Cubism

Cubism. A term describing a revolutionary style of painting created jointly by Braque and Picasso in the period 1907–14 and subsequently applied to a broad movement, centred in Paris but international in scope, in which their ideas were adopted and adapted by many other artists. These artists were mainly painters, but Cubist ideas and motifs were also used in sculpture, and to a more limited and superficial degree in the applied arts and occasionally in architecture. Cubism was a complex phenomenon, but in essence it involved what Juan Gris (its leading exponent apart from the two founders) called ‘a new way of representing the world’. Abandoning the idea of a single fixed viewpoint that had dominated European painting for centuries, Cubist pictures used a multiplicity of viewpoints, so that many different aspects of an object could be simultaneously depicted in the same picture. Such fragmentation and rearrangement of form meant that a painting could now be regarded less as a kind of window through which an image of the world is seen, and more as a physical object on which a subjective response to the world is created. This new approach proved extraordinarily influential, and John Golding has described Cubism as ‘perhaps the most important and certainly the most complete and radical artistic revolution since the Renaissance’.

Braque and Picasso met in October 1907. At this time, Braque had recently been overwhelmed by the memorial exhibition of Cézanne's work at the Salon d'Automne, and Picasso had spent much of the year working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906–7, MoMA, New York), in which the angular and aggressive forms owed much to the influence of African sculpture. These two sources—Cézanne and primitive art—were of great importance in the genesis of Cubism. Cézanne's late work, with its subtle overlapping patches of colour, showed how a sense of solidity and pictorial structure could be created without traditional perspective or modelling; and primitive art offered an example of expressively distorted forms and freedom from inhibition.

The pictures to which the term ‘Cubism’ was first applied were a group of landscapes painted by Braque in the summer of 1908, when he was staying at L'Estaque, near Marseilles. They were shown later that year at Kahnweiler's gallery, and in reviewing this exhibition Louis Vauxcelles (see Fauvism) made reference to Braque's way of reducing ‘everything—sites, figures, and houses—to geometric outlines, to cubes’. The following year Vauxcelles used the expression ‘bizarreries cubiques’ (cubic eccentricities), and by 1911 the term ‘Cubism’ had entered the English language. The word is undoubtedly apposite for the blocklike forms in some of the Braque landscapes that occasioned Vauxcelles's gibes and in a few similar works by Picasso, but it is not really appropriate to their later Cubist pictures, in which the forms tend to be broken into facets rather than fashioned into cubes. However, they soon accepted the term, as did their followers.

Braque and Picasso's mature Cubist work is usually divided into two phases—Analytical Cubism (1909–11) and Synthetic Cubism (1912–14). In the ‘Analytical’ phase, the relatively solid massing of their earliest Cubist paintings gave way to a process of composition in which the forms of the object depicted are fragmented into a large number of small, intricately hinged planes that fuse with one another and with the surrounding space. This fascination with pictorial structure led to colour being downplayed, and the archetypal Analytical Cubist paintings are virtually monochromatic, painted in muted browns or warm greys. Examples—showing how similar the two artists were in style at this date—are Braque's The Portuguese (1911, Kunstmuseum, Basle) and Picasso's The Accordionist (1911, Guggenheim Mus., New York). At times they worked in such close harmony—‘like mountaineers roped together’ in Braque's memorable phrase—that even experts can have difficulty in differentiating their hands. In The Portuguese, Braque introduced the use of stencilled lettering, and by the following year he was experimenting with mixing materials such as sand and sawdust with his paint to create interesting textures. He refined this notion again by imitating the effect of wood graining. Later in the same year, 1912, Picasso took this a stage further when he produced his first collages, and Braque quickly followed with his own type of collage—the papier collé.

These developments—marking a move away from the very cerebral near-abstraction of Analytical Cubism to a more relaxed and decorative art incorporating everyday ephemera—ushered in Synthetic Cubism. This reversed the compositional principle of Analytical Cubism, the image being built up (‘synthesized’) from pre-existing elements or shapes rather than being created through a process of fragmentation. One consequence of this concern with greater surface richness was that Braque and Picasso reintroduced colour to their paintings. In the Synthetic phase of Cubism, Juan Gris played as important a role as Braque or Picasso, and by this time many other artists had been won over to the movement (including Fernard Léger, who is often considered the fourth major Cubist). Indeed, Cubism had become the dominant avant-garde idiom in Paris as early as 1911, Delaunay, Gleizes, La Fresnaye, Metzinger, and Picabia being among the adherents by this time.

Cubism proved immensely adaptable and was the starting point or an essential component of several other movements, including Constructivism, Futurism, Orphism, Purism, and Vorticism, as well as a spur to the imagination of countless individual artists. These included not only painters, but also sculptors, who adapted Cubist ideas in various ways, notably by the opening up of forms so that voids as well as solids form distinct shapes. Picasso himself made Cubist sculpture, and other leading artists who worked in the idiom include Archipenko (whose international success played a great part in spreading Cubist ideas), Duchamp-Villon, Laurens, Lipchitz, and Zadkine. Another noted Cubist sculptor was the Czech Otto Gutfreund, who was part of a remarkable flowering of Cubist art and design in Prague in the years immediately before the First World War. This was the only place where there was a significant adaptation of Cubism to architecture; several Czech architects broke up the façades of their buildings with abstract, prismatic forms in a way that clearly recalls the fragmentation of Analytical Cubism. In the applied arts, Cubism was one of the sources of Art Deco, and more generally it has had a huge and varied impact on modern pictorial culture, becoming part of the common currency of ideas: ‘Cubist painting gave to artists complete freedom to deal with reality in art in any way they chose. Cubist collage gave them in addition the equally radical freedom to make art out of anything they chose. These developments have been enormously fruitful—they have been and they continue to be the basis of much of the best of modern art’ ( Simon Wilson, What is Cubism?, 1983).