Summary
Highlights
Cubism is an avant-garde artistic movement from the early 20th century, launched by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. It primarily impacted European painting and sculpture but also influenced music and literature. This video focuses only on painting.
The roots of Cubism come from two pictorial sources: Paul Cézanne's work, which sought to represent natural forms using cylinders, spheres, or cones, and the discovery of African and Amerindian art in the early 20th century. The unique style of African masks influenced artists to produce works with simpler, more defined forms, leading to Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" in 1907, considered a pre-Cubist work.
Analytic Cubism aimed to analyze and reproduce subjects' forms using simple geometric shapes. Artists fragmented subjects into multiple facets, each representing a particular viewpoint, discarding perspective and resulting in exploded planes. A key characteristic was the limited use of color, with artists preferring to treat forms over color, leading to drab, often monochromatic palettes. This phase ended in 1912 as Braque and Picasso feared the hermeticism and limits of constant deconstruction, leading to unintelligible works.
Synthetic Cubism explored the object's place in the artwork, seeking to insert real-world elements to make the work more accessible to viewers. Picasso's "Still Life with Chair Caning" (1912) is a foundational work, using a printed canvas to create deep realism and incorporating collage for the first time. The inclusion of stencil-written letters (like 'JOUR') created a dialogue between the artwork and the viewer. Braque further adopted collage, incorporating various materials like paper and sand into his canvases. Juan Gris also embraced this collage dimension in his works.
Orphism, coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912, labeled paintings by Robert Delaunay, Sonia Terk Delaunay, and Frantisek Kupka. Orphists moved away from figuration, utilizing form and color to convey meaning, making a significant step towards abstraction. The content of the work became a total creation of the artist, designed to evoke specific sensations.
Cubism evolved from Cézanne's concepts and greatly influenced European art, leading to movements like ready-mades, abstract painting (Piet Mondrian), Russian Constructivism, Suprematism (Malevich), and Futurism. These movements all owe a debt to the innovations introduced by Braque, Picasso, and Cubism in general.