The twentieth century, with its rapid political, social, economic, and technological advances, has marked the beginning of a multitude of unconventional art movements across Europe, created in response to these sweeping changes. One of the earliest avant-garde movements, Cubism, stands out in particular. Created in the early 1900s by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Cubism dramatically transformed the European artistic tradition, inspiring the creation of several related art, sculpture, literature, and architecture movements.
Cubism is a painting style and a European art movement in which artists rejected the traditional notion that art should mimic nature and instead turned to two-dimensional geometric shapes, disassembling objects to depict them from multiple perspectives (Apollinaire, Eimert 29). Unlike many other art movements, Cubism has a clear starting point in history. In 1907 Pablo Picasso, a painter from Spain, created the first pre-Cubist work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which portrayed anatomically and geometrically distorted bodies of five female prostitutes (Apollinaire, Eimert 29).
This individual work of art is considered the most important painting of the twentieth century, as it is credited with starting the “Cubist revolution” (Galenson 82). Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was so novel that even Henri Matisse, the leader of another avant-garde movement Fauvism, considered it “an abuse of modern art” without any “aesthetically justified explanation” (Apollinaire, Eimert 47).
In fact, Picasso’s vision, inspired by African cultural elements and by three-dimensional forms in the late works of a Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, aimed at avoiding any aesthetic allusions. Picasso’s artistic endeavor was supported by his friend, a French painter Georges Braque, whose landscapes were labeled cubic by a critic Louis Vauxcelles in 1909 when Cubism was officially recognized as a new artistic style (Apollinaire, Eimert 29).
As artists searched for new ways to express reality by creating techniques previously absent in painting, Cubism evolved into several sub-genres. Between 1909 and 1912, Picasso and Braque practiced Analytical Cubism, painting abstract figures and fragmented still lifes that offered layered views on an object from many perspectives (Apollinaire, Eimert 29). Their main goal was to analyze the object and its many facets instead of merely creating its representation. In the winter of 1912 and 1913, Picasso created several papiers collés by inserting colored pieces of paper into his works (Apollinaire, Eimert 30).
This technique initiated a new style, Synthetic Cubism, where Picasso and Braque no longer dissected objects, but rather created new ones in a form of a collage. This new technique allowed for three-dimensional expression in the artistic world previously dominated by a two-dimensional canvas (Apollinaire, Eimert 41). Marcel Duchamp made another notable artistic breakthrough in his painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) in 1912 (Galenson 39).
Inspired by Étienne-Jules Marey’s series of photographs depicting movement, Duchamp managed to transcend the painting’s static nature, introducing time and velocity as its fourth dimension (Apollinaire, Eimert 42). This phenomenon, further developed by Futurist artists Robert and Sonia Delaunay, came to be known as simultaneity signifying “the rapidity and the concurrence of all existence and action” (Apollinaire, Eimert 44).
As Picasso and Braque once remarked, they did not intend to create a new art movement – they were just responding to the changing scientific understanding of space and time, which they wanted to transfer onto their canvas (Apollinaire, Eimert 29).
For Picasso, as an artist and as an individual, Cubism was a solution to his own spiritual and artistic crisis. As Picasso explained to his contemporary, a photographer Alexander Liberman: “I saw that everything had been done. One had to break, to make one’s revolution and to start at zero” (qtd. in Apollinaire, Eimert 47). Unsurprisingly, Cubism is considered to be more than just another art movement: it is a “quintessentially conceptual innovation,” breaking away from former artistic foundations and aiming to represent the knowledge of an object, and not merely its appearance (Galenson 82).
At the same time, Cubism, in a way, was also a transitionary movement: while it remained popular into the 1920s, eventually even its creators developed a new artistic style. However, Picasso’s and Braque’s artistic experiments resonated with many contemporary artists, and Cubism, with its liberating principles, laid the foundations for Dadaism and Surrealism in Europe, Orphism and Purism in France, Constructivism in Russia, and Futurism in Italy (Galenson 116).
Personally, I realize that I have not given Cubism its due credit. A contemporary artist, being familiar with the original solutions and ideas from the past, may regard them with respect, but nevertheless considers them normal. Now I have come to appreciate and understand Cubism’s significance in the art history, as I see how groundbreaking the works of Picasso, Braque, and their followers were at the time. Cubism changed not only the form of art, but also its function – the influence that can be seen not only in the other twentieth century movements but also in modern and contemporary popular culture. Regardless of whether one likes Cubism or not, one thing remains true – Cubism was a revolutionary artistic breakthrough that paved the way for a multitude of new visual art techniques and movements.
Works Cited
Apollinaire, Guillaume, and Dorothea Eimert. Art of Century: Cubism. New York, NY, USA: Parkstone International, 2012. Print.
Duchamp, Marcel. Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2). 1912. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
Galenson, David W. Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.
Picasso, Pablo. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 1907. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York.