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The Figure-Ground Relationship in Painting Explained and Explored
Discover new layers of significance in visual art
Here is an intriguing image, painted by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso.
Three Musicians (1921) is an example of so-called Synthetic Cubism. Angular blocks of paint offer a stylised, rudimentary depiction of a trio of musicians whose faces, instruments and clothing are entangled with each other and with the setting.
Stepping back, one of the things we can say about this painting is that the relationship between the foreground and background is slippery.
Take a moment to look at it. What part does the roaming layer of blue play in the portrayal, for instance? Shape or shadow, subject matter or backdrop? It’s hard to say, but fascinating to explore.
Likewise, the areas of white, black and brown, what is their role in the image?
The various objects within Picasso’s painting are unmoored from our normal expectations of space. Nearness and depth coexist. The overall effect is to instigate a reappraisal of how we perceive three-dimensional space and objects within it…
Foreground & background
One way of thinking about the clarity of a subject matter is to see it in relation to its background. Does it stand out? Are the lines that delineate the subject crisp? Or does the subject blend into its surroundings?
As the Picasso artwork demonstrates, paintings can play with our sense of foreground and background. Some degree of perceptive deciphering has to be performed by the viewer in order to transform the patches and daubs of paint on a surface into a picture. Sometimes the painting is clear, its subject well-defined, at other times it isn’t.
Here’s another example. The painting above, Soldier at a Game of Chess, is by the French artist Jean Metzinger, painted in the slightly earlier Crystal Cubism style in about 1914.
One of the most deliberate aspects of this painting is how the figure appears almost…
