Reaction to Art Market. Pablo Picasso. Brick Factory at Tortosa

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Art Essay: Reaction to Art Market
The first art work is an oil canvas entitled “Brick Factory at Tortosa” by a cubist artist, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), and is dated 1909 (Apollinaire & Eimert 78). This painting from Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia was handed over from the State Museum of New Western Art, Moscow in 1948. This Proto-cubist painting is thought to belong to Picasso’s African Period (1906-1909). The Proto-Cubist period is also known as the Black Period or the Negro Period because of the African artworks that were being returned to Paris museums as a result of the expansion of the French empire in Sub-Saharan Africa. Picasso’s work follows the techniques and rules to produce an accurate image of a factory that Picasso saw while he was on a holiday in Spain. The artwork simplifies, reduces, and solidifies imaginations to produce an image not easily decipherable. The lines representing the roofs and walls of the brick factory do not converge at the horizon. As Charles and Podoksik (n.p) describe, these lines diverge and run off into infinitude creating a “mad hallucination.” The painting is thought to have been influenced by African sculpture, especially the contemporary African masks. He employs geometric reductionism in the painting as he makes squares and triangles appear irregular and the forms are not logically neat to reveal the plain and articulate truth behind the image as shown below.
1 Pablo Picasso. Brick Factory at Tortosa. 1909. Oil canvas. 50.7 X 60.2 cm. Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
2 Fernand Leger. Nudes in the Forest. 1909-1910. Oil canvas. 120 X 170 cm. Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.
Using expressive theory, Picasso’s personal and worldview of factories as smokestacks during the 19th century can be understood. Instead of a blue dazzle, Picasso enhances his painting with a grey sky using bleak planes that run beyond the brick factory. The factory’s chimney represents the harmful effects of today’s factories to the environment. Contextual theorists understand art as a product of a culture and value system. The 19th century was marked with industrial revolution and a transition from agricultural systems to industrialized and urban societies. While this period promised a greater improvement in the way of life, dangers such as air pollution became inevitable. Picasso’s painting of a brick factory with a chimney and a grey sky illustrate the problem of air pollution
The second art work is Fernand Leger’s “Nudes in the Forest” date...