Cubism

Cubism was an innovative and influential style and movement in 20th century art that was developed in Paris between 1907 and 1914. In 1907, Pablo Picasso painted the painting Demoiselles d’Avignon, which is one of the first work of art that included elements of cubism. The French painter Georges Braque also played a significant role in the development of the cubist style.

Cubist painters rejected the traditional idea that art should imitate nature. Cubist paintings were abstract and included geometric forms and the painters used “multiple or contrasting vantage points” (Rewald 2004¹) to show reality from many different perspectives. Cubist painters “reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space” (Rewald 2004¹).

According to Jean Metzinger, Cubist painters wanted to create a fourth dimension (“a dimension greater than the third”) in order to show an object from several perspectives. They wanted to represent modern life, which was primarily characterised by mechanisation and fragmentation. The past and the present are fused in Cubist paintings and fragmented objects are depicted.

Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 combines elements of Cubism and Futurism². It was rejected by the Cubists "for being too futuristic"².

The movement between 1910 and 1912 is often referred to as Analytic Cubism and the period between 1912 and 1914 is often referred to as Synthetic Cubism³. While Analytic Cubism includes the early Cubist works of Picasso and Braque who broke down an object into a fragmentary image⁴, Synthetic Cubism includes painters who used simpler shapes and more colours and experimented with new techniques such as collage.

Guillaume Apollinaire observed that there are four different Cubist tendencies: scientific Cubism, physical Cubism, instinctive Cubism and orphic Cubism (Kolokytha 2019⁵).

The influence of Cubism was enormous and many other art forms appeared in the 20th century as a response to Cubism, for example Futurism and Vorticism. As Douglas Cooper puts it, “Cubism has proved to be probably the most potent generative force in twentieth-century art and has transformed our western ideas concerning the purpose and possibilities of pictorial representation” (Cooper 1970: 12⁶).

Works Cited

1 Rewald, Sabine. Cubism. 2004. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cube/hd_cube.html

2 https://blog.singulart.com/en/2020/05/08/nude-descending-a-staircase-no-2-1912-duchamps-stirring-piece/

3 https://www.britannica.com/art/Cubism

4 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/synthetic-cubism

5 Kolokytha, Chara. Cubism. 2019. Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/overview/cubism-revised-and-expanded

6 Cooper, Douglas. The Cubist Epoch. 1970. Phaidon Press Limited.