Cubism

What is cubism? Cubism was an art movement invented jointly by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Picasso and Braque shared their ideas and the result of their combined vision was called cubism. The foundation of the movement was Picasso’s early work including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which gradually developed into the style we now recognise as cubism.

Cubism was the first of the Abstract Art movements of the 20th century. It was praised by the avant garde and seen as the future of art. It quickly took hold amongst the arty elite in Europe. The public however gave this radical new movement a luke warm reception at first. An art critic at the time said one canvas looked like a sheet of broken glass.

Some say the name was suggested by Picasso’s friend and rival Henri Matisse others credit the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles with coining the term.

In cubism, traditional ideas of painting such as proportions and perspective were abandoned in favour of a minds eye or total view of an object.

Cubists argued that the mind sees an object from many different viewpoints simultaneously and can hold all these in the memory to create what we know as the object. When seen from above or below or from behind or to the side, the mind can put all these viewpoints together simultaneously to recognise an object.

Perspective had been used in painting since the 15th century to reproduce a three dimensional image on a two dimensional canvas. This wasn’t enough for the cubists who wanted to capture the notion of several viewpoints at once to create a multi dimensional image on a two dimensional canvas. They wanted a total view, a multi dimensional view.

Organic shapes were distilled into geometric angular patterns of colour. Cubism was not haphazard but very analytical and each shape was created with purpose and design. Subjects were carefully deconstructed and then reconstructed as if seen from several viewpoints simultaneously. This shattered the ideals of conventional art at the time which Picasso, Braque and their contemporaries considered too stuck in the past.

There were two stages of cubism, first came Synthetic Cubism between 1907-1911 followed by Analytic Cubism 1912-1921. Although artists continued working in the cubist style, around this time the vitality of the movement petered out. The Surrealist movement came along and gradually replaced it.