Henri Victor Gabriel Le Fauconnier

This complex and monumental painting depicts a group of mountaineers as they are attacked by bears. Dominated by the bear at left, the scene is densely packed with disassociated body parts, hunters with exploding muskets, frightened children in striped shirts, and random puffs of smoke. Glimpses of landscape and urban architecture reinforce Le Fauconnier’s belief that motifs rendered in a radical Cubist vocabulary need not be separated from the physical world. In this grand-scale performance, he fragments figures, time, and space, while preserving dramatic and pictorial unity.