Cubism for Kids: An Art Treasure Hunt at MoMA

A Cubist Salon Party

Hi! My name is Anne Umland. I’m a senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. And along with many other people here at The Museum of Modern Art, I take care of the art. That caring can take so many different forms, but one is selecting. You could be a curator if you make a playlist, or you can curate your closet, because it means you’re choosing what is in it. At MoMA, I’m selecting or deciding things like: What artworks are going to go on display in this gallery? Which wall should they hang on? What hangs next to each other? I like thinking about choosing works to be displayed together like hosting a party. Who would you want to invite? Who would have a nice conversation?

As you look around Gallery 503: A Cubist Salon, you might notice that there are many, many different works up on the walls. All these different works were made within a relatively short time period: 10 years, between 1908 and 1918, and within the same place: the city of Paris, in France. We wanted to capture the energy of this moment in Paris, of artists from many different countries coming there to look at and talk about art, and how to make it new. Hanging lots of works together in this way also encourages you to look for relationships between things, both similarities and differences.

Many of these artists knew each other and looked at each other’s works and were in conversation. They all were trying in their own ways to invent new approaches to making pictures, and to experiment with materials and shapes that hadn’t been used in art before. Instead of creating some sort of seamless, illusionistic painting that appeared as though it were a window you’re looking through, these artists are interested in trying to give you the sensation that you are looking at objects from many different vantage points all at once by breaking their surfaces up into flickering, fragmented planes. I’d be curious to hear from you. What are some of the things that you notice as you look around the gallery, or at the works illustrated here?

☐ Can you find a cube?

This is maybe a trick question! Although the gallery is called A Cubist Salon, I don’t think there is a single literal “cube” to be seen. The term Cubism was not necessarily one that all these artists felt comfortable with. It originated with a sarcastic remark made by a critic who said that when he looked at some of these works, they made him think of cubes. It is fun to look for how many different sorts of quasi-geometric shapes you can find: rectangles, triangles, cylinders, and maybe even a few wonky cubes or squares!

☐ Can you find different kinds of eyes?

How many different eyes or pairs of eyes can you find in the artworks displayed in this room? Once you’ve found some eyes, what are the different visual clues the artist has provided to make you think of the word eye? Sometimes it’s by how the feature that looks like an “eye” is positioned on a face. Sometimes it’s by modeling or by shading. Another thing to look for is just simple shapes: eyes can be suggested by nothing more than a circle or a dot. But part of the great fun of Cubism is the way that artists like Pablo Picasso played with the way simple shapes could mean, or look like, different things, depending on what is around them and how they are positioned. Circles don’t necessarily have to read as eyes, for example; if you put them in a different context, they could become something else, like the sound hole in a guitar. So one of the things I really like to do when in this gallery, or when looking at illustrations of the works included, is to focus on one element—an eye, or a circle—and see how many different times they repeat within a work, or reappear in different works, and how each time they look similar but different, and can mean different things.

☐ Can you spot the picture that includes real sequins?

One of the things I really love about Gino Severini’s Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin is that no matter where you look, there are fun details to discover. If you look toward the center of the upper part of the picture, you'll see a man riding a camel, and that is often interpreted as a reference to the Turco-Italian War of 1911. You can also see, up along the top edge, many different suspended flags, or triangular pennants, representing countries around the world. Or, if I let my eye travel to all those purply- pink flounces in the lower-left quadrant, I can see that Severini glued actual sequins to this work, which heightens its sparkle and visual razzamatazz. For the cat lovers among you, there’s that little black cat head at upper right. There are just all sorts of things: curls, shoes, hats, monocles, mustaches. I’d encourage you to see what happens if you try standing in front of this picture or looking at its illustration silently for a whole minute, and in your head, try to make a list of how many different things you notice. If you are like me, you might need more than a minute to make sure you didn’t miss anything...and then another, and another.

☐ What’s the most unexpected thing you can find in an artwork in this room? Can you find the artwork that has a thermometer in it?

*Hint: It’s by one of the doors. Still can’t find it? It’s called Reservist of the First Division, by Kazimir Malevich, and it also includes a real stamp.

A number of the artists in this room, in trying to make works of art that were different from those that had come before, incorporated real-world materials like sequins or a thermometer into their works, putting traditional fine art materials next to those found in everyday life. I think that’s such an inspiration and an invitation for all of us to look at the world around us in a different way—as a place filled with artistic potential! Next time you’re sitting at the breakfast table, look around. What could you do with your spoon, for instance? Could it become part of a sculpture? It was for Picasso!

☐ Can you find artworks that include letters, or words, or numbers?

Some of the artists in this gallery wanted you not only to look at their artworks, but to find things to read in them, mixing visual and verbal elements. This strategy was also related to how artists were interested in using humble, non-fine-art materials drawn from everyday life, like menus or newspapers or signs. In Liubov Popova’s Objects from a Dyer’s Shop, she painted cut-up snippets from the Moscow newspaper Early Morning. Can you find other artworks in the gallery that include letters, or words, or numbers? How many different ways are they shown? Are different styles of handwriting or printing or numbering used? Why do you think the artists might have chosen to do so?

☐ Can you find an instrument that might be hard to play?

There are a lot of instruments depicted in this gallery! One of the more dimensional ones is a sculpture by Pablo Picasso, titled very simply Guitar. (Look up and you’ll find it.) It is both like and unlike any guitar I’ve ever seen before. Picasso is showing us the inside and the outside of his Guitar at the same time. He roughly cut shapes from sheets of metal, and punched holes into some of them, and then threaded pieces of wire through those holes; the guitar’s sound hole is just this five-inch piece of ordinary pipe that he welded to the backplane of his unconventional yet instantly recognizable instrument. The idea of opening up a work of art to the space of the world, and of using space as a sculptural material, is such an amazing new idea!

Picasso had a friend named André Salmon who was a poet, a critic, a novelist, and also a very good storyteller. According to Salmon, those who first saw Guitar hanging in Picasso’s studio were shocked and confused because it was both a relief sculpture that hung on the wall like a painting, but also an object that engaged space like a sculpture. Salmon recalls that people said, “What is it, painting or sculpture?” To which, according to Salmon, Picasso replied, “It’s nothing. It’s el guitar.”

Can you imagine playing Picasso's Guitar, and what it would sound like?

This text was edited from audio recorded for the Kids audio playlist by Arlette Hernandez.