For the purpose of getting their students to better understand what was going on inside the heads of modernist writers and artists of the post WWI era, Dr. Ashley Tidey and Dr. Charles Donelan took their AP students to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
“It was interesting to not only examine the works of Picasso and Braque, but also to see how their works related to each other and developed from their partnership,” said senior Cameron Platt.
The purpose of the field trip was to immerse students in an art form that would most closely parallel the abstract subject matter being covered in their modernist writing units.
The exhibit of works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, created exclusively between the years 1910 to 1912 runs until Jan. 8.
The exhibit, Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, is a combination of 15 paintings and 25 prints which came to be defined by Analytic Cubism, an experimental modernist art form which involves picking apart the human figure and every day objects, then rearranging them in pieces that depict various different perspectives of the same subject.
Many of the two artists’ paintings depict stark vertical black lines contrasted by softer toned horizontal brush strokes in the background, which were meant to keep the eye from automatically following the black lines, and drifting to the bottom on the piece. This theme of experimentation stemmed from the post WWI social and physical turmoil, which sparked questions about existence and values in society.
In turn, writers and artists began to reexamine commonly accepted aspects of daily life, expressing and preserving their findings on paper and canvas.
A quote from Picasso is displayed on the wall in the exhibit, “In the early days of cubism, we made experiments…to make pictures was less important than to discover things all the time.”
Works were produced in the two years that Picasso and Braque spent in each other’s studios, closely watching over each other’s processes.
The museum borrowed many of the pieces from the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, TX and others from private collectors in Santa Barbara.
