History of Modern Art with Klaire
Explore Modern Art history including Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and other key Modernist art movements. Join artist and educator Klaire Lockheart as she examines famous artists and artwork through a 21st century intersectional feminist lens. Whether you’re an artist, student, or patron of the arts, you will hopefully learn something new about Modern Art.
Cubism: Picasso was a Flapping A-hole
It it truly possible to separate art from the artist? What if their art is about the abuse they caused? Join Klaire Lockheart as she rails against misogynist Pablo Picasso, but stick around to learn about Modern Dakota art created Oscar Howe.
Artists and Artwork: Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso (The Young Women of Avignon, Guernica, Weeping Woman, Bust of a Woman), Georges Braque, Dora Maar, and Oscar Howe (Ghost Dance, Sioux Seed Player)
Additional Topics: Postimpressionism, Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography, Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azulay (Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism), Talking Heads, Olu Oguibe (“Into the ‘Heart of Darkness,’”), Cultural Appropriation, Iberian Sculptures, Hannah Gadsby (Nanette), Blue Period, University of South Dakota, Primitivism, Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, Domestic Abuse, Pigcasso, Shakeel Massey, Dakota Art, and Santa Fe Indian Art School
Artists and Artwork: Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso (The Young Women of Avignon, Guernica, Weeping Woman, Bust of a Woman), Georges Braque, Dora Maar, and Oscar Howe (Ghost Dance, Sioux Seed Player)
Additional Topics: Postimpressionism, Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography, Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azulay (Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism), Talking Heads, Olu Oguibe (“Into the ‘Heart of Darkness,’”), Cultural Appropriation, Iberian Sculptures, Hannah Gadsby (Nanette), Blue Period, University of South Dakota, Primitivism, Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, Domestic Abuse, Pigcasso, Shakeel Massey, Dakota Art, and Santa Fe Indian Art School
Transcript
Hello, my friends! Thank you for taking the time to listen to the History of Modern Art with Klaire. I’m your host Klaire Lockheart, and I’m pleased you’re going to join me for this intersectional feminist examination regarding the history of Cubism. Whether you’re an artist, student, or contemplating what to add to your art collection next, I hope you’ll enjoy this episode.
[Music]
Cubism is a popular category of Modern Art. Many people are familiar with it, even if they claim they don’t know anything about art at all. Cubism is easily identified as artwork that looks like it kind of represents a person or some objects, but the subjects are broken apart and rearranged in new and strange ways. Imagine a person shattered like a broken Rubik’s cube, and then the surfaces of the pieces were laid out flat, but all jumbled up. This is also the style where artists would depict people with two eyeballs on the same side of the head and body parts in the wrong spots. Cubists claimed that they were making art more real than anyone before them, and they wanted to show objects and models from multiple viewpoints at once.
Cubism had multiple influences, and many of the artists credited Postimpressionist Paul Cézanne, who made paintings that incorporated multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Cubists were also influenced by the vague notion of “African art,” and I wish I could provide more context but unfortunately I can’t find much more information than that. There isn’t a fantastic record that is readily available. I know that some of the Cubists visited the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography, but I wish I could find more specifics, such as the names of the African artists or at least the individual countries of origin. Africa is a vast continent, with many different cultures and endless varieties of art created over thousands of years. According to Ariella Aïsha Azulay in an interview she did with Hyperallergic, museums in Europe and the United States were created at this time as a result of imperialist looting and plundering. These objects and works of art were ripped from their original sources, and the people who stole and collected the objects didn’t document the names of the people who created everything. Some of this work was made at the same time as Modernist art was flourishing in the West, but unfortunately the names of the artists from Africa weren’t recorded. Azulay elaborates on this concept in her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. She wrote, “…the majority of Africans from whose material worlds these objects were plundered are still kept out.”
You may ask yourself, “Why does Klaire spend so much time addressing the unpleasant aspects of art history?” “And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’ And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house,’” But, instead of continuing to reference the Talking Heads at an inappropriate time, I want to share that it is important to include the controversial aspects of history. The history of Modern Art is full of exclusion, bias, and at times it is just unfair. When we illuminate the negative qualities we can learn from these mistakes, stop making them, and do better. I have grown weary of art historians and curators patting themselves on the backs for simply acknowledging that the Cubists were aware that artwork was made in Africa, but they don’t provide any context. The artists themselves probably didn’t know the exact sources they appropriated from anyway. In his essay “In the ‘Heart of Darkness,’” Olu Oguibe revealed, “The underlining necessity to consign the rest of humanity to antiquity and atrophy so as to cast the West in the light of progress and civilization has been sufficiently explored by scholars.” There is a long history of Western artists, collectors, and scholars viewing non-European art as “primitive” in order to declare themselves as superior. My understanding is that the Trocadéro Museum highlighted the otherness of other countries outside of Europe. I stumbled across a few photographs of the museum, and from what I could see the exhibitions appeared pretty insensitive and racist. Furthermore, these displays were meant to show extinct cultures, even though many of the objects on display were new. The Cubists treated Africa similar as to how the Orientalists viewed the Middle and Near East. They appropriated what they wanted, ripped imagery from various cultures without regard to its original context, and the final message was that they, the Modern European men artists, were the best compared to everyone else.
The Cubists were also influenced by Iberian sculptures. Ancient Iberians lived in contemporary Spain and Portugal before the Romans conquered the area about 2,000 years ago. This civilization is certainly out of my area of expertise, and so I tried to find examples of art from the Iberian Peninsula. When I checked the Met’s online collection for art from “Iberia,” I got only seven results. I would like to find resources about Iberian art that are independent of Cubism without excessive digging. This is a similar problem I had when trying to find art from Tahiti that didn’t mention Gauguin.
After the break, I will examine Pablo Picasso’s impact on Cubism.
[Break]
One of the most famous Cubist artists is, of course, Pablo Picasso. Even people who have never taken an art class will often recognize his name. He was incredibly famous during his lifetime, and his artwork currently sells for millions and millions of dollars. When I was taught about Picasso, my instructors always put him on a pedestal, and that is pretty common in the field of art education. Many teachers, artists, and historians will claim that Picasso was one of the best artists of the 20th century. Some will say that he was the best, most creative, artistic “genius” in the history of art! Everything he made was a masterpiece, and all artists should strive to be just like him. Elementary and middle school teachers love to put his quotes on their classroom walls or print his words on t-shirts. I have seen countless high school educators put his quotes in their email signatures. The never-ending praise of Picasso is ubiquitous; however, I must disclose that the more I learn about Picasso, the less I care for him or his work.
He is credited as being one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, but he treated women horribly and was abusive. I also highly doubt that art couldn’t have evolved or changed without him. There were plenty of other inventive artists that lived at the same time. Before I reveal any additional information about his contributions to Modernism, allow me to share this quote from Hannah Gadsby when she was told she had to consider Pablo Picasso’s work: “‘Separate the man from the art. You gotta learn to separate the man from the art. The art is important, not the artist.’ OK, let’s give it a go. How about you take Picasso’s name off his little paintings there and see how much his doodles are worth at auction? Nobody owns a circular lego nude. They own a Picasso.”
Before he contributed to the development of Cubism alongside Georges Braque, Picasso had to learn to become an artist. His father was an art professor, and so he had a nice advantage in his training. He first learned about art in the traditional Western academic way, but after he moved from Spain to Paris he began to emulate the Impressionists and Postimpressionists because these were still trendy styles in the early 20th century. Then, he began his Blue Period. When I first learned about Picasso, I was taught that he painted everything blue at this time because was sad after his friend died. I would like to note that Picasso’s friend died because he committed suicide after he tried to shoot a woman who didn’t want to marry him. Let me repeat that: Picasso’s friend tried to murder a woman because she rejected him, yet I was taught to feel bad for him and Picasso. The history of Western art is, unfortunately, a long visual record of men being entitled to women’s bodies and lives.
Anyway, allow me to fast forward past Picasso owning statues that were stolen from the Louvre, the accusation that he stole the Mona Lisa, the uncontrolled crying, temper tantrums, and denouncing his friends to get out of trouble, up to his creation of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or The Young Women of Avignon. This painting is eight feet tall, and it’s at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I saw it in person once, but it didn’t leave a lasting impression but I know I’m not the intended audience for it. I am about 100 years too late, plus I’m not a rich, privileged European heteronormative man, living in Paris, who likes to ogle women. Picasso made this oil painting in 1907 and it depicts five nude, fragmented women. They’re all sex workers, and despite many men artists before him acknowledging that brothels existed, this was still considered revolutionary and edgy at the time for some reason.
The women’s bodies are various shades and tints of pink, and their postures mimic the poses of odalisques and Venuses. The figure on the left is standing in profile, and so her body is turned sideways as she faces the center of the canvas. The next figure has her right hand behind her head with the elbow pointed upwards. Her distorted face has a profile nose, but she looks forward to engage the presumed male gaze. There’s a little bit of drapery on her left thigh. The next figure is in the center. Both of her hands are behind her head, and she has a profile nose on a frontal face too. I was once told that this figure is supposed to be reclining on a bed, but Picasso flipped the bed vertical so the viewer could see her and he could show off that he was so clever to include multiple viewpoints. At the bottom center there is a hint of a black outlined still life including what appears to be some grapes, a slice of melon, and a couple other blobs. This is Picasso’s reference to Cézanne’s still life paintings. There are two additional figures, and this is where things really start to get problematic. In the bottom right corner, there is a completely nude woman squatting with her back to the audience. She is looking over her left shoulder, and she is wearing Picasso’s interpretation of a generic African mask. In the top right corner, there is another nude woman who appears to be entering between curtains, and she also has Picasso’s attempt at representing a mask from Africa. I am not an expert in African art, but I did get to work with the University of South Dakota’s mask collection several years ago, and I know that many cultures have spiritual significance tied to creating and wearing masks. Picasso was praised for being so creative and innovative to place these women in a brothel and to have two of them appear with faces that remind the viewer of African masks, but I will argue that this is as disrespectful as the white ladies who go to music festivals and wear Native American war bonnets because they think it looks cool.
The Young Women of Avignon is technically not a Cubist work of art, but it does lead to the development of Cubism. This work is sometimes categorized as Primitivism, which was an art movement where Europeans were influenced by cultures outside of Europe. The Primitivist artists saw the world through a colonialist lens, and their interpretations of artwork from Africa was overwhelmingly reductive and disrespectful. Primitivism is a big ole’ pile of cultural appropriation, and I struggle to say anything positive about this movement.
[Music]
Cubism began in 1909, but there are different subcategories within this genre. This is similar to how Pointillism is a specific type of Postimpressionism. Analytic Cubic came first, and it occurred from 1909-11. The common narrative about the invention of Cubism is that artistic “geniuses,” such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, were the first artists in the history of the world to discover that the canvas was a flat surface. They claimed that throughout the history of art, artists were trying to fool viewers into thinking what they illustrated was real. Apparently people from the Renaissance forward were tricked by these dastardly artists who would make the the viewers believe they were looking through a window at a scene. However, the Cubists arrived just in time to save the day and show everyone Truth with a capital “T.” Picasso and Braque thought that if they took a subject, fragmented all the surfaces, and then showed the subject from multiple angles and viewpoints simultaneously, this would be the truest representation of the world around them. This would provide a clarity that humanity didn’t even know it needed. So, Picasso, Braque, and other Cubists made neutral colored paintings that show hints and fragments of subjects that overlap and mix with other objects. According to the Cubism origin story, this was apparently the best representation of the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface ever made.
I am going to take a moment to reassure you that that if you have a hard time grappling with Analytic Cubism, it’s okay. I promise. When I was first taught about Cubism, I was made to feel that if I didn’t instantly believe that each and every Cubist canvas was a masterpiece that brought clarity and truth the entire world, then I was stupid. If I couldn’t spend hours transfixed by splintered violins and didn’t see the universal appeal of fragmented muddy portraits, then I was hopelessly uncreative and I needed to spend more time reading, studying, and staring until I had a magical epiphany so I could suddenly agree with everyone else. Despite the years I have devoted to learning about Cubism and Modernism in general, I never had a transcendental experience in front of a Cubist work of art. I don’t want to discourage you from digging deeper and exploring this work on your own, but I want you to know that you don’t have to love and adore every work of art that is in a museum or a book. If you don’t understand it on your first encounter, that is completely normal. If you still can’t tell exactly what the artist was trying to communicate even after years of study and contemplation, that is also okay. You are not stupid. The premise that Modernism is universal and accessible to all is false. On the other hand, if you are a person who automatically connects with Analytic Cubism, then that perfectly fine too! Your personal experience and connection with artwork is meaningful.
Synthetic Cubism arose immediately after Analytic Cubism ended. It lasted from 1912-14. This is when the Cubists claimed they invented collage. Instead of taking the time to render a newspaper in a still life, for example, they would simply glue an actual newspaper to the composition. Picasso and Braque are often credited as the inventors of collage, which is the technique of gluing paper or other 2D objects to the surface of a work of art. However, I must mention that artists from China and Japan made collages long before the Cubists. Regardless, Synthetic Cubism included collage. It’s also a little easier to see what the artists were trying to depict; the shapes were simpler, and the artists used more colors.
World War I coincided with the end of Synthetic Cubism, but many Cubist artists continued to make Cubist artwork afterwards throughout their careers. It’s just like the Impressionists who continued to draw, paint, and print in their signature style after Impressionism technically ended in 1886 with the last Impressionist exhibition. Many of the most familiar Cubist artworks were made after World War I. Picasso created Guernica in 1937. This monochromatic painting is about 25.5 feet wide, and it depicts the horrible aftermath of when the Germans bombed the Spanish city of Guernica. While I will publicly admit that I do not like Picasso as a human being, at least he didn’t like nazis. Now, I think the bar is pretty low for a person when their most admiral quality is that they don’t like nazis, but at least Picasso cleared that one. Not all prominent Modern Artists can make that claim.
Picasso also painted Weeping Woman in 1937. This portrait of photographer Dora Maar is an archetypical Cubist painting. This image is about 2 feet tall, and it is housed at the Tate in London. The canvas is filled with the head of a woman. The heavy black outline indicates the profile of a woman, with her green and violet nose pointing to the right side of the canvas. She has two horizontal oval eyes on the same side of her head, and the outer edges of her eyes are outlined with a flurry of furry eyelashes. Her skin is various tones of green and yellow. The center of the canvas is white, as though the model is dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. There appears to be white fingers at the top edges of the angular white shape, but there are green hands at the bottom. It’s as though she is wiping tears from her eyes so quickly, the viewer can see multiple hands. Her mouth is open in a grimace, and she bares her teeth. The model is wearing an angular shaped hat, she has stringy cool colored hair outlined in black, and the background in made up of yellow and gold vertical bands. This painting clearly shows a distraught woman.
Picasso was lauded as a “genius” and I purposefully use a sarcastic emphasis here. He was considered so creative because his paintings show emotion; however, I find it incredibly important to point out that Picasso was horribly abusive and tormented the women in his life. I don’t want to list out all his atrocities, but I must share that he was terrible to the model of Weeping Woman. He proclaimed Dora Maar was his muse, physically abused her, and then illustrated her suffering. I do not think this is creative. I do not think this is the work of a genius. When I look at Picasso’s weeping women, all I can see are domestic abuse victims. Picasso himself stated, “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something.” These are his depictions of the women that he abused. He called them his muses, and he exploited their misery for his fame and fortune. Picasso beat Dora Maar unconscious at least twice. I know that some people can separate art from the artist, but this is a time when I cannot.
I honestly don’t understand why Picasso is still held on a pedestal as an example of what artists should aspire to be. I do not understand that how in this day and age teachers will plaster their walls with his quotes, his artwork that depicts the suffering of his victims, and try to use him as inspiration. Domestic abuse is wrong. This shouldn’t be a radical statement. I feel that it is irresponsible and dangerous to teach children, especially girls, that Picasso is the best artist in the world. Even if teachers ignore or omit his misogyny, how will this influence students when they grow up and learn about his biography? How will this influence their self-worth?
When I first saw Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, I was so relieved to see someone finally publicly state that they did not care for Picasso. Not appreciating Picasso is taboo, and I was made to feel like an uniformed bumpkin because I did not see the artistic merit of a man’s depictions of the trauma his abuse caused. Gadsby stated, “I hate Picasso, and you can’t make me like him. I know I should be more generous about him too, because he suffered a mental illness. But nobody knows that, because it doesn’t fit with his mythology. Picasso is sold to us as this passionate, tormented, genius, man-ball-sack. But Picasso suffered the mental illness…of misogyny.” Picasso himself once stated, “Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I'd be rid of them. They wouldn't be around to complicate my existence. Maybe, that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.”
I hate giving so much time to this abusive, disrespectful person, but I feel it is necessary to counterbalance the mythology that he was amazing and his work should continued to be honored as relics. My hope is that one day you will become fabulously wealthy, and you’ll find yourself at a Christie’s auction because you have hundreds of million of dollars just burning a hole in your pocket and you need to buy some art. The person sitting next to you notices that there is a painting made by Picasso up for sale, and they say they plan to bid on it. You’ll scoff, raise your eyebrows, and ask, “You want to own something by Picasso? When he was 45 and married, he had an affair with a 17 year old girl! Don’t you know he beat up women? He once burned a model’s face with a cigarette!” You’ll stare that person down until they mumble something about how you misunderstood them, and they want to buy something from Pigcasso, you know, that pig that someone trained to hold a paintbrush.
The last painting by Picasso I want to discuss is Bust of a Woman from 1944. This oil painting is a little over 30 inches tall, and it was on display at the Tate. It’s another portrait of Dora Maar. She has a green, scribbly body, which kind of looks like her left shoulder is closer to the viewer. It appears that her right breast, the one that is farther away, is much larger than the other one. There is a chair behind her body, but it kind of overlaps a yellow smear that is probably supposed to be her hair. Her vertical, oblong face is white. Picasso made her sharp, rhombus-like nose point to the left. Her nostrils are on the tip of her nose. Her mouth points to the right. Her eyes are on where her forehead would probably be, with her right eye higher than her left. She has one big pink circle on her left cheek. It kind of looks as though she has a giant baseball cap on, and the brim points to the right side of the composition. There is one green and one yellow semicircle on top of the head too. The top half of the background has vertical violet lines on a beige background. The bottom half is filled with sloppy red horizontal lines.
The reason I bring up this painting is because near the end of 2019, a man named Shakeel Massey punched a hole in it. He said that his act was a performance. In 2020, he was sentenced to serve 18 months in jail because the judge thought Massey was only seeking attention. The judge wanted to deter other people from attacking artwork. What bothers me the most about this entire situation is that this young man was punished more harshly for hitting a painting of Dora Maar than Picasso was ever punished for assaulting the real woman. It makes me sick that we as a society apparently value a painting of a victim created by an abuser over the actual person who suffered the abuse. While I am not going to say you should go out and vandalize artwork by Picasso, I really think we need to reconsider the value placed on his paintings and why the women he tormented weren’t respected. Pablo Picasso himself declared, “It’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is.” Picasso did make Cubist paintings, but that shouldn’t count according to him. Who he was should be his legacy. Picasso was a horribly abusive, misogynistic, giant flapping a-hole. Once again, I cannot look at his paintings of weeping women without seeing them as memorials for the violence he caused.
Please join me after the break to learn about an artist that did not care to be compared to Pablo Picasso.
[Break]
Unfortunately, many people compare other artists to Picasso because he is the most successful artist they can reference. Not all artists enjoy this comparison. Oscar Howe was an artist who created artwork with geometric shapes that didn’t look like the physical world, but he did not consider himself a Cubist. He rejected the Neo-Cubist label. He was assertive that his art was Dakota art, not Cubist art. Oscar Howe’s background was vastly different from Picasso’s and his artwork has noticeable differences. Howe was Yanktonai Dakota, and he was born into poverty in South Dakota when Picasso was already over 30 years old. Howe was born after the Synthetic Cubism movement ended. Instead of receiving instruction from an art professor father like Picasso, Howe was sent to the Pierre Indian School. These boarding schools were notoriously terrible to their Indigenous students, and the abuse and trauma the students endured was unacceptable.
When he was 19, Oscar Howe went to the Santa Fe Indian Art School, where the program was run by a white woman who was originally from Kansas. The students never actually received art lessons because the teacher thought that the Native American students were somehow magic and could learn how to paint without instruction. Howe stated, “There were no lectures at all on anything, not even hints of instructions. We weren’t allowed to do research.” The students were expected to emulate the “studio style,” which was also called “traditional Indian painting” even though it was made with materials that were not part of any historic Indigenous art practice, and the style was a mishmash of what the teacher thought looked “traditional.” Regardless of what background the students had or where they grew up, they were all expected to create this same style of painting. Despite all of these challenges, Howe learned how to paint, and he was quite skilled because he persevered. He was drafted in World War II, and after he returned to the United States, he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees thanks to the GI Bill. He then taught art at the University of South Dakota while still creating his own artwork. Oscar Howe’s artwork was Modern with a capital “M,” but it was not Cubist. Cubism developed in a city that had hundreds of years of tradition in oil painting, which lead to the development of Modern Art. Even though Native American artists have a long history of art making too, the materials and goals differed. Indigenous artists were first introduced to creating art with watercolors and ink on paper at the end of the 19th century. Where artists lived, their experiences, and their cultural history does influence the art they create.
Howe made many works of art during his career, and he created colorful, geometric, and swirling paintings in the 1950s-70s. I have seen a few of his pieces in person, and even though many big museums own his work, the information about his artwork isn’t easily accessible nor is it highlighted in their collections. The last painting I saw by Howe in person is called Ghost Dance, and I saw it at the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls, but unfortunately they do not have their permanent collection available on their website. The best way to see his art online is through the University of South Dakota Art Galleries website where they sell limited reproductions of his work.
In 1974, Oscar Howe created Sioux Seed Player with casein on paper. Casein is kind of similar to watercolor paint, but it has a milk-based protein. This horizontal composition includes swirls of reds, blues, and yellows. At the center of the primary color painting, there is a head of a woman who is looking down at a flat surface made of more spirals. Her black hair is parted down the center. Even though her body is not depicted in a representational style, it appears to me that she is crouched down on the floor. Her right hand comes forward out of large yellow oval with a blue cuff around her wrist. She holds a small red triangle-like shape, and there are a few small dots underneath the tool she holds. The surface where she is working has a dull red swoop that almost creates a horizontal ellipse. There is a yellow oval in the center, and a small shape that appears like a little bowl with a grey cast shadow. This surface has many tiny dots. The swirls that encircle the entire canvas also include many small spots near the edges of the melting, organic shapes.
I can see why some people are tempted to compare Oscar Howe to Pablo Picasso, but Howe was not a Cubist. Unfortunately, many people do not have enough opportunities to learn about art and art history in their schools and communities, and this lack of knowledge inhibits a deeper understanding of art and artists. I completely understand why Oscar Howe did not like to be compared to Picasso. While Howe created figures that have abstracted bodies, it is critical to notice that the faces he created are clearly identifiable. His craftsmanship was impeccable; the shapes are clean and crisp. The paint on the surfaces of his work is flat, and the colors appear solid. Additionally, the themes in his work differs vastly from what the Cubists created.
Overall, not all artwork that is colorful with abstracted figures is considered Cubism. Remember that Cubism was a specific art movement that took place in Paris in the early 20th century. Analytic Cubism was made of fragments of neutral colored paint, and it lasted from 1909-11. This was when Braque, Picasso, and other Cubists thought they were the first people on Earth to discover that stretched canvas was two dimensional. Synthetic Cubism began in 1912 and ended in 1914, and the artists created collages, used colors, and their subjects became easier to identify. After 1915, some of these founding members of the Cubism movement continued to paint in the Cubist style throughout their lives.
[Music]
Thank you for joining me to learn about Cubism, and I hope you’ll return next time to cover Suprematism. To find transcripts of this podcast plus my resources, visit klairelockheart.com and then go to the “Media” tab. That’s K-L-A-I-R-E-L-O-C-K-H-E-A-R-T dot com. Find me on Instagram @klairelockheart to check out my artwork and shenanigans, or you can follow me on Facebook by searching for Klaire A. Lockheart.
The History of Modern Art with Klaire was created by me, Klaire Lockheart. This program was recorded with equipment provided by the amazing Aaron C. Packard of Aaron C. Packard Productions. Check out his artwork at aaronpackard.com, that’s A-A-R-O-N-P-A-C-K-A-R-D dot com. I sincerely appreciate your support and positive feedback, and I adore those of who have subscribed to this podcast! Thank you very much! You’re awesome!
[Music]
Cubism is a popular category of Modern Art. Many people are familiar with it, even if they claim they don’t know anything about art at all. Cubism is easily identified as artwork that looks like it kind of represents a person or some objects, but the subjects are broken apart and rearranged in new and strange ways. Imagine a person shattered like a broken Rubik’s cube, and then the surfaces of the pieces were laid out flat, but all jumbled up. This is also the style where artists would depict people with two eyeballs on the same side of the head and body parts in the wrong spots. Cubists claimed that they were making art more real than anyone before them, and they wanted to show objects and models from multiple viewpoints at once.
Cubism had multiple influences, and many of the artists credited Postimpressionist Paul Cézanne, who made paintings that incorporated multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Cubists were also influenced by the vague notion of “African art,” and I wish I could provide more context but unfortunately I can’t find much more information than that. There isn’t a fantastic record that is readily available. I know that some of the Cubists visited the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography, but I wish I could find more specifics, such as the names of the African artists or at least the individual countries of origin. Africa is a vast continent, with many different cultures and endless varieties of art created over thousands of years. According to Ariella Aïsha Azulay in an interview she did with Hyperallergic, museums in Europe and the United States were created at this time as a result of imperialist looting and plundering. These objects and works of art were ripped from their original sources, and the people who stole and collected the objects didn’t document the names of the people who created everything. Some of this work was made at the same time as Modernist art was flourishing in the West, but unfortunately the names of the artists from Africa weren’t recorded. Azulay elaborates on this concept in her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. She wrote, “…the majority of Africans from whose material worlds these objects were plundered are still kept out.”
You may ask yourself, “Why does Klaire spend so much time addressing the unpleasant aspects of art history?” “And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’ And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house,’” But, instead of continuing to reference the Talking Heads at an inappropriate time, I want to share that it is important to include the controversial aspects of history. The history of Modern Art is full of exclusion, bias, and at times it is just unfair. When we illuminate the negative qualities we can learn from these mistakes, stop making them, and do better. I have grown weary of art historians and curators patting themselves on the backs for simply acknowledging that the Cubists were aware that artwork was made in Africa, but they don’t provide any context. The artists themselves probably didn’t know the exact sources they appropriated from anyway. In his essay “In the ‘Heart of Darkness,’” Olu Oguibe revealed, “The underlining necessity to consign the rest of humanity to antiquity and atrophy so as to cast the West in the light of progress and civilization has been sufficiently explored by scholars.” There is a long history of Western artists, collectors, and scholars viewing non-European art as “primitive” in order to declare themselves as superior. My understanding is that the Trocadéro Museum highlighted the otherness of other countries outside of Europe. I stumbled across a few photographs of the museum, and from what I could see the exhibitions appeared pretty insensitive and racist. Furthermore, these displays were meant to show extinct cultures, even though many of the objects on display were new. The Cubists treated Africa similar as to how the Orientalists viewed the Middle and Near East. They appropriated what they wanted, ripped imagery from various cultures without regard to its original context, and the final message was that they, the Modern European men artists, were the best compared to everyone else.
The Cubists were also influenced by Iberian sculptures. Ancient Iberians lived in contemporary Spain and Portugal before the Romans conquered the area about 2,000 years ago. This civilization is certainly out of my area of expertise, and so I tried to find examples of art from the Iberian Peninsula. When I checked the Met’s online collection for art from “Iberia,” I got only seven results. I would like to find resources about Iberian art that are independent of Cubism without excessive digging. This is a similar problem I had when trying to find art from Tahiti that didn’t mention Gauguin.
After the break, I will examine Pablo Picasso’s impact on Cubism.
[Break]
One of the most famous Cubist artists is, of course, Pablo Picasso. Even people who have never taken an art class will often recognize his name. He was incredibly famous during his lifetime, and his artwork currently sells for millions and millions of dollars. When I was taught about Picasso, my instructors always put him on a pedestal, and that is pretty common in the field of art education. Many teachers, artists, and historians will claim that Picasso was one of the best artists of the 20th century. Some will say that he was the best, most creative, artistic “genius” in the history of art! Everything he made was a masterpiece, and all artists should strive to be just like him. Elementary and middle school teachers love to put his quotes on their classroom walls or print his words on t-shirts. I have seen countless high school educators put his quotes in their email signatures. The never-ending praise of Picasso is ubiquitous; however, I must disclose that the more I learn about Picasso, the less I care for him or his work.
He is credited as being one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, but he treated women horribly and was abusive. I also highly doubt that art couldn’t have evolved or changed without him. There were plenty of other inventive artists that lived at the same time. Before I reveal any additional information about his contributions to Modernism, allow me to share this quote from Hannah Gadsby when she was told she had to consider Pablo Picasso’s work: “‘Separate the man from the art. You gotta learn to separate the man from the art. The art is important, not the artist.’ OK, let’s give it a go. How about you take Picasso’s name off his little paintings there and see how much his doodles are worth at auction? Nobody owns a circular lego nude. They own a Picasso.”
Before he contributed to the development of Cubism alongside Georges Braque, Picasso had to learn to become an artist. His father was an art professor, and so he had a nice advantage in his training. He first learned about art in the traditional Western academic way, but after he moved from Spain to Paris he began to emulate the Impressionists and Postimpressionists because these were still trendy styles in the early 20th century. Then, he began his Blue Period. When I first learned about Picasso, I was taught that he painted everything blue at this time because was sad after his friend died. I would like to note that Picasso’s friend died because he committed suicide after he tried to shoot a woman who didn’t want to marry him. Let me repeat that: Picasso’s friend tried to murder a woman because she rejected him, yet I was taught to feel bad for him and Picasso. The history of Western art is, unfortunately, a long visual record of men being entitled to women’s bodies and lives.
Anyway, allow me to fast forward past Picasso owning statues that were stolen from the Louvre, the accusation that he stole the Mona Lisa, the uncontrolled crying, temper tantrums, and denouncing his friends to get out of trouble, up to his creation of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or The Young Women of Avignon. This painting is eight feet tall, and it’s at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I saw it in person once, but it didn’t leave a lasting impression but I know I’m not the intended audience for it. I am about 100 years too late, plus I’m not a rich, privileged European heteronormative man, living in Paris, who likes to ogle women. Picasso made this oil painting in 1907 and it depicts five nude, fragmented women. They’re all sex workers, and despite many men artists before him acknowledging that brothels existed, this was still considered revolutionary and edgy at the time for some reason.
The women’s bodies are various shades and tints of pink, and their postures mimic the poses of odalisques and Venuses. The figure on the left is standing in profile, and so her body is turned sideways as she faces the center of the canvas. The next figure has her right hand behind her head with the elbow pointed upwards. Her distorted face has a profile nose, but she looks forward to engage the presumed male gaze. There’s a little bit of drapery on her left thigh. The next figure is in the center. Both of her hands are behind her head, and she has a profile nose on a frontal face too. I was once told that this figure is supposed to be reclining on a bed, but Picasso flipped the bed vertical so the viewer could see her and he could show off that he was so clever to include multiple viewpoints. At the bottom center there is a hint of a black outlined still life including what appears to be some grapes, a slice of melon, and a couple other blobs. This is Picasso’s reference to Cézanne’s still life paintings. There are two additional figures, and this is where things really start to get problematic. In the bottom right corner, there is a completely nude woman squatting with her back to the audience. She is looking over her left shoulder, and she is wearing Picasso’s interpretation of a generic African mask. In the top right corner, there is another nude woman who appears to be entering between curtains, and she also has Picasso’s attempt at representing a mask from Africa. I am not an expert in African art, but I did get to work with the University of South Dakota’s mask collection several years ago, and I know that many cultures have spiritual significance tied to creating and wearing masks. Picasso was praised for being so creative and innovative to place these women in a brothel and to have two of them appear with faces that remind the viewer of African masks, but I will argue that this is as disrespectful as the white ladies who go to music festivals and wear Native American war bonnets because they think it looks cool.
The Young Women of Avignon is technically not a Cubist work of art, but it does lead to the development of Cubism. This work is sometimes categorized as Primitivism, which was an art movement where Europeans were influenced by cultures outside of Europe. The Primitivist artists saw the world through a colonialist lens, and their interpretations of artwork from Africa was overwhelmingly reductive and disrespectful. Primitivism is a big ole’ pile of cultural appropriation, and I struggle to say anything positive about this movement.
[Music]
Cubism began in 1909, but there are different subcategories within this genre. This is similar to how Pointillism is a specific type of Postimpressionism. Analytic Cubic came first, and it occurred from 1909-11. The common narrative about the invention of Cubism is that artistic “geniuses,” such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, were the first artists in the history of the world to discover that the canvas was a flat surface. They claimed that throughout the history of art, artists were trying to fool viewers into thinking what they illustrated was real. Apparently people from the Renaissance forward were tricked by these dastardly artists who would make the the viewers believe they were looking through a window at a scene. However, the Cubists arrived just in time to save the day and show everyone Truth with a capital “T.” Picasso and Braque thought that if they took a subject, fragmented all the surfaces, and then showed the subject from multiple angles and viewpoints simultaneously, this would be the truest representation of the world around them. This would provide a clarity that humanity didn’t even know it needed. So, Picasso, Braque, and other Cubists made neutral colored paintings that show hints and fragments of subjects that overlap and mix with other objects. According to the Cubism origin story, this was apparently the best representation of the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface ever made.
I am going to take a moment to reassure you that that if you have a hard time grappling with Analytic Cubism, it’s okay. I promise. When I was first taught about Cubism, I was made to feel that if I didn’t instantly believe that each and every Cubist canvas was a masterpiece that brought clarity and truth the entire world, then I was stupid. If I couldn’t spend hours transfixed by splintered violins and didn’t see the universal appeal of fragmented muddy portraits, then I was hopelessly uncreative and I needed to spend more time reading, studying, and staring until I had a magical epiphany so I could suddenly agree with everyone else. Despite the years I have devoted to learning about Cubism and Modernism in general, I never had a transcendental experience in front of a Cubist work of art. I don’t want to discourage you from digging deeper and exploring this work on your own, but I want you to know that you don’t have to love and adore every work of art that is in a museum or a book. If you don’t understand it on your first encounter, that is completely normal. If you still can’t tell exactly what the artist was trying to communicate even after years of study and contemplation, that is also okay. You are not stupid. The premise that Modernism is universal and accessible to all is false. On the other hand, if you are a person who automatically connects with Analytic Cubism, then that perfectly fine too! Your personal experience and connection with artwork is meaningful.
Synthetic Cubism arose immediately after Analytic Cubism ended. It lasted from 1912-14. This is when the Cubists claimed they invented collage. Instead of taking the time to render a newspaper in a still life, for example, they would simply glue an actual newspaper to the composition. Picasso and Braque are often credited as the inventors of collage, which is the technique of gluing paper or other 2D objects to the surface of a work of art. However, I must mention that artists from China and Japan made collages long before the Cubists. Regardless, Synthetic Cubism included collage. It’s also a little easier to see what the artists were trying to depict; the shapes were simpler, and the artists used more colors.
World War I coincided with the end of Synthetic Cubism, but many Cubist artists continued to make Cubist artwork afterwards throughout their careers. It’s just like the Impressionists who continued to draw, paint, and print in their signature style after Impressionism technically ended in 1886 with the last Impressionist exhibition. Many of the most familiar Cubist artworks were made after World War I. Picasso created Guernica in 1937. This monochromatic painting is about 25.5 feet wide, and it depicts the horrible aftermath of when the Germans bombed the Spanish city of Guernica. While I will publicly admit that I do not like Picasso as a human being, at least he didn’t like nazis. Now, I think the bar is pretty low for a person when their most admiral quality is that they don’t like nazis, but at least Picasso cleared that one. Not all prominent Modern Artists can make that claim.
Picasso also painted Weeping Woman in 1937. This portrait of photographer Dora Maar is an archetypical Cubist painting. This image is about 2 feet tall, and it is housed at the Tate in London. The canvas is filled with the head of a woman. The heavy black outline indicates the profile of a woman, with her green and violet nose pointing to the right side of the canvas. She has two horizontal oval eyes on the same side of her head, and the outer edges of her eyes are outlined with a flurry of furry eyelashes. Her skin is various tones of green and yellow. The center of the canvas is white, as though the model is dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. There appears to be white fingers at the top edges of the angular white shape, but there are green hands at the bottom. It’s as though she is wiping tears from her eyes so quickly, the viewer can see multiple hands. Her mouth is open in a grimace, and she bares her teeth. The model is wearing an angular shaped hat, she has stringy cool colored hair outlined in black, and the background in made up of yellow and gold vertical bands. This painting clearly shows a distraught woman.
Picasso was lauded as a “genius” and I purposefully use a sarcastic emphasis here. He was considered so creative because his paintings show emotion; however, I find it incredibly important to point out that Picasso was horribly abusive and tormented the women in his life. I don’t want to list out all his atrocities, but I must share that he was terrible to the model of Weeping Woman. He proclaimed Dora Maar was his muse, physically abused her, and then illustrated her suffering. I do not think this is creative. I do not think this is the work of a genius. When I look at Picasso’s weeping women, all I can see are domestic abuse victims. Picasso himself stated, “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something.” These are his depictions of the women that he abused. He called them his muses, and he exploited their misery for his fame and fortune. Picasso beat Dora Maar unconscious at least twice. I know that some people can separate art from the artist, but this is a time when I cannot.
I honestly don’t understand why Picasso is still held on a pedestal as an example of what artists should aspire to be. I do not understand that how in this day and age teachers will plaster their walls with his quotes, his artwork that depicts the suffering of his victims, and try to use him as inspiration. Domestic abuse is wrong. This shouldn’t be a radical statement. I feel that it is irresponsible and dangerous to teach children, especially girls, that Picasso is the best artist in the world. Even if teachers ignore or omit his misogyny, how will this influence students when they grow up and learn about his biography? How will this influence their self-worth?
When I first saw Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, I was so relieved to see someone finally publicly state that they did not care for Picasso. Not appreciating Picasso is taboo, and I was made to feel like an uniformed bumpkin because I did not see the artistic merit of a man’s depictions of the trauma his abuse caused. Gadsby stated, “I hate Picasso, and you can’t make me like him. I know I should be more generous about him too, because he suffered a mental illness. But nobody knows that, because it doesn’t fit with his mythology. Picasso is sold to us as this passionate, tormented, genius, man-ball-sack. But Picasso suffered the mental illness…of misogyny.” Picasso himself once stated, “Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I'd be rid of them. They wouldn't be around to complicate my existence. Maybe, that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.”
I hate giving so much time to this abusive, disrespectful person, but I feel it is necessary to counterbalance the mythology that he was amazing and his work should continued to be honored as relics. My hope is that one day you will become fabulously wealthy, and you’ll find yourself at a Christie’s auction because you have hundreds of million of dollars just burning a hole in your pocket and you need to buy some art. The person sitting next to you notices that there is a painting made by Picasso up for sale, and they say they plan to bid on it. You’ll scoff, raise your eyebrows, and ask, “You want to own something by Picasso? When he was 45 and married, he had an affair with a 17 year old girl! Don’t you know he beat up women? He once burned a model’s face with a cigarette!” You’ll stare that person down until they mumble something about how you misunderstood them, and they want to buy something from Pigcasso, you know, that pig that someone trained to hold a paintbrush.
The last painting by Picasso I want to discuss is Bust of a Woman from 1944. This oil painting is a little over 30 inches tall, and it was on display at the Tate. It’s another portrait of Dora Maar. She has a green, scribbly body, which kind of looks like her left shoulder is closer to the viewer. It appears that her right breast, the one that is farther away, is much larger than the other one. There is a chair behind her body, but it kind of overlaps a yellow smear that is probably supposed to be her hair. Her vertical, oblong face is white. Picasso made her sharp, rhombus-like nose point to the left. Her nostrils are on the tip of her nose. Her mouth points to the right. Her eyes are on where her forehead would probably be, with her right eye higher than her left. She has one big pink circle on her left cheek. It kind of looks as though she has a giant baseball cap on, and the brim points to the right side of the composition. There is one green and one yellow semicircle on top of the head too. The top half of the background has vertical violet lines on a beige background. The bottom half is filled with sloppy red horizontal lines.
The reason I bring up this painting is because near the end of 2019, a man named Shakeel Massey punched a hole in it. He said that his act was a performance. In 2020, he was sentenced to serve 18 months in jail because the judge thought Massey was only seeking attention. The judge wanted to deter other people from attacking artwork. What bothers me the most about this entire situation is that this young man was punished more harshly for hitting a painting of Dora Maar than Picasso was ever punished for assaulting the real woman. It makes me sick that we as a society apparently value a painting of a victim created by an abuser over the actual person who suffered the abuse. While I am not going to say you should go out and vandalize artwork by Picasso, I really think we need to reconsider the value placed on his paintings and why the women he tormented weren’t respected. Pablo Picasso himself declared, “It’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is.” Picasso did make Cubist paintings, but that shouldn’t count according to him. Who he was should be his legacy. Picasso was a horribly abusive, misogynistic, giant flapping a-hole. Once again, I cannot look at his paintings of weeping women without seeing them as memorials for the violence he caused.
Please join me after the break to learn about an artist that did not care to be compared to Pablo Picasso.
[Break]
Unfortunately, many people compare other artists to Picasso because he is the most successful artist they can reference. Not all artists enjoy this comparison. Oscar Howe was an artist who created artwork with geometric shapes that didn’t look like the physical world, but he did not consider himself a Cubist. He rejected the Neo-Cubist label. He was assertive that his art was Dakota art, not Cubist art. Oscar Howe’s background was vastly different from Picasso’s and his artwork has noticeable differences. Howe was Yanktonai Dakota, and he was born into poverty in South Dakota when Picasso was already over 30 years old. Howe was born after the Synthetic Cubism movement ended. Instead of receiving instruction from an art professor father like Picasso, Howe was sent to the Pierre Indian School. These boarding schools were notoriously terrible to their Indigenous students, and the abuse and trauma the students endured was unacceptable.
When he was 19, Oscar Howe went to the Santa Fe Indian Art School, where the program was run by a white woman who was originally from Kansas. The students never actually received art lessons because the teacher thought that the Native American students were somehow magic and could learn how to paint without instruction. Howe stated, “There were no lectures at all on anything, not even hints of instructions. We weren’t allowed to do research.” The students were expected to emulate the “studio style,” which was also called “traditional Indian painting” even though it was made with materials that were not part of any historic Indigenous art practice, and the style was a mishmash of what the teacher thought looked “traditional.” Regardless of what background the students had or where they grew up, they were all expected to create this same style of painting. Despite all of these challenges, Howe learned how to paint, and he was quite skilled because he persevered. He was drafted in World War II, and after he returned to the United States, he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees thanks to the GI Bill. He then taught art at the University of South Dakota while still creating his own artwork. Oscar Howe’s artwork was Modern with a capital “M,” but it was not Cubist. Cubism developed in a city that had hundreds of years of tradition in oil painting, which lead to the development of Modern Art. Even though Native American artists have a long history of art making too, the materials and goals differed. Indigenous artists were first introduced to creating art with watercolors and ink on paper at the end of the 19th century. Where artists lived, their experiences, and their cultural history does influence the art they create.
Howe made many works of art during his career, and he created colorful, geometric, and swirling paintings in the 1950s-70s. I have seen a few of his pieces in person, and even though many big museums own his work, the information about his artwork isn’t easily accessible nor is it highlighted in their collections. The last painting I saw by Howe in person is called Ghost Dance, and I saw it at the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls, but unfortunately they do not have their permanent collection available on their website. The best way to see his art online is through the University of South Dakota Art Galleries website where they sell limited reproductions of his work.
In 1974, Oscar Howe created Sioux Seed Player with casein on paper. Casein is kind of similar to watercolor paint, but it has a milk-based protein. This horizontal composition includes swirls of reds, blues, and yellows. At the center of the primary color painting, there is a head of a woman who is looking down at a flat surface made of more spirals. Her black hair is parted down the center. Even though her body is not depicted in a representational style, it appears to me that she is crouched down on the floor. Her right hand comes forward out of large yellow oval with a blue cuff around her wrist. She holds a small red triangle-like shape, and there are a few small dots underneath the tool she holds. The surface where she is working has a dull red swoop that almost creates a horizontal ellipse. There is a yellow oval in the center, and a small shape that appears like a little bowl with a grey cast shadow. This surface has many tiny dots. The swirls that encircle the entire canvas also include many small spots near the edges of the melting, organic shapes.
I can see why some people are tempted to compare Oscar Howe to Pablo Picasso, but Howe was not a Cubist. Unfortunately, many people do not have enough opportunities to learn about art and art history in their schools and communities, and this lack of knowledge inhibits a deeper understanding of art and artists. I completely understand why Oscar Howe did not like to be compared to Picasso. While Howe created figures that have abstracted bodies, it is critical to notice that the faces he created are clearly identifiable. His craftsmanship was impeccable; the shapes are clean and crisp. The paint on the surfaces of his work is flat, and the colors appear solid. Additionally, the themes in his work differs vastly from what the Cubists created.
Overall, not all artwork that is colorful with abstracted figures is considered Cubism. Remember that Cubism was a specific art movement that took place in Paris in the early 20th century. Analytic Cubism was made of fragments of neutral colored paint, and it lasted from 1909-11. This was when Braque, Picasso, and other Cubists thought they were the first people on Earth to discover that stretched canvas was two dimensional. Synthetic Cubism began in 1912 and ended in 1914, and the artists created collages, used colors, and their subjects became easier to identify. After 1915, some of these founding members of the Cubism movement continued to paint in the Cubist style throughout their lives.
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Thank you for joining me to learn about Cubism, and I hope you’ll return next time to cover Suprematism. To find transcripts of this podcast plus my resources, visit klairelockheart.com and then go to the “Media” tab. That’s K-L-A-I-R-E-L-O-C-K-H-E-A-R-T dot com. Find me on Instagram @klairelockheart to check out my artwork and shenanigans, or you can follow me on Facebook by searching for Klaire A. Lockheart.
The History of Modern Art with Klaire was created by me, Klaire Lockheart. This program was recorded with equipment provided by the amazing Aaron C. Packard of Aaron C. Packard Productions. Check out his artwork at aaronpackard.com, that’s A-A-R-O-N-P-A-C-K-A-R-D dot com. I sincerely appreciate your support and positive feedback, and I adore those of who have subscribed to this podcast! Thank you very much! You’re awesome!
Resources
Ariella Aïsha Azulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. New York: Verso, 2019.
Bill Anthes, “Making Pictures on Baskets,” in Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism, ed. Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
Hakim Bishara, "Man Vandalized a Picasso Portrait of Dora Maar at Tate Modern,” Hyperallergic, January 02, 2020, https://hyperallergic.com/535540/man-vandalized-a-picasso-portrait-of-dora-maar-at-tate-modern/
Taylor Dafoe, “The 20-Year-Old Who Punched a Picasso Painting at Tate Modern as a ‘Performance’ Is Going to Jail for 18 Months,” Artnet, August 26, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/picasso-vandal-tate-modern-sentenced-1904322
William V. Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991.
Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, directed by Madeleine Parry and John Olb, performed by Hannah Gadsby (2018; Sydney, Australia, Netflix).
Julia Halperin, “Is Hannah Gadsby, the Comedian Behind Netflix’s Viral Standup Special, Today’s Most Vital Art Critic?” Artnet, July 16, 2018, news.artnet.com/opinion/netflix-hannah-gadsby-1318442
Peter Kalb, ed., H. H. Arnason History of Modern Art, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, Inc, 2004).
Shannon Lee, “The Picasso Problem: Why We Shouldn't Separate the Art From the Artist's Misogyny,” Artspace, November 22, 2017, https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/art-politics/the_picasso_problem_why_we_shouldnt_separate_the_art_from_the_artists_misogyny-55120
“Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” Philadelphia Museum of Art, https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51449.html
Olu Oguibe, “Into the ‘Heart of Darkness,’” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 1170-1175.
“Once at MIA: Amazed by modern art,” Minneapolis Institute of Art, April 13, 2015, new.artsmia.org/stories/once-at-mia-modern-art-is-amazing
“Oscar Howe,” University of South Dakota Art Galleries, https://www.usdartgalleries.com/oscar-howe
Sam Phillips, …isms: Understanding Modern Art. (New York: Universe, 2013).
Pablo Picasso, “Conversation with Picasso,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 507-510.
Hrag Vartanian, interview with Ariella Azoulay, “Connecting Modern Art Museums, Colonialism, and Violence,” Hyperallergic, podcast audio, March 11, 2020, https://podcast.hyperallergic.com/episodes/connecting-modern-art-museums-colonialism-and-violence-wIxK2evi
James Voorhies, “Pablo Picasso,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, October, 2004, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pica/hd_pica.htm
Bill Anthes, “Making Pictures on Baskets,” in Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism, ed. Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
Hakim Bishara, "Man Vandalized a Picasso Portrait of Dora Maar at Tate Modern,” Hyperallergic, January 02, 2020, https://hyperallergic.com/535540/man-vandalized-a-picasso-portrait-of-dora-maar-at-tate-modern/
Taylor Dafoe, “The 20-Year-Old Who Punched a Picasso Painting at Tate Modern as a ‘Performance’ Is Going to Jail for 18 Months,” Artnet, August 26, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/picasso-vandal-tate-modern-sentenced-1904322
William V. Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991.
Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, directed by Madeleine Parry and John Olb, performed by Hannah Gadsby (2018; Sydney, Australia, Netflix).
Julia Halperin, “Is Hannah Gadsby, the Comedian Behind Netflix’s Viral Standup Special, Today’s Most Vital Art Critic?” Artnet, July 16, 2018, news.artnet.com/opinion/netflix-hannah-gadsby-1318442
Peter Kalb, ed., H. H. Arnason History of Modern Art, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, Inc, 2004).
Shannon Lee, “The Picasso Problem: Why We Shouldn't Separate the Art From the Artist's Misogyny,” Artspace, November 22, 2017, https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/art-politics/the_picasso_problem_why_we_shouldnt_separate_the_art_from_the_artists_misogyny-55120
“Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” Philadelphia Museum of Art, https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51449.html
Olu Oguibe, “Into the ‘Heart of Darkness,’” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 1170-1175.
“Once at MIA: Amazed by modern art,” Minneapolis Institute of Art, April 13, 2015, new.artsmia.org/stories/once-at-mia-modern-art-is-amazing
“Oscar Howe,” University of South Dakota Art Galleries, https://www.usdartgalleries.com/oscar-howe
Sam Phillips, …isms: Understanding Modern Art. (New York: Universe, 2013).
Pablo Picasso, “Conversation with Picasso,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 507-510.
Hrag Vartanian, interview with Ariella Azoulay, “Connecting Modern Art Museums, Colonialism, and Violence,” Hyperallergic, podcast audio, March 11, 2020, https://podcast.hyperallergic.com/episodes/connecting-modern-art-museums-colonialism-and-violence-wIxK2evi
James Voorhies, “Pablo Picasso,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, October, 2004, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pica/hd_pica.htm