Cubisme i guerra. El cristall dins la flama

Cubism and War. The Crystal in the Flame

Fri, 21/10/2016 - 12:00 - Sun, 29/01/2017 - 12:00

Cubisme i guerra. El cristall dins la flama

The French called the 1914-18 War, the Great War. It is a war whose front-line horror and misery is most compellingly remembered in images by photography and film, and the massacre was a daily reality in Paris, which was hardly more than 100 kilometres from the front-line.

This exhibition explores the work of artists who refused to accept that recording the war or producing propaganda was their duty and attempted to keep alive the expanded possibilities opened up for the arts of painting and sculpture by what was called Cubism in Paris in 1911-14.

The majority of young Frenchmen were mobilized, so those artists left behind in Paris were either foreign or too old or unfit for combat: Pablo Picasso, alongside his fellow Spaniards Juan Gris and María Blanchard, the Mexican Diego Rivera, the Italian Gino Severini, and the Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, the French sculptor Henri Laurens and painter Henri Matisse. Fernand Léger and Georges Braque, who went to the front and had very different artistic responses to the conflict, are also included in this exhibition.

Curated:

Christopher Green

Exhibition microsite