In an essay, discuss how both Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre (Joy of Life) and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon can be simultaneously seen as inspired by and breaking free of Paul Cézanne’s, The Large Bathers. Refer to specific visual references in your discussion.
Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre (Joy of Life) and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon art work can be seen as inspired by and breaking free of Paul Cézanne’s, The Large Bathers when juxtapose because they were both heavily influenced by art from other cultures such like Asian art, North Africa art, some of the decorative qualities of Islamic art, the angularity of African sculpture, and the flatness of Japanese. They both have balance of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter," and this aspiration was an important influence on some, such as Clement Greenberg, who looked to art to
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The compressed space the figures inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards; a fiercely pointed slice of melon in the still life of fruit at the bottom of the composition teeters on an impossibly upturned tabletop. These strategies would be significant in Picasso’s subsequent development of Cubism, charted in this gallery with a selection of the increasingly fragmented compositions he created in this period.
Joy of Life is a large-scale painting (nearly 6 feet in height, 8 feet in width), depicting an Arcadian landscape filled with brilliantly colored forest, meadow, sea, and sky and populated by nude figures both at rest and in motion. As with the earlier Fauve canvases, color is responsive only to emotional expression and the formal needs of the canvas, not the realities of nature. The references are many, but in form and date, Bonheur de Vivre is closest to Cézanne 's last great image of