Cubism

Cubism was an early 20th century art movement pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Cubist paintings abandoned the traditional Renaissance perspective in art. They fragmented subjects into abstracted forms and reassembled them from multiple angles to represent the subject’s essence. Cubism shattered conventions of Western art and opened the door to abstraction.
Cubism emerged in France between 1907 and 1911. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Braque’s series of landscapes initiated the movement. They aimed to show all sides of a subject simultaneously rather than from a single point of view. Their paintings featured flattened forms, shallow depth and muted colors. Subjects were broken up and reassembled in an abstracted collage-like style.
Within years, European avant-garde circles embraced Cubism as the decade’s most influential modernist development. Picasso and Braque continued evolving their style into the 1910s. A second phase known as Synthetic Cubism incorporated collage techniques using patterned paper, newspaper and tobacco wrappers. These introduced new textures and a bolder, decorative quality.
Cubism had a vast influence on 20th century art, including Constructivism, Surrealism and Abstract art. Its vision of representing complex subjects from multiple perspectives revolutionized visual culture. Today Cubism is appreciated for opening up an entirely new system of abstraction that liberated art from the constraints of tradition.
At its heart, Cubism reflected the dynamism and fragmentation of modern life. Through a radical new pictorial language, Picasso, Braque and their followers aimed to grasp the inner life of their subjects – breaking free from surface appearance to penetrate deeper truths about the world as experienced in the modern era. Their influence transformed the course of art with an entirely new visual syntax for the 20th century.