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.’

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).

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 block-like forms in some of the Braque landscapes that occasioned Vauxcelles's jibes 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 in corporating 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).

cubism art movement, primarily in painting, originating in Paris c.1907.

Cubist Theory

Cubism began as an intellectual revolt against the artistic expression of previous eras. Among the specific elements abandoned by the cubists were the sensual appeal of paint texture and color, subject matter with emotional charge or mood, the play of light on form, movement, atmosphere, and the illusionism that proceeded from scientifically based perspective. To replace these they employed an analytic system in which the three-dimensional subject (usually still life) was fragmented and redefined within a shallow plane or within several interlocking and often transparent planes.

Analytic and Synthetic Cubism

In the analytic phase (1907-12) the cubist palette was severely limited, largely to black, browns, grays, and off-whites. In addition, forms were rigidly geometric and compositions subtle and intricate. Cubist abstraction as represented by the analytic works of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris intended an appeal to the intellect. The cubists sought to show everyday objects as the mind, not the eye, perceives them—from all sides at once. The trompe l'oeil element of collage was also sometimes used.

During the later, synthetic phase of cubism (1913 through the 1920s), paintings were composed of fewer and simpler forms based to a lesser extent on natural objects. Brighter colors were employed to a generally more decorative effect, and many artists continued to use collage in their compositions. The works of Picasso, Braque, and Gris are also representative of this phase.

The Scope of Cubism

In painting the major exponents of cubism included Picasso, Braque, Jean Metzinger, Gris, Duchamp, and Léger. The chief segments of the cubist movement included the Montmartre-based Bâteau-Lavoir group of artists and poets (Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude and Leo Stein, Modigliani, Picabia, Delaunay, Archipenko, and others); the Puteaux group of the Section d'Or salon (J. Villon, Léger, Picabia, Kupka, Marcoussis, Gleizes, Apollinaire, and others); the Orphists (Delaunay, Duchamp, Picabia, and Villon; see orphism ); and the experimenters in collage who influenced cubist sculpture (Laurens and Lipchitz).

Cubist Inspiration and Influence

In painting the several sources of cubist inspiration included the later work of Cézanne; the geometric forms and compressed picture space in his paintings appealed especially to Braque, who developed them in his own works. African sculpture, particularly mask carvings, had enormous influence in the early years of the movement. Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) is one of the most significant examples of this influence. Within this revolutionary composition lay much of the basic material of cubism.

The cubist break with the tradition of imitation of nature was completed in the works of Picasso, Braque, and their many groups of followers. While few painters remained faithful to cubism's rigorous tenets, many profited from its discipline. Although the cubist groups were largely dispersed after World War I, their collective break from visual realism had an enriching and decisive influence on the development of 20th-century art. It provided a new stylistic vocabulary and a technical idiom that remain forceful today.

Bibliography

See G. Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters (1913, tr. 1949); R. Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (rev. ed. 1967); D. Cooper, The Cubist Epoch (1971); C. Green, Cubism and Its Enemies (1987); W. Rubin, Pioneering Cubism (1989).

CUBISM

CUBISM. The term "cubism" was first used by the French critic Louis Vauxcelles in his review of a 1908 exhibition of paintings by Georges Braque. Cubist artists abandoned academically correct representation, which approximated the actual appearance of objects. Instead, the Cubists represented objects from multiple points of view and forms were reduced to basic geometric configurations. In theory, the Cubists justified their experiments as a search to uncover the essential structure of an object and its relation to other parts of a composition. Cubist painters such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris were profoundly affected by the art of Paul Cézanne, who maintained that natural forms could be reduced to simple geometric figures such as the cube, the sphere, and the cylinder. The Cubists also admired the art of so-called primitive cultures such as those of Africa and Egypt. Cubism made a decisive break with the centuries-old Western tradition of illusionistic representation, and in so doing initiated a revolution in the visual arts that all subsequent painters dealt with in some way.

A few American painters were exposed to cubism early on—notably Max Weber, who worked in Paris from 1905 until 1909, when he returned to New York City. Weber certainly knew such cubist artists as Picasso and in New York City during the winter of 1910–1911 Weber adopted cubist theory to American subject matter in canvases such as his Rush Hour, New York (1915). Weber's urban subjects combine his interest in cubism with the Italian avant-garde futurist artists' concern for dynamic movement and nature in flux. Weber's interest in cubist-futurist experiments lasted only a few years, but had a profound impact on John Marin and Joseph Stella, both active in New York City. Marin's The Woolworth Building (1912) and Stella's Brooklyn Bridge (1917) illustrate how lessons from both the French and Italian avant-gardes could be used to express the hectic pace of big city America. Cubist painting in France after World War I was increasingly concerned with creating compositions from areas of flat, often bright colors. Artists such as Stuart Davis, who encountered cubism at the 1913 Armory Show, owed their subsequent highly individual development to their early study of cubist work.

Still other expatriate American artists such as Morgan Russell, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, and Patrick Henry Bruce formed a movement that they called synchronism, which combined cubist analysis of form with a colorful palette inspired by the work of contemporary French artists such as Robert Delaunay. By the mid-1920s, the importance of cubism for American artists was in decline, but the movement was the stepping-off point for the subsequent development of American abstract art.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Golding, John. Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907–1914. London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988.

Rubin, William. Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989.

VictorCarlson

See alsoArmory Show ; Art: Painting .

Cubism. Movement in art originating with the work of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963), and mainly dating from c.1905 to 1914. Cubism departed from the notion of art as an imitation of Nature that had been paramount in Europe from Renaissance times, and also retreated from traditional perspective. Instead it attempted to achieve the illusion of three-dimensionsal forms in a different way by showing solids and volumes in two-dimen-sional flat planes to suggest space. To do this, many aspects of familiar objects were represented all at once, their forms shown on various geometrical planes redrawn from many vantage-points to create new combinations. Thus it claimed to be a new way of seeing, and tried to indicate that which was visible as well as everything known about the item depicted.

The relationship of Cubism and architecture was at best tentative, often involving the application of Cubist decorations to stripped Neo-Classical buildings. Hints of Cubist themes are found in Art Deco and Modernist work: however, even in Prague, the Czech Cubist group ( Čapek, Chochol, Gočár, Hofman, Janák, and Novotny) did little more than treat façades with prismatic ornament not unlike that of Expressionism. The fundamentals of Cubism, however, including asymmetrical composition, interpenetration of volumes, transparency, and perception simultaneously from various points of view, became enshrined in the Modern Movement, and they played no small part in its evolution.

Bibliography

Barr (1936);
Blau & Troy (eds.) (1997);
Burkhardt & and Lamarová (1982);
Chilvers, Osborne, & Farr (eds.) (1988);
Golding (1988);
Svácha (1995);
Vegesack (ed.) (1992)

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.

cub·ism / ˈkyoōˌbizəm/ • n. an early 20th-century style and movement in art, esp. painting, in which use was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, and, later, collage. DERIVATIVES: cub·ist n. & adj. cub·is·tic / kyoōˈbistik/ adj.

cubism an early 20th-century style and movement in art, especially painting, in which perspective with a single viewpoint was abandoned and use was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, and, later, collage.

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