Painting of the early twentieth century. The birth of composition and a new perception of reality

The artist of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often imagined that he was on the edge of the abyss. The huge cycle of historical development that began in the Renaissance ended. The artist felt heir to this culture and at the same time could not help but see its striking inconsistency with the coming era. He made a heroic attempt to create a new big style, but often used eclectic means. This was the inconsistency of art nouveau, as the culture of that time is often called.

During this period, many new plastic ideas were put forward, outwardly very contradictory and seemingly mutually annihilating each other, but often closely interconnected. These searches give the art of the era a special tension. Often, the artists themselves are clearly aware of the experimental nature of their work. Schools succeeded each other, the rhythm of artistic life was restless and intense. New ideas did not have time to develop in detail, often they were only put forward and, without stopping, they moved on.

Today, without the experience of Cezanne painting, it is inconceivable to imagine the formation of a system of fine art of the 20th century. P. Cezanne first begins to paint a picture not as a “window into the world”, but tries to imagine this world from the inside, to see the picture as part of a great whole. He builds it like a house, erecting mountains, trees, figures from color in space. Color loses only the informational role, ceases to be just a color, constant or variable. He gains weight, density and thereby can determine the intensity of feelings of empathy with the viewer, the nature of this feeling.

P. Picasso, J. Braque, F. Leger and other artists even more actively tried to combine the laws of the picture - a separate space of the canvas - and the laws of the space of nature, surrounding us, the human inner world. Such an expanded perception of space when writing a picture was supposed to change the usual idea of the image of an object in a frame as something immovable, static. Visible by the eye crumbled into fantastically modified fragments. But the “cohesion”, the connection between them turned out to be so great that a new previously unknown harmony was born. The artist seemed to release the possibilities of shaping, the natural birth of the composition, inherent in the plastic itself. And at the same time, he introduced strict control into this process by reducing all kinds of forms to a geometric fundamental principle. Such a dual unity spoke of a completely new perception of reality - free, very personal, creative. And along with this, it spoke of the desire to affirm the features inherent in the art of the era, as the laws of the "big style", valid not only for painting, but also for other arts.