History of Cubism
At the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite were discovering African, Micronesian and Native American art for the first time. Artists such as George Braque and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures. Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when both artists had recently acquired an interest in primitivsm, beriansculpture, African art and African tribal masks. They became friendly rivals and competed with each other throughout their careers, perhaps leading to Picasso entering a new period in his work by 1907, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian and African art. Picasso's paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism.
Within the first two decades of the 20th century, a new art movement began that was unlike any other—Cubism.
What is Cubism?
Cubism was one of the first truly modern movements to emerge in art. It evolved during a period of heroic and rapid innovation between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.Unlike traditional still-lifes, landscapes, or portrait paintings, Cubist paintings aren’t meant to be realistic or life-like in any way. Instead, after looking at the subject from every possibly angle, the artist will piece together fragments from different vantage points into one painting.
Most Cubist works are immediately recognizable due to their flattened, nearly two-dimensional appearance; an inclusion of geometric angles, lines, and shapes; and a fairly neutral color palette.
Girl with a Mandolin by Pablo Picasso
As the movement evolved, color, texture, and graphic elements (like text) were added, to the point where later Cubist works often appeared more like collage than anything else. But Cubism wasn’t just a specific “style” or “look”—it actually allowed artists an entirely different way of seeing and depicting real-life objects.
Nude Descending a Staircase
In doing this, the artist is attempting to give a fuller, more detailed explanation of the subject—breaking past barriers of space and time, like in the famous painting by Marcel Duchamp entitled Nude Descending a Staircase (seen above.)
Synthetic Cubism on the other hand was a natural extension of Analytic Cubism. Instead of breaking a subject down into pieces, it involved assembling pieces already available into a collage. Here’s an example by Georges Braque-Tenora
Tenora by Georges Braque
As you can see, Synthetic Cubism is still fairly geometric, and some pieces (like this one) incorporate traditional media as well as found objects.
Famous Cubist Artists
The most famous Cubist is probably Picasso, followed by Georges Braque, even though he was just as instrumental as Picasso was in founding Cubism.
Paul Cézanne (although not a part of the Cubist movement himself) is often credited with sparking Braque’s first attempts at painting a Cubist landscape. Cézanne’s paintings separated objects into basic shapes—cubes and spheres, mostly—which directly led to Cubism’s use of fractured, geometric planes.
Other Cubist artists include Jaun Gris (whose work seems to almost bridge Cubism with Art Deco) and artists like Marcel Duchamp (whose artwork actually spanned a variety of styles and movements).
You can see some of the Art Deco similarities in The Guitar, by Jaun Gris, below.
Nowadays, Cubism seems like just another facet of abstract art, but in reality, it came first—and it directly influenced most of the abstract art of the 20th century.
In fact, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the 20th century without Cubism, Picasso and the others.It would be a very different world of art than the one we know.
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