Drawing Three Women & Violin And Palette By Georges Braques

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1st November 2017
“THREE WOMEN” AND “VIOLIN AND PALETT”
In ‘Three Women’, Picasso used different styles and techniques that distinctly differentiated his paintings from other forms of contemporary art. Analysis of the painting suggests that the woman to the left depicts an African appearance, while the figure to the right has a significantly softer and riper form distinct from the other two. However, the woman in the middle is highly abstracted and schematic (Zimmerman 1999). Although ‘Three Women’ seems to portray a distinctive style, Picasso has drawn the three figures in a style that qualifies and reaffirms the artistic properties of the adjacent figures. The three figures are depicted as a tight single sculptural group while the surrounding space appears limited and leaning towards them. A closer analysis of the two women to the right reveals the use of unique striations and hatchings that eventually paves way to largely discreet and faintly modeled planes separating the trunks and limbs (Butler 1994). Picasso has used angled planes that are separated by clearly defined ridges, softly merging into each other. Moreover, he has achieved a mixed mood of gravity and violence. He has successfully achieved formal experimentation using cubist technique and multifigure compositions (Hodge & Libby 2004). Thus a great similarity between ‘Three Women’ and ‘Violin and Palette’is in their use of multifigure compositions, even though they later migrated to single figure compositions.
In ‘Violin and Palette’, Braque makes use of Picasso’s style of painting interior scenes that extensively used music as an overriding theme. In this piece of art, he draws violin, a musical instrument based on analytic cubism (Butler 1994). Using this technique, he experimented with shallow spacing, particularly the color palette reduction. He did this to achieve the neutral browns and grays that flattened out of the space. This piece clearly depicts Braque’s experimentation in trying to achieve the same item in a multi-perspective view. Besides, a certain amount of shading has been used to achieve an impression of ‘bas relief’ (Hodge & Libby 2004)’. This shading used diverse geometric shapes that appear to overlap. Thus, ‘Violin and Palette’ is no doubt a classic example of analytic cubism. Musical instruments often dominated cubist paintings, and Braque’s are no exception also considering that he himself was a musician. Braque has employed repetitive subject matter technique analytic cubism has been used to compel the viewer to largely focus on stylistic innovations as opposed to the specificity of the subject matter (Rewald 2017).
Both Braque’s ‘Violin and Palette’ and Picasso’s ‘Three Women’ are classic examples of cubism, even though ‘Three Women’ isn’t truly cubist. Picasso’s ‘Three women’ departed from the then conventional artistic styles, both in terms of content and formal representation (Zimmerman 1999). In this painting, Picasso introduced nudity as anew subject matter. Hedepicts three women, supposedly, prostitutes in aggressive sexual postures. The extreme nudity and sexuality depicted in this painting perhaps stems from the fact that Picasso was largely influenced by non-western styles (Hodge & Libby 2004). This is evident from the manner in which he has painted the faces of the three women which he rendered in a ‘mask-like’ style, probably indicative of their aggressiveness and primitivism. It’s also evident that Picasso departed from the Renaissance illusion that largely relied on three dimensionality. Subsequently, he has presented a completely flattened plane that appears fragmented into different geometric schemes(Doring 2011). An example is the picture of the middle woman, which comprises of angles and sharp edges. In fact, a closer scrutiny of the painting suggests that both her lower and upper body is given equal concentration just as the surrounding negative space (Hodge & Libby 2004).
Analysis of the two paintings evidently suggests that the two artists borrowed a lot from each other. Their close collaboration is perhaps is the reason why their work has more similarities than differences (Hodge & Libby 2004). One of the similarities identified from ‘Three Women’ and ‘Violin and Palette’ is that objects are simultaneously depicted from diverse viewpoints in a technique also referred to as ‘simultaneity’. As a result, the solid forms appear shattered in both pictures. Therefore, both paintings depict the use of ‘analytic cubism’ that was commo...