat picture surfaces (Rosenblum, 10)