Detroit Institute of Art: After Cubism: Modern Art in Paris, 1918-1948

It’s always a pleasure to visit the Detroit Institute of Art, and it was no exception during my recent trip in December, where they had an amusing exhibit on Cubism.

The DIA is housed in a Beaux-Arts building boasting more than 100 galleries and 65,000 items, a collection that started in 1885 and had increased with the help of Director William Valentiner between 1924 and 1945. The institution is known to be the first US art museum to acquire a Van Gogh.

Their latest exhibit, After Cubism, contains both paintings and photographs from such artists as Fernand Leger, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ilse Bing, and Claude Cahun. An impressively big exhibit that took me quite some time to appreciate.

A brief explanation on Cubism (and I promise to post an entry with more details on Cubism in the future). Painters George Braque and Pablo Picasso formed Cubism, a method of seeing past the reality of a place or thing and painting that perception. In other words, they didn’t paint reality; they painted in abstraction. In other other words, they painted weird stuff.

But the exhibit covers what happened after the Cubism movement, which had various takes on Cubism (such as Robert Delaunay’s Orphism), the return to Classicism and Surrealism with a twist, and the introduction of the Dada movement. And I still promise to have another post about all of this, eventually.

One of the paintings, and it was only one from this painter, was of Marie Laurencin. I don’t recall learning about her works in my art history classes, yet Laurencin hung out with the icons of Cubism: Picasso, Braque, and a few others. I was taken by how soft the painting was, as if it was touchable. The portrait is both alluring and feminine.

I researched her and found that she mainly painted portraits of young Parisian women and only strayed to make decorations and costumes for the Ballet Russes and Comedie Française. Curious enough, there is a whole museum dedicated to her in Japan. Apparently, the museum’s director, Masahiro Takano, is a great collector and admirer.