The through line of art history is arguably one of portraying humans in accordance with the zeitgeist of the time. For instance, the Egyptians depicted their pharaohs not in a realistic fashion, but in a godly fashion, with precious materials, exaggerated features, and defined musculature; Egyptian culture and civilization was at the mercy of the elements and the chaos of the ancient world and therefore needed to worship and empower a transcendent leader to protect them. Likewise, the spirituality and extravagance of Byzantine and Romanesque styles reflect their competing cultures of the time, attempting to establish dominance in the wake of Rome’s fall. The High Renaissance attempts to inaugurate man’s genius and identity through its perfected…show more content… Indeed Georges Braque’s The Portuguese, produced in 1911, was produced in the wake of World War I; in conjunction with the expanding world population and the ever-increasing interconnectedness of the world, the cataclysmic nature of World War I splintered the artistic world into countless styles. Georges Braque led the charge of Cubism, while Marcel Duchamp championed Dadaism, and Violet Oakley embodied the American Renaissance – all of which occurred in the wake of the devastating conflict of World War I, as three vastly different responses and artistic expressions of the…show more content… It aims to represent the entirety of an object on one two-dimensional plane. In a somewhat baffling design, the piece has both three-dimensional spaces and two-dimensional letters, numbers, and shapes as Cubists “abandoned perspective, which had been used to depict space since the Renaissance” (“Cubism Movement, Artists and Major Works.”). As is the nature of art, this abrupt change in and indeed rejection of style, form, perspective, and all other traditional methods of academic art reflects the artists’ needs at the time. Braque and his colleague, Picasso, were undergoing severe changes in their social landscape that perhaps explain this radical shift in artistic style. The drastically and rapidly changing world around them forced artists to reevaluate their expressive role in society. For instance, “photography was increasingly being used for portraiture and to document historical and everyday events, so it was only natural for painters to turn to other things” (Philinthecircle). Additionally, some viewers saw in “its structured dissection of the subject, viewpoint-by-viewpoint, resulting in a fragmentary image of multiple viewpoints and overlapping planes” (Tate) an attempt to invoke the shrapnel of a bomb; or perhaps even more painfully, what an object would look
