Fauvism, Cubism and Dada
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Fauvism, Cubism and Dada at the Musee National d’Art Moderne
The collection on floor five is organized more or less chronologically and starts in a blaze of colour with the Fauvists- Braque, Derain, Vlaminck and Matisse. Their vibrant works reflect the movement’s desire to create form rather than imitate nature. Colour becomes a way of composing and structuring a picture, as in Braque’s L’ Estaque (1906), where trees and sky are broken down into blocks of vibrant reds and greens. Matisse’s series of Luxe paintings also stands out, the colourful nudes recalling the primitive figures of Gauguin.
Shape is broken down even further in Picasso’s and Braque’s early Cubist paintings. Highlights include Picasso’s portrait of his lover Fernande (Femme assise daus un fauteuil; 1910), in which different angles of the figure are shown all at once, giving rise to complex patterns and creating the effect of movement. Hung alongside Picasso’s works, and almost indistinguishable from them, are a number of Braque’s works, such as Nature morte au violon (1911) and Femme à la guitare (1913). The juxtaposition of these paintings illustrates the intellectual and artistic dialogue that went on between the two artists, who lived next door to each other at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre.
Another artist heavily influenced by the new Cubism was Fernand Léger. In paintings such as Femme en rouge et vert (1914) and Contraste de formes (1913), Léger creates his own distinctive form of Cubism based on tubular shapes, inspired by the modern machinery of World War I in which he fought.
Reaction to the horror of the 1914-18 war gave rise to the nibilistic Dada movement, a revolt against petty bourgeois values; leading members included Marcel Duchamp, who selected everyday objects ("ready-mades") such as the Hat Rack (1917), and elevated them, without modification, to the rank of works of art, simply by taking them out of their ordinary context and putting them on display. As well as the Hat Rack, you can inspect Duchamp’s most notorious ready-made- a urinal – which he called Fontaine and first exhibited in New York in 1917.
