ubism (c.
1907-14)
Contents
• Introduction: Revolutionary Abstract Art
• What were the Origins of Cubism?
• How to Understand Cubism?
• What are the Characteristics of Cubism?
• Cubist Exhibitions
• Symbol of Artistic & Intellectual Fashion
• Cubist Sculpture
• Cubist Design in Czechoslovakia
• Legacy of Cubism
• Greatest Cubist Paintings
Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1909)
by Pablo Picasso. Pushkin Museum.
Violin and Candlestick (1910)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
By Georges Braque.
GEOMETRIC ABSTRACTION
For a guide to concrete art, see:
Abstract Paintings: Top 100.
Introduction: Revolutionary Abstract Art
In fine art, the term Cubism describes the revolutionary style of painting
invented by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) in
Paris, during the period 1907-12. Their Cubist methods - initially influenced
by the geometric motifs in the landscape compositions of the Post-
Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne - radically redefined the nature and scope
of fine art painting and, to a lesser extent, sculpture, as previously practised,
and heralded entirely new ways of representing reality. To this extent, Cubism
marks the end of the Renaissance-dominated era, and the beginning
of modern art.
Largely a type of semi abstract art - although at times it approaches full-
blown non-objective art - Cubism is traditionally classified into three stages:
(1) Early Cubist Painting (1907-9)
(2) Analytical Cubism (1909-12)
(3) Synthetic Cubism (1912-14)
In addition to Braque and Picasso, other famous artists who were closely
associated with the movement include the painters Juan Gris (1887-1927),
Fernand Leger (1881-1955), Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), Albert Gleizes
(1881-1953), Andre Lhote (1885-1962), Roger de La Fresnaye (1885-1925),
Jean Metzinger (1883-1956), Francis Picabia (1879-1953), the versatile artist
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), and the sculptors Jacques Lipchitz (1891-
1973), Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964). (See Cubist Painters, and 20th
Century Sculptors.) Cubism was the starting point for, or an essential element
in, a number of other modern art movements, including Futurism (1909-14),
Orphism (1910-13), Vorticism (1914-15), Russian Constructivism, (c.1919-
1932), and Dada (1916-1924).
Harlequin With Guitar (1919)
By Juan Gris. Private Collection.
TWENTIETH CENTURY ARTISTS
For a quick reference guide,
see: 20th Century Painters.
EVOLUTION OF VISUAL ART
For details of art movements
and styles, see: History of Art.
For the chronology and dates
of key events in the evolution
of visual arts around the world
see: History of Art Timeline.
WORLD'S GREATEST ARTWORKS
For a list of the Top 10 painters/
sculptors: Best Artists of All Time.
For a list of important styles,
see: Abstract Art Movements.
What Were the Origins of Cubist Art?
After three decades of Impressionist-inspired art, culminating in the Fauvist
colourist movement (of which, incidentally, Braque had been a member),
Picasso began to worry that this type of painting was a dead-end with less
and less potential for intellectual exploration. In this frame of mind, and
recently exposed to African tribal art whilst in Spain, he began painting Les
Demoiselles D'Avignon (1907, MoMA, New York), his ground-breaking
masterpiece, whose flat splintered planes replaced traditional linear
perspective and rounded volumes thereby signalling his break with the
naturalistic traditions of Western art. At the same time, Georges Braque, a
former student at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, had just been
overwhelmed by the 1907 Exhibition of Cezanne's paintings at the
Parisian Salon d'Automne and the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery - notably
Cezanne's masterpiece The Large Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) (1894-
1905). The pair then met in October 1907, and over the next two years
developed what became known as Cubism - a completely new method of
depicting the visual world.
NOTE: To see how non-naturalistic Impressionist painting led to abstract art
like Cubism, see: Realism to Impressionism (1830-1900). To see why Cubism
is related to classicism, please see our article: The Classical Revival in modern
art (c.1900-30).
The Origin of the Term 'Cubism'
In the summer of 1908, while staying at L'Estaque near Marseilles, Braque
painted a series of landscapes which were shown later that year at a Gallery
in Paris owned by the art dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler. When reviewing this
exhibition, the famous art critic Louis Vauxcelles commented on Braque's way
of reducing everything - sights, figures and houses - to geometric outlines, to
cubes. The following year, Vauxcelles used the expression 'bizarreries
cubiques' (cubic excentricities) - a phrase allegedly first used by Henri Matisse
- and by 1911 the term "Cubism" had entered the English language. The
description is quite apt for the blocklike forms in some of Braques early
landscapes, and in a few similiar works by Picasso painted at Horta del Ebro in
Spain, though not for their later Cubist pictures in which the forms are broken
down into facets rather than cubes. The term was taken up by two practising
Cubists, Gleizes and Metzinger in their influential 1912 book Du Cubisme.

How to Understand Cubism

First off, its very difficult to appreciate Cubism without examining its
paintings. A good start is to compare early Cubist still-lifes with traditional still
life from (say) the Baroque or Dutch Realist schools. If nothing else, you will
appreciate the radical nature of Cubism compared to traditional Western art.
Note also that Cubism was not a single style of painting: analytical Cubism is
completely different from the later synthetic Cubism. The former is all about
structure - how the picture should depict the object being painted; the latter
is exclusively concerned with the surface of the picture, and what may be
incorporated within it. One final word of advice: don't be put off by its
strangeness. Cubism is symbolic, challenging and full of ideas, but it's not a
terribly pretty form of visual art.

What Are the Characteristics of Cubism?

Ever since the Renaissance, if not before, artists painted pictures from a
single fixed viewpoint, as if they were taking a photograph. The illusion of
background depth was created using standard conventions of linear
perspective (eg. objects were shown smaller as they receded) and by painting
figures and objects with rounded shaded surfaces to convey a 3-D effect. In
addition, the scene or object was painted at a particular moment in time.

In contrast, Braque and Picasso thought that the full significance of an object
could only be captured by showing it from multiple points of view and at
different times. So, they abandoned the idea of a single fixed viewpoint and
instead used a multiplicity of viewpoints. The object was then reassembled
out of fragments of these different views, rather like a complex jigsaw puzzle.
In this way, many different views of an object were simultanously depicted in
the same picture. In a sense, it's like taking 5 different photographs (at
different times) of the same object, then cutting them up and reassembling
them in an overlapping manner on a flat surface.

Such fragmentation and rearrangement of form meant that a painting could

now be regarded less as a kind of window on the world and more as a
physical object on which a subjective response to the world is created. As far
as artistic technique was concerned, Cubism showed how a sense of solidity
and pictorial structure could be created without traditional perspective or
modelling.

Thus the Cubist style focused on the flat, two-dimensional surface of the
picture plane, and rejected the traditional conventions and techniques of
linear perspective, chiaroscuro (use of shading to show light and shadow) and
the traditional idea of imitating nature. Instead of creating natural-looking 3-
D objects, Cubist painters offered a brand new set of images reassembled
from 2-D fragments which showed the objects from several sides
simultaneously. If Fauvists and Impressionists strove to express their
personal sensation of a particular object or scene, Cubists sought to depict
the intellectual idea or form of an object, and its relationship to others.

NOTE: For other important stylistic trends similar to Cubism, please see Art
Movements, Periods, Schools (from about 100 BCE).

Cubist Exhibitions

Cubism had two identities, a public and a private. The style was jointly
evolved by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque on the basis of observations
derived from Cezanne, and also, to some extent, from
ethnographical primitivism such as that investigated by Picasso during
his African art period. It made its public debut with Braque's one-man
exhibition organized by Kahnweiler in November 1908. But after this both he
and Picasso more or less went to ground, and the Cubist banner was upheld
by others - the so-called "salon-Cubists - including Robert Delaunay, Albert
Gleizes, Fernand Leger, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Jean Metzinger at the Salon
des Independeants in 1911.

In 1912, a group of Cubists calling themselves the Section d'Or, with

Delaunay at their head, exhibited at the Galerie La Boetie. When he reviewed
this show, the art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) coined the term
'Orphism', applying it to Delaunay in particular. The first published statement
of Cubist theory was Du Cubisme, by Metzinger and Gleizes, published in
1912; this was followed by Apollinaire's Les Peintres Cubistes, published in
1913. The year 1913 also witnessed the famous Armory Show, held in
Feb/March on Lexington Avenue, Manhattan, New York, in which Marcel
Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (no 2) (1912) was the controversial,
even scandalous, attraction. (The work was later bought by the Philadelphia
Museum of Art.)

Around the beginning of 1912, Picasso and Braque switched from the Analytic
Cubism with which they started, to Synthetic Cubism - a new more decorative
and surface-oriented style created using new techniques such as collage and
papier colles. The incorporation of everyday detritus into their paintings can
be seen as the beginning of Junk Art. At this point, they were joined in their
explorations by Juan Gris.

During World War I the forced departure of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler led

to Leonce Rosenberg (1879-1947) becoming the major dealer for Cubist
painters in Paris. His brother Paul Rosenberg (1881-1959) was Picasso's main
dealer during the interwar years.

Symbol of Artistic & Intellectual Fashion

Cubism was an art-style with attitude! It was iconoclastic, challenging,

intellectual. It focused on ideas rather than pretty pictures. But it captured
the spirit of the age - the age of challenging French musicians Claude
Debussy (1862-1918), Erik Satie (1866-1925) and Maurice Ravel (1875-
1937), and analytical Cubism in particular corresponded with the ideas of the
French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), whose concept
of simultaneity stated that the past overlaps with the present, which itself
flows into the future. Meanwhile, fine art was at something of a crossroads.
Impressionism was yesterday's fashion, the Belle Epoque of Parisian poster
art was over, Toulouse-Lautrec was dead, Art Nouveau was in decline, and
even colourful Fauvism was running out of steam. At the same time, the
political temperature was rising across Europe, exposing horrific possibilities
of war and chaos. In its assault on the old certainties of Renaissance art,
Cubism mirrored the calls for change in many other disciplines, as well as the
world at large. Note: For an explanation of some of the great Cubist works by
Picasso and others, see: Analysis of Modern Paintings (1800-2000).

Cubist Sculpture

Cubist sculpture, like Constructivism, was too radical to become an integral

part of the artistic mainstream. Even so, Cubist ideas were also absorbed and
adapted by those working in other disciplines such as abstract sculpture, as
well as architecture and applied art. Cubist sculpture developed from collage
and papier colle, and fed into assemblage. The new techniques not only
liberated sculptors to employ new subject matter, but also prompted them to
think of sculptures as built, not just modelled, objects. The mathematical and
architectural qualities found in Gris's work were very influential here, as seen
in the work of Archipenko and Ossip Zadkine, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and
Henri Laurens, the Lithuanian Jacques Lipchitz, the Hungarian-born French
sculptor Joseph Csaky (1888-1971), and the Czech sculptors Emil Filla (1882-
1953) and Otto Gutfreund (1889-1927).

Picasso (1881-1973)
Head of a Woman (1909) MoMA, New York.
Guitar (1912) Musee Picasso, Paris.

Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918)

The Large Horse (1914) Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris.

Henri Laurens (1885-1954)

Head of a Woman (1915) MoMA, New York.

Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964)

Woman Walking (1912) private collection.
Marching Soldier (1917) private collection.

Naum Gabo (1890-1977)

Head of a Woman (1917-20) MoMA, NY.

Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973)

Man With Guitar (1915) MoMA, NY.
Sailor With Guitar (1915) Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris.
The Bathers III (1917) Barnes Foundation.
Cubist Design in Czechoslovakia

Cubist theories of design were taken up enthusiastically in Czechoslovakia by

artists, sculptors, designers and architects, who translated the characteristics
of Cubist painting (simplified geometric forms, contrasts of light and dark,
prism-like facets, angular lines) into architecture and decorative art, including
furniture, jewellery art, tableware, ceramics and landscaping. Prominent were
the members of the Group of Plastic Artists, which was founded in 1911 by
Filla to focus on Cubism. The group was active in Prague until 1914 and
included sculptors Filla and Gutfreund, as well as architects and designers
Pavel Janak, Josef Gocar (1880-1945), Josef Chochol (1880-1956), Vlastislav
Hofman (1884-1964) and Otokar Novotny. Gutfreund published influential
articles in the group's monthly journal.

The House of the Black Madonna (1911-12), a department store designed by

Gocar, was the first piece of Cubist architecture to be built. The Grand Cafe
Orient situated on the first floor, complete with a Cubist interior and Cubist
light fixtures, rapidly became a meeting place for the avant-garde until its
closure in the mid-1920s. The building is now part of the Czech Museum of
Fine Arts and houses the Czech Cubism Museum, which was opened in 1994,
containing a permanent exhibition of Cubist paintings, furniture, sculptures
and porcelain. The Czech Cubism Museum also contains an exhibition of
collages by the Czech artist and poet Jiri Kolar, who was also active in France.
His ideas later introduced collage to a wider context. Paris may have been the
site of the birth of Cubism, but it was in Prague that its possibilities were
explored most fully, as a whole way of life.

Legacy

Ultimately Cubism is less important in its own right - as an artistic style - and
more important as an indicator of what is possible in fine art. It extended the
boundaries of art to include alternatives to traditional single point
perspective; it demonstrated that fine art could be made out of anything,
even scraps of rubbish; and it raised important questions about the nature of
reality in art. It was one of the most important movements associated with
the Ecole de Paris, and made significant contributions to avant garde art in
the early 20th century. In particular, Cubism had a widespread and persistent
influence on a wide variety of painting movements, including, most
importantly, Futurism(c.1909-14) - see for instance Woman on the
Balcony (1912, Private Collection) by Carlo Carra (1881-1966). Other
movements and styles influenced by Cubist motifs include: French Orphism
(c.1910-13), English Vorticism (c.1913-19), Russian Rayonism (c.1912-15),
and Constructivism (c.1914-25), the Dutch design group De Stijl (1917-31)
as well as American styles such as Synchromism (c.1913-18)
and Precisionism (1920s). Its anti-art elements stimulated the emergence
of Dada in 1916, and Surrealism in 1924.

uturism, Italian Futurismo, Russian Futurizm, early 20th-

century artistic movement centred in Italy that emphasized the
dynamism, speed, energy, and power of the machine and the vitality,
change, and restlessness of modern life. During the second decade of the
20th century, the movement’s influence radiated outward across most
of Europe, most significantly to the Russian avant-garde. The most-
significant results of the movement were in the visual arts and poetry.

READ MORE ON THIS TOPIC

theatre: Futurism in Italy

Although it produced one major dramatist, Luigi Pirandello, in the period

between the two world wars, the Italian theatre contributed very…

Futurism was first announced on February 20, 1909, when the Paris
newspaper Le Figaro published a manifesto by the Italian poet and
editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti coined the
word Futurism to reflect his goal of discarding the art of the past and
celebrating change, originality, and innovation in culture and society.
Marinetti’s manifestoglorified the new technology of the automobile and
the beauty of its speed, power, and movement. Exalting violence and
conflict, he called for the sweeping repudiation of traditional values and
the destruction of cultural institutions such as museums and libraries.
The manifesto’s rhetoric was passionately bombastic; its aggressive tone
was purposely intended to inspire public anger and arouse controversy.

BRITANNICA QUIZ

Meet the Futurists

When did Futurism begin?

Painting And Sculpture

Marinetti’s manifesto inspired a group of young painters in Milan to
apply Futurist ideas to the visual arts. Umberto Boccioni, Carlo
Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini published
several manifestos on painting in 1910. Like Marinetti, they glorified
originality and expressed their disdain for inherited artistic traditions.
Although they were not yet working in what was to become the Futurist
style, the group called for artists to have an emotional involvement in
the dynamics of modern life. They wanted to depict visually the
perception of movement, speed, and change. To achieve this, the Futurist
painters adopted the Cubist technique of using fragmented and
intersecting plane surfaces and outlines to show several simultaneous
views of an object. But the Futurists additionally sought to portray the
object’s movement, so their works typically include rhythmic spatial
repetitions of an object’s outlines during transit. The effect resembles
multiple photographic exposures of a moving object. An example is
Balla’s painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), in which a
trotting dachshund’s legs are depicted as a blur of multiple images. The
Futurist paintings differed from Cubist work in other important ways.
While the Cubists favoured still life and portraiture, the Futurists
preferred subjects such as speeding automobiles and trains, racing
cyclists, dancers, animals, and urban crowds. Futurist paintings have
brighter and more vibrant colours than Cubist works, and they
reveal dynamic, agitated compositions in which rhythmically swirling
forms reach crescendos of violent movement.

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, oil on canvas by Giacomo Balla, 1912; in the Buffalo Fine Arts
Academy, New York.Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; bequest of A. Conger Goodyear
and Gift of George F. Goodyear, 1964

Boccioni also became interested in sculpture, publishing a manifesto on

the subject in the spring of 1912. He is considered to have most fully
realized his theories in two sculptures, Development of a Bottle in
Space(1912), in which he represented both the inner and
outer contours of a bottle, and Unique Forms of Continuity in
Space (1913), in which a human figure is not portrayed as one solid form
but is instead composed of the multiple planes in space through which
the figure moves.

Boccioni, Umberto: Unique Forms of Continuity in SpaceUnique Forms of Continuity in Space,

bronze sculpture by Umberto Boccioni, c. 1913; in the Mattioli Collection.The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York, Bequest of Lydia Winston Malbin, 1989, 1990.38.3, www.metmuseum.org

Futurist principles extended to architecture as well. Antonio

Sant’Eliaformulated a Futurist manifesto on architecture in 1914. His
visionary drawings of highly mechanized cities and boldly modern
skyscrapers prefigure some of the most imaginative 20th-century
architectural planning.
Boccioni, who had been the most-talented artist in the group, and
Sant’Elia both died during military service in 1916. Boccioni’s death,
combined with expansion of the group’s personnel and the sobering
realities of the devastation caused by World War I, effectively brought
an end to the Futurist movement as an important historical force in the
visual arts.