Life & Times: Cubist Confetti

Confetti—those insidious little paper circles and squares—was ardently embraced in Paris; and figured in the Cubists’ visual vocabulary. Both Picasso and Braque confetti showers as a phenomenon of optical mixing within three-dimensional space. This talk considers the Cubists’ colorful stippling during the prewar years as a sophisticated means of introducing formal qualities of texture and light into their art, while referencing popular culture and artistic movements such as Pointillism.