The paper shroud

The paper-wrapped figure could be seen as a contemporary take on the classical draped nude, a study of the folds and creases of cloth against smooth skin. Whilst fabric flows softly over the forms of the figure, paper will maintain a structure of its own, which lends itself to the art of paper folding  - origami.

In what is arguably Picasso’s most well-known painting ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’, his cubist treatment of the drapery as a collection of flat planes gives it an origami appearance. The flesh of the demoiselles is treated more softly in comparison, but there is a unity in their angular forms. The sharp folds of the drapery fill the spaces between the figures and engulf them in places, differentiated only by colour and tone.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907.

Naum Gabo is a cubist sculptor who created the figure itself from paper - a Picasso in three dimensions. Renouncing the traditional sculptural notions of volume and mass, he turns instead to space and depth using intersecting planes. The surface of the figure is fragmented by the play of light and shadow. Gabo cited the Norwegian landscape as a source of inspiration -  think mountains and fjords in paper form.

Naum Gabo, Model for ‘Constructed Torso’, 1917.

Blowing the origami figure up to life-sized proportions is the Dada artist Hugo Ball, with his ‘Magic Bishop’ costume for a sound-poetry performance.  A Dada performance was incomplete without an elaborate costume to transform the human figure into abstraction, described by Ball as being ‘festooned and draped with impossible objects’. This is a strong example of paper maintaining its own structure around the body. He was so tightly wrapped that he had to be carried onto the stage!

Cubist forms

Following on from the ‘paper shroud’ session, this week our model will be posing against piece of giant origami. This will create a backdrop of geometric shapes and dramatically lit planes. Inspiration for drawing the figure within such a structure may be taken from artists working in styles derived from cubism.

Picasso was one of the pioneers of cubism. In the early years, he constructed his images using small facets, or geometric planes, like those in origami. ‘Figure dans un fauteuil’ is one of his paintings in this style. Not only is the background broken up into geometric planes, but the figure is too. She appears mechanistic, and as if she is being engulfed by the shapes of the background, where you can only just make out an armchair. Despite this semi-abstraction, the tonal variation of the planes suggests the direction of the light and three-dimensionality. 

Picasso, Figure dans un fauteuil, 1909

Another early cubist painting is Jean Metzinger’s ‘Deux Nus’. The models are portrayed from multiple view-points and at successive intervals in time shown simultaneously on the canvas. It results in a fragmented image of interlocking planes, which looks almost like a view in a broken mirror. The figures, the rocks and trees are all treated in the same way, blurring the distinction between background and foreground with only the colour variation helping to decipher the scene. Despite this, Metzinger still manages to render the nudes in a convincing and elegant way.

Jean Metzinger, Deux Nus, 1911

Wyndham Lewis was one of the artists involved in the development of Vorticism in England, a movement which owed a debt to  French cubism and Italian futurism. Like Picasso’s cubist painting, Lewis’s ‘Figure composition’ depicts fragmented space using sharp angles. Line thickness is varied in order to make things recede or project. The straight lines in the background and the sweeping curves that make up the figures come together to evoke the architectural and mechanistic rhythm of urban life, as they walk their bulldogs. In a similar way, a background of origami could be treated like a scaled-down architectural form.

Wyndham Lewis, Figure Composition (Man and woman with two bulldogs) 1912-13

These three artists demonstrate how the figure can be drawn against a background of geometric planes, in order to blend in or stand out to varying degrees.