rong early influence on Braque, painted in the Post-Impressionist school, meaning he attempted to move beyond capturing a direct naturally-occurring experience in his work. Rather, CTzanne sought to elaborate upon Impressionism's movement away from artwork that presented the viewer with theoretical or moral significance by adding emotional and symbolic meaning to his work. Some art scholars offers Braque's "The Bay of L'Estaque" (1908), made up of fragmented and partially overlapping planes, as an illustration of his work during his transition from Post-Impressionism to Cubism. Braque painted "The Bay" at the start of his trip to Provence, where CTzanne had painted important landscapes in the 1880s.
Many contemporary art scholars argue that Braque and Picasso's Analytic Cubist paintings were the first genuinely modernist art, insofar as it was the first art to present our fragmented, relativistic way of seeing and thinking. From a perspectival viewpoint, Cubism was the first artistic movement that privileged the viewer rather than the image. Analytic Cubism is not abstract art, although it would eventually lead to it. Rather, the purpose of analytic Cubism's fragmented images is to compound the perspectives on an object into an organized image that shatters the integrity of the object.
Thus, Analytic Cubism is the deconstruction of the image by the artist so that the viewer may reconstruct it through his or her own perspective. Cubism reoriented the traditional relationship between viewing subject and artwork by denying that the artist produced an image that was a true representation of the world. Rather, Cubism's fragmented images force the viewer to actually create (recreate) the image. The process of creation is thus repeated every time the viewer looks at the image. It was also the first artistic movement that introduced the self-reflexiveness of modernism: art thinking about art.
Many in the American museum in...