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 image, presenting the artist's accumulated idea of a subject rather than an imitation of its appearance at any one moment. Such fragmentation and rearrangement of form meant that a picture could now be regarded less as a kind of window through which an image of the world is seen, and more as an artificial structure on which a subjective response to the world is created; painting became a matter of two-dimensional composition rather than three-dimensional illusionism. This new approach proved extraordinarily influential, and John Golding, one of the leading writers on the subject, has described Cubism as ‘the pivotal movement in the art of the first half of this century’ and as ‘perhaps the most important and certainly the most complete and radical artistic revolution since the Renaissance'.

Braque and Picasso met in October 1907. Their friendship was to some extent an attraction of opposites, for as Wilhelm Uhde wrote, ‘Braque's temperament was limpid, precise and bourgeois; Picasso's sombre, excessive and revolutionary'. Nevertheless, at times they worked in such close harmony—‘like mountaineers roped together’ in Braque's memorable phrase—that it can be difficult to differentiate their hands. At the time they met, 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 (MOMA, New York, 1907), 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, had shown 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. In Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, two of the figures are not only given faces resembling African masks, but also are twisted so that more of them is visible than could be seen from a single viewpoint. Like others who saw the picture at this time, ‘Braque was shocked and troubled by its violence', but he was also ‘profoundly excited and moved. What is so remarkable is that he seems to have realised instantly what it took so many other painters several years to perceive and digest: that Picasso, leaning heavily on Cézanne and exhilarated by his contact with African art, had for the first time intuitively but consciously broken with traditional Western single viewpoint perspective’ ( John Golding, Georges Braque, 1966). The impact of Picasso on Braque's work was immediate; in the winter of 1907–8 he painted a Large Nude (private collection) that is virtually a variant of one of the figures in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Because Cubism made such a radical break with established traditions, initiating a new concept of pictorial space, attempts have been made to link it with new views about the nature of reality that were coming to the fore at the same time ( Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, for example, was published in 1905). However, although Braque and Picasso were intellectual in approach, they were intuitive rather than scientific in their methods, and Picasso himself stressed that Cubism was fundamentally about painting: ‘Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music and whatnot have all been related to cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which brought bad results, blinding people with theories. Cubism has kept itself within the limits and limitations of painting, never pretending to go beyond it.’ In this respect it is noteworthy that Braque's and Picasso's Cubist paintings are unconcerned with depicting things that evoke the modern world (indeed, they were necessarily limited to portraying a repertoire of familiar, fairly ‘timeless’ forms, in order that the spectator could appreciate how these forms had been manipulated); their favourite subjects were still-lifes (often involving fruit bowls or musical instruments), landscapes, portraits, and figure studies (Braque being more inclined to landscapes and Picasso to figures). The support of their dealer Kahnweiler allowed them the freedom to experiment, repeating favourite themes again and again as they developed their ideas.

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 rejected by the Salon d’ Automne later that year, and a member of the selecting jury (Matisse according to some sources) is said to have remarked slightingly that they were composed of ‘petits cubes'. (According to Frank Rutter, citing Léonce Rosenberg as his authority, the word ‘cubisme’ itself was uttered on this occasion.) Soon afterwards these pictures were shown at Kahnweiler's gallery, and in reviewing this exhibition in Gil Blas (14 Nov. 1908), Louis Vauxcelles made reference to Braque's way of reducing ‘everything—sites, figures, and houses—to geometric outlines, to cubes'. The following March, describing some Braques shown at the Salon des Indépendants, 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 block-like forms in some of the Braque landscapes that occasioned Vauxcelles's jibes, such as Houses at L'Estaque (Kunstmuseum, Berne, 1908), and in a few similar works by Picasso, but it is not really appropriate to their mature Cubist pictures, in which the forms tend to be broken into facets rather than fashioned into cubes (and it is completely inappropriate to later Cubism). However, they soon accepted the term, as did their followers.

Braque and Picasso's working relationship was at its closest in what John Golding calls ‘the “look-alike” years between the autumn of 1910 and the autumn of 1912', when the similarities between their work were ‘so great that even the trained and experienced eye has occasionally to pause and blink'. During this period they worked in nearby studios in Montmartre, but Picasso moved to Montparnasse in 1912, and the outbreak of the First World War two years later ended their collaboration. Their work of 1910–12 is sometimes characterized as ‘High Cubism', in reference to the brief peak of poise and equilibrium it is thought to have attained; and another term that has been applied to it is ‘Hermetic Cubism', conveying the idea that at this time Cubism reached its most esoteric, near-abstract state. More commonly, however, Braque and Picasso's mature Cubism is divided into two phases—Analytical Cubism (1909–11) and Synthetic Cubism (1912–14).

The ‘Analytical’ phase is so called ‘because one can find evidence of the artists' having taken objects apart, of having analyzed them into their compound elements, only to rearrange them on the canvas in a new and exclusively pictorial order’ (George Heard Hamilton). The relatively solid massing of the 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. There is no sense of recession, the image seeming to be compressed into a shallow, subtly modelled continuum that stretches across the entire picture surface (Braque referred to ‘tactile space’ and ‘manual space', and later wrote ‘That is what early Cubist painting was—a research into space'). This fascination with pictorial structure led to colour being downplayed (‘colour disturbed the space in our paintings’ said Braque), and the archetypal Analytical Cubist paintings are virtually monochromatic, painted in muted browns or warm greys. Examples—showing how close the two artists were in style at this date—are Braque's The Portuguese ( Kunstmuseum, Basel, 1911) and Picasso's The Accordionist (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1911).

In The Portuguese, Braque introduced the use of stencilled lettering, a practice that Picasso adopted soon afterwards. By the following year, Braque was experimenting with mixing materials such as sand and sawdust with his paint to create interesting textures and emphasize further the idea that the picture was a physical object with its own integrity rather than an illusionistic representation of something else. He refined this notion again by imitating the effect of wood graining (using techniques that he had learnt in his early days as a painter-decorator). 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), consisting of compositions of pieces of decorative paper. 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. A consequence of this concern with greater surface richness was that Braque and Picasso reintroduced colour to their paintings. Examples are Braque's Still-life with a Violin, Glass and Pipe on a Table (also known as Music, Phillips Collection, Washington, 1914) and Picasso's Still-life with a Fruit Dish on a Table (Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, 1914–15).

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. In that year the movement had its first organized showing when a number of Cubists exhibited together at the Salon des Indépendants, among them Delaunay, Gleizes, La Fresnaye, Metzinger, and Picabia (they had the support of advanced critics such as Apollinaire, but their work was met with scorn or bewilderment by many people). The following year, two of these artists— Gleizes and Metzinger—published the first book on the subject, Du Cubisme. It was translated into English in 1913, and the first book written in English on the subject, A. J. Eddy's Cubists and Post-Impressionism, was published in Chicago in 1914 and in London in 1915. British and American audiences had already been introduced to Braque's and Picasso's work through Roger Fry's second Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912 and the Armory Show in 1913. However, the two founders of the movement did not take part when their followers exhibited collectively; Braque's and Picasso's Cubist work was generally sold by Kahnweiler to a select group of well-informed clients rather than displayed in the open marketplace in the various salons. For this reason, the public image of Cubism in its early days was provided mainly by the lesser figures rather than the chief masters. Some art historians therefore use the terms ‘true’ or ‘essential’ Cubism (coined by Douglas Cooper) to distinguish the work of Braque and Picasso (and later Gris and to a lesser extent Léger) from the work of the ‘Salon Cubists', whom Cooper described as ‘derivative'.

The First World War interrupted the course of Cubism, but it re-emerged as a powerful force at the end of the war, with Léonce Rosenberg beginning a series of Cubist exhibitions at his Galerie de l'Effort Moderne in 1918. By this time Cubism had already been highly influential on avant-garde art throughout Europe and had made a significant impact in the USA. It 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 (although the Puteaux Group exhibited a model of a ‘Maison Cubiste’ at the 1912 Salon d'Automne). Several Czech architects, mainly members of the Group of Plastic Artists, broke up the façades of their buildings with abstract, prismatic forms in a way that clearly recalls the fragmentation of Analytical Cubism. The best-known of these architects was probably Josef Gočár (1880–1945), who also designed Cubist furniture; several pieces by him are in the Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague. In applied arts more generally, Cubism was one of the sources of Art Deco.

Cubism, indeed, had a huge and varied impact on 20th-century art, becoming part of the common currency of ideas. Simon Wilson (What is Cubism?, 1983) describes it as ‘the most important and influential single innovation in the early history of modern art. 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.’