cubism

cubism Revolutionary, 20th-century art movement. It originated in c.1907 when Picasso and Braque began working together to develop ideas for changing the scope of painting. Abandoning traditional methods of creating pictures with one-point perspective, they built up three-dimensional images on the canvas using fragmented solids and volumes. In 1908, Braque held an exhibition of his new paintings that provoked the critic Louis Vauxcelles to describe them as bizarre arrangements of ‘cubes’. The initial experimental, ‘analytical’, phase (1907–12), of which Picasso and Braque were the main exponents, was inspired mainly by African sculpture and the later works of Cézanne. They treated their subjects in muted grey and beige so as not to distract attention from the new concept. The ‘synthetic’ phase (1912–14) introduced much more colour and decoration and the techniques of collage and papiers collés were very popular. Cubism attracted many painters as well as sculptors. These included Léger, Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay-Terk and František Kupka. The most important cubist sculptors (apart from Picasso) were Archipenko, Lipchitz and Ossip Zadkin. Although it was not an abstract idiom, cubism revolutionized artistic expression, and lent itself easily to adaptation and development. It is probably the most important single influence on 20th-century progressive art.