In Italy, the Cubists inspired Futurism in the UK, Vorticism in Russia, Constructivism, and in Germany, Expressionism. Their influence on future generations of artists continues to this day. Other important artists who have worked in a Cubist style include Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and Robert Delaunay. By appropriating objects from commodity culture, the Cubists further challenged the notion of “Fine Art.” This stage also introduced more colors and a lighter, more playful mood to the style. The prefix "synthetic" referred to the idea of creating a synthesis of fragments from the real world and the painting world. ![]() During this period, the Cubists started pasting real objects like newspaper, colored paper, or cloth onto the canvas in place of former planes of the subject, inventing a collage. That’s why the paintings of this phase look austere, formal, and cold.Īfter 1912, Cubism entered a new stage called Synthetic Cubism. Like many Analytical Cubism pieces, the painting uses very few colors, because the Cubists wanted the viewer to concentrate on the shapes more than the color. According to Picasso, this kind of representation gives the viewer a more accurate understanding of what we really see when we look at objects around us. The second guitar player appears sliced up in two-dimensional planes overlapping to the point that the image is nearly unrecognizable. ![]() One is from his early Blue Period, while the other one is from the latter days of Analytical Cubism. One can see the differences by looking at two of Picasso’s paintings on the same subject - a guitar player. The first stage was called Analytical Cubism. However, it’s important to note that Cubism did not arrive all at once, but rather in various stages and submovements. This allowed the artists to convey a sense of totality without freezing a moment in time. Hence, Picasso and Braque started analyzing parts of objects by rendering them from multiple perspectives. The Cubists decided to break from the belief that a painting should be a window onto a realistic scene and instead show it as it truly is - a flat, two-dimensional surface. Drawing upon Paul Cezanne’s idea that objects don’t have just one perspective, Braque used multiple viewpoints to break down objects into basic, geometrical forms such as cubes and cones, condensed in a space where foreground and background could merge. Since the Renaissance, Western European painting had been preoccupied with creating an illusion of a three-dimensional space on a flat, two-dimensional surface. Imagine how strange and disturbing this radical new aesthetic must have felt for audiences of the day? So strange that, after seeing Braque’s painting, “Houses at L’Estaque,” art critic Louis Vauxcelles referred to it as “bizarreries cubiques” (cubic oddities), unaware that he had actually named the movement. Picasso once said that he learned what painting was really about after seeing African masks at the Ethnographic Museum in Paris. Besides Cézanne, the Cubists were greatly influenced by African and Native American cultures, Assyrian and Egyptian art, and Iberian sculpture. Goodbye, linear perspective! Goodbye, chiaroscuro! Goodbye, old standards of beauty! The fundamentals of Western European painting simply didn’t matter anymore.Ĭubist art also introduced the popularity of mask-like faces in paintings. We came to see distorted female bodies composed of flat, abstracted geometric shapes in a compressed space, with no central vanishing point. ![]() Les Demoiselles d’Avignon gave art critics a good indication of where Cubism would go in the following years. Fortunately, he managed to pull himself together, and the two artists began formulating the new visual language of modernity. When George Braque saw it for the first time, he went into a state of shock. It is considered to be among the first Cubist paintings, marking a radical break from the style of Western European art in years past. The effect of the exhibit becomes clear when we look at Picasso’s painting, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (The Young Ladies of Avignon), which was painted the same year. The event had an immediate and profound impact on the young artists of the day. Fundamental change always needs a watershed moment, and for visual culture at the beginning of the 20th century, this was Paul Cézanne’s posthumous retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. Cubism began in France in 1907, as a response to a rapidly changing world shaped by technology, new inventions, and scientific discoveries.
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