Summary
Highlights
Cubism represents a significant step towards abstraction in art. Unlike the Fauves, who abstracted color while still referencing the natural world, or German Expressionists, who focused on pure emotion, Cubists like the Fauves still rooted their work in the natural world but introduced unique changes. Cézanne, though not a Cubist, laid the groundwork by focusing on reducing images to basic shapes like cylinders, spheres, and cones. Cubist works are characterized by applying structure to natural forms, distilling them into basic geometric shapes, and fracturing the picture plane.
While Cubist paintings don't emphasize vibrant colors like the Fauves, often featuring muted palettes, or diverse subject matter, they are renowned for fracturing images into basic component shapes. The term 'Cubism' originated in 1911 from a critic describing artworks as 'cubic eccentricities'. Common subjects include still lifes, fruits, musical instruments, women, and landscapes. A key aspect of Cubist work is the presentation of multiple views simultaneously, creating a dynamic visual experience that keeps the viewer's eye moving across the canvas.
Picasso significantly advanced the innovations of Cézanne, reducing images to central formal elements and collapsing space. His famous painting, 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' (1907), exemplifies this, showing women reduced to cubic and distorted forms, evoking the harsh reality of their existence. The fractured representation, including impossibly twisted heads, contributes to the unsettling nature of the work, reflecting Picasso's view of modern city life.
Georges Braque further developed Cubist principles, as seen in his work 'Houses' (1908). Here, houses and trees are reduced to essential shapes and lines, with houses resembling cubes topped with prisms. This reduction distorts and collapses space, often incorporating multi-directional light sources that create a lively, engaging composition despite the flattened appearance. The early works by Picasso and Braque, characterized by painted fractured images, are known as Analytic Cubism.
A later development in Cubism is Synthetic Cubism, which takes the fracturing and flattening of the image a step further by incorporating bits and scraps of paper. Braque's 'Violin and Palette' (1909) and other similar works exemplify this style, using mixed media like charcoal and collage elements to create the fragmented appearance, introducing a tactile dimension to the reduction and flattening of forms.