Fogg Showcases Picasso, Pollock and Others

The abrupt, angular renderings of Cubist painting are most often associated with Picasso, but an example of an earlier style of Cubist art is on display at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, in the form of La Baie de L’Estaque by Georges Braque. The brush strokes of the 1908 painting, which has never been varnished, are exceptionally clear; the piece that may have been described by Henri Matisse in 1935 as “the first Cubist painting” allows visitors and students to see the transition between the post-impressionism of Cézanne and the high Cubism of Picasso. Braque was extremely influenced by meeting Picasso in 1907, around the time he traveled to the southern French village of L’Estaque, which had featured into many paintings of Cézanne.

Fascinated with the strange distortions and odd perspectives characteristic of Cézanne’s work, Braque began to experiment with the way objects are represented in art, adopting a style making its subjects look both flat and three-dimensional.

The Fogg Museum, the oldest of several art museums located around the Harvard campus, now includes La Baie de L’Estaque in the Wertheim Collection, described by the Fogg as one of America’s finest collections of Impressionist and post-Impressionist work.

Though it is small when compared to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston or the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, the Fogg’s several galleries show the history and development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present. An ongoing exhibit on American Modernism contains No. 2 by Jackson Pollock, which was created by pouring, dripping and splattering paint on the floor in the manner for which Pollock was famous; and the Boston area’s most important Picasso collection includes 1901’s Mother and Child.

Amidst the paintings that comprise “Art in France, 1890-1960,” an exhibit that just opened on January 5, is a small painting by Max Ernst, the founder of Surrealism. Born in 1891, Ernst was one of the more prominent members of the Dada movement during the early twentieth century; “Dada is the sun, Dada is the egg. Dada is the Police of the Police,” said Richard Huelsenbeck defining the movement that was a precursor to Surrealism. While many people may be more familiar with Spanish painter Salvador Dali than with Ernst, it was Ernst who began to paint in the 1920’s in the style that was made famous by Dali’s works of the 1930’s.

One of the forms Ernst used in his early Dada art was collage, which he created out of pictures from books and magazines. Many of these collages Ernst only publicly presented after being touched-up with watercolors or as printed photographs, so that they would appear not as assemblies of other material but as individual, homogenous pieces, eliminating the delineation between the art of the collage and its non-artistic building blocks.

The question of how the physical structure of art influences our perception of it – the differences between the way it is structured and made and how it is looked at – is raised by another exhibit at the Fogg, “Extreme Connoisseurship,” which runs through April 7. The exhibit includes notebooks, videos, slide projections and DVDs, and unlike Ernst’s collages frequently presents the elements an artist has used to create their piece in bare view.

Other museums in immediate walking distance from the Fogg include the Busch Reisinger and the Sackler Museum; the Sackler contains a collection of the coins of Alexander the Great amongst its Ancient Greek and Roman art. For those interested in the development of art during the history of the world, a visit to the museums at Harvard may provide the opportunity to watch human creativity mutate over the course of centuries by taking just a couple of footstep.