22 Mar How Picasso Designed the Modern Area Rug
Whether you like Picasso or not, there’s a good chance your area rug was inspired by his work. Modern area rug design is significantly indebted to Picasso’s obsession with geometry and his desire to move art beyond simple representation of reality.
Before the 20th century, painting was dominated by the notion that the artist should accurately depict 3D space. Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian mastered the arts of shading and painting in perspective. Their figures, buildings and spaces were drawn to mimic reality. Every hand, foot and face was meticulously crafted to look like the hands, feet and faces you might see outside.
In 1908, however, Paris-based artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso made a bold break with the masters of the Renaissance. They abandoned this notion that painting had to portray reality as it actually appeared. Rather, the subjects of their paintings were drawn as the artists imagined them. Instead of sketching realistic figures, Picasso and Braque broke up, or abstracted, their subjects into little geometric shapes. A nose became a triangle, an arm, a rectangle, and a head, a square. One critic called the paintings a collection of “strange cubes” and thus the term “Cubism” was born.
Later artists took Braque and Picasso’s interest in geometry and abstraction even further. In 1915, Russian avant-garde painter Kazimir Malevich began to form compositions composed of colored geometric shapes set against a white background. His famous “Black Square” was simply that, a black square. In only a few short years, art had gone from representing reality to total abstraction.
Artists throughout the 20th century would continue to pursue geometric forms. In the 1930s Dutch painter Piet Mondrian created a number of famous compositions with red, blue, yellow and white squares separated by thick black lines. In the 1950s, Russian-American artist Mark Rothko covered gigantic canvases with three stacked rectangles of different colors. Today both of these artists’ works can be found in museums throughout the world.
While modern area rugs may not actually resemble Picasso paintings, Picasso’s ideas about art are certainly behind them. Many modern rugs use geometric patterns to give spaces a sense of freshness and life. The sharp, crisp lines of squares and rectangles tend to contrast nicely with plush couches or other furniture. At the same time, single-colored geometric figures are also calming and can provide hectic spaces with a simplistic order.
While it probably isn’t a good idea to shop for an area rug that resembles a Picasso, Mondrian or Rothko painting, it can’t hurt to channel some of the greatest artists of our time when considering home design.