Collection connections
Picasso
50.1974 |
Not on display
Roy de Maistre, et al.
Seated figure circa 1936-circa 1937
Of all Picasso’s contributions to modern painting, cubism was certainly the most influential. This groundbreaking approach to painting – depicting objects and figures as a sum of multi-faceted parts – was taken up in various ways by artists across the world during the first half of the 20th century, including Australians like de Maistre. Here, de Maistre has layered geometric planes, interlaced with lyrical black lines, to describe a body in space. This combination of flat coloured shapes and bold structural lines is strikingly similar to Picasso’s treatment of the figure in the late 1920s, when he merged cubism with a more surreal, liquid distortion of the figure.