Analyzing twentieth- and twenty-first-century 2D art

Pablo Picasso emerged in the early years of the the twentieth century from Spain being clearly influenced by his Spanish antecedents Diego Velázquez, El Greco, and Francisco de Goya. When he moved to Paris in 1901, he began to be influenced, and helped shape the careers of, fellow artists like Henri Matisse and Georges Braque. After the 1930s, however, while Picasso himself was massively influential, he began to retreat into his own style and missed out on innovations by painters like Wassily Kandinsky.

Georges Braque intentionally picked a monochromatic palette for his cubist works to highlight the way he deconstructed his images into framents. With a monochromatic palette, the viewer would have to focus on Braque’s lines and geometric shapes, rather than be distracted by blocks of saturated color or sharp contrasts between light and dark elements.

As an example of cubism, this painting deeply engages with various forms of advanced mathematics, especially geometry. Cubism broke down forms to various geometric shapes, and rendered them in crystalline forms based on those shapes. Cubism could be taken to different lengths; certain works may have a difficult underlying shape to discern, but Gris' Portrait of Pablo Picasso surrounds a rather conventional human form with geometric shapes.

Figure: Portrait of Pablo Picasso by Juan Gris (1912)

Mondrian's use of geometric shapes and simple lines gave him the opportunity to create abstract art that nonetheless borrowed from familiar forms. The abstract expressionists, who flourished in the two decades after World War II in New York City, similarly used bold expressions of color and shapes to create abstract forms. Many of the abstract expressionists, most notably Mark Rothko, similarly used large blocks of color on sizable canvasses.

Image: Tableau I by Piet Mondrian (1921)

While Piet Mondrian, the creator of this painting, is well known as an abstract artist, he actually used essentially no abstract shapes in his paintings. Instead, Mondrian placed together thick black lines to create geometrical patterns, almost entirely in squares and rectangles, and then used large blocks of primary colors to create different images.

Image: Tableau I by Piet Mondrian (1921)

The letters “D BAL” are stenciled in the upper right corner of Portuguese, placed there by Georges Braque seemingly separately from the rest of the painting. As a cubist artist, Braque’s intention was to deconstruct the very concept of representation and clear imagery and present art in a new manner. Including the stencilled letters further reinforces the way in which the work of art intentionally separates itself from the traditional expectations of painting.

All of these are features of Rothko's work with rectangles except the notion that his works were monochromatic -in fact, the colors he employed varied over the course of his career, beginning as bright contrasting hues and moving toward darker maroons and blacks.

The De Stijl movement grew out of the work of a select group of Dutch modernists in the 1890s, who all focused on basic shapes and form over function in design. Piet Mondrian, whose Tableau I is displayed here, was the foremost painter of the De Stijl movement. Mondrian's chief visual markers—primary colors, simple geometric forms, and thick black lines—are all hallmarks of the De Stijl movement more generally.

Image: Tableau I by Piet Mondrian (1921)

Piet Mondrian was a part of the Dutch artistic movement known as De Stijl, Dutch for simply "The Style," a group of painters working before the First World War who attempted to distill art to its basic elements. Between the World Wars, Mondrian pushed ahead with similar work in Paris he termed "Neoplasticism." Mondrian's hallmarks from this period were thick black horizontal and vertical lines across a white canvas, while inside some of the resultant rectangular shapes were large blocks of primary colors.

Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937) was painted in response to the Fascist bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The black-and-white cubist painting uses animal imagery to denote brutality and darkness, as well as a women with a torch to symbolize freedom.