Salon Cubism
Started: 1910
Ended: 1918
KEY ARTISTS
 | Henri Le Fauconnier Quick View Further External Info  |
| Henri Le Fauconnier |  |
| Henri Le Fauconnier helped the public accept the shocking new Cubist style through his abstracted tableaus featuring classical subjects. He was an acclaimed artist and worked with many of the Salon Cubists, including Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes. Further External Info | ||
 | Albert Gleizes Quick View Further External Info |
| Albert Gleizes | |
| Albert Gleizes was a French artist, philosopher, and a self-proclaimed founder of Cubism. A member and founder of several different art movements, Gleizes, along with Jeane Metzinger, wrote the first treatise on Cubism, Du Cubismbe, in 1912. Gleizes was a friend and collaborator of many Paris-based artists including Metzinger, Fernand Leger, and Robert Delaunay. Gleize is best known for his Cubist works, including Les Baigneuses, et Le Depiquage des Moissons (Harvest Threshing). Further External Info | ||
 | Jean Metzinger Quick View Further External Info |
| Jean Metzinger | |
| Jean Metzinger was a French artist who was initially influenced by Fauvism and Impressionism, but then turned to Cubism. Metzinger was a member of the Section d'Or group of artists. In 1912, together with Albert Gleizes, he created the first major treatise on Cubism, Du Cubisme. Further External Info | ||
 | Fernand Léger Quick View  Artist Page |
| Fernand Léger | |
| Influenced by Cubism and Futurism, the French painter Fernand Léger developed a unique style of Cubism using cylindrical and other geometric forms with mechanically smooth edges. Often colorful and punctuated by patterns, his paintings range from still lifes and figures to abstract compositions. Art Story: Fernand Léger Artist Page | ||
 | Robert Delaunay Quick View Artist Page |
| Robert Delaunay | |
| Robert Delaunay was a French avant-garde painter. Early in his career he was associated with the Expressionist group The Blue Rider along with Kandinsky and Klee. Delaunay's singular style is referred to as Orphism; an approach that combines visual elements of Cubism, Expressionism and figurative abstraction. Art Story: Robert Delaunay Artist Page | ||
 | Raymond Duchamp-Villon Quick View Further External Info |
| Raymond Duchamp-Villon | |
| Duchamp-Villon and three of the other five Duchamp children, including Marcel Duchamp, became famous artists. Duchamp-Villon was a self-taught French sculptor. He served as a juror in the Salon d'Automne in 1907 and helped promote the Cubist movement. He died in 1916 of typhoid fever. Further External Info | ||
"Painting is a language - and it has its syntax and its laws."
Summary of Salon Cubism
The Salon Cubists, a group of avant-garde French artists, who lived and worked in Paris and its environs, built upon the early Cubist experiments of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, but they intentionally steered a different artistic path. Compared to Picasso’s and Braque’s small, intimate works with the subdued palette of browns and greys, Salon Cubists painted large scale works in vibrant colors and grounded their aesthetic theories with references to mathematics and vitalist philosophy.
The term Salon Cubists was adopted following the 1911 Salon des Indépendants to distinguish them from the "gallery Cubists," Picasso and Braque, who showed with the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. While Picasso and Braque are now the most famous Cubists, it was the Salon Cubists who established Cubism as an identifiable movement and introduced it to the general public through their exhibitions in notable Paris Salons between 1910 and 1913.
Key Ideas
Beginnings:
The story of Cubism usually begins in the studios of Pablo Picasso and George Braque, who were looking at African sculpture and Paul Cézanne's late landscapes and still lifes, which reduced form to geometric cubes, pyramids, and cylinders. Picasso and Braque took Cézanne’s geometry even further, creating scenes from faceted planes of monochromatic color. There were other artists, however, who were similarly experimenting with form. Jean Metzinger and Robert Delaunay were longtime artistic colleagues who painted in the radical Neo-Impressionist style and were influenced by the color theories of Georges Seurat. Metzinger was also influenced, as were most of the Cubists, by the works of Cézanne, which had been exhibited in major Salons in Paris from 1904-1907. Cézanne’s work became the bridge between Metzinger’s earlier Neo-Impressionist work and his Cubist fracturing of the image into multiple perspectives.
Important Art and Artists of Salon Cubism | |
  | Abundance (1910-1911)Artist: Henri Le Fauconnier Artwork description & Analysis: Le Fauconnier presents the viewer with an allegory of the plentitude of nature and the fertility of womanhood in the large-scale oil painting. A nude woman bears an oversized platter laden with fruit on her head, and a nude child with his arms full of apples stands next to her. The figures occupy a landscape in which a lake with boats, the spires of a castle, mountains, and a city street can be glimpsed, and the foreground is littered with fallen fruit. Oil on canvas - Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands |
 | Woman with Phlox (1910)Artist: Albert Gleizes Artwork description & Analysis: The monochromatic and abstracted treatment of a traditional genre scene created a scandal when it was shown at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, where viewers thought the painting outlandish. A woman sits in a room between two vases filled with flowers. She concentrates on the unfolded paper or cloth she holds in her lap. Behind her, a window opens onto a view of the landscape beyond. The reductive color palette, combined with the angled planes of multiple perspectives, creates a blurring between the interior of the room and the exterior view and between the figure and her surroundings. Oil on canvas - Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas |
 | Woman with a Horse (1911-1912)Artist: Jean Metzinger Artwork description & Analysis: Metzinger depicts a nude woman, wearing a pearl necklace petting the ear of a horse while her right hand offers the horse a treat. The scene is placed in a landscape, though a window is visible in the upper right of center and a vase and various flowers and fruits are in the foreground. The setting of the woman and the horse is ambiguous. The model’s block upon which the woman sits coupled with the vase in the foreground and what appears to be a window suggests the two are inside, perhaps in the artist’s studio, but the landscape elements in the foreground and what appears to be a tree in the top left indicate that the pair could also be outside. Oil on canvas - Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark |
More Salon Cubism Artwork and Analysis:
Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
" Movement Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
Available from:
First published on 13 Dec 2017. Updated and modified regularly. 
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