Cubism

Cubism is an influential modernist art movement that emerged in Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century. The term was established by Parisian art critics, derived from Louis Vauxcelles, and possibly Henri Matisse’s description of Braque’s reductive style in paintings of 1908. Subsequently, it soon became a commonplace term and was widely used to describe the formalist innovations in painting pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque from 1907 to 1914. Cubism signals the break with Renaissance tradition through the rejection of three-dimensional illusionist composition. The dull and monochromatic palette (Picasso, Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, 1911) of early Cubist painting, in addition to its emphasis on geometry, can be alternatively viewed as a reaction against the pure bright colors of the Fauves and the spontaneous color treatment of the Impressionists. Cubist art was largely influenced by the late work of Paul Cézanne and the study of primitive art and, more precisely, African religious masks, statuettes, and artefacts. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Braque’s Maisons à l’Estaque (1908) are considered to be the first manifestations of proto-Cubist painting. However, artists such as Fernand Léger (Les fumeurs, 1912), Juan Gris (Grapes, 1913), and Robert Delaunay (Windows, 1912) developed their own distinctive styles, pushing forward the color perspectives, the shifting geometrical elements and the non-objective approach (Léger, Contraste de formes, 1913) of the Cubist synthesis. Alternative Cubist perspectives were also introduced by painters such as Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Roger de La Fresnaye, and André Lhote and sculptors such as Jacques Lipchitz and Henri Laurens. Its influence was not limited to painting and sculpture but extended to architecture, poetry, music, literature, and the applied arts.