Cubism

Cubism as a movement rejected the fixed, monocular point of view that was inherent to the art world of the time.

Rather than constructing an illusion of depth, artists organize the picture plane into fragmented forms: facets, intersecting planes, and simultaneous multiple aspects. Color loses its descriptive function, while light emanates from the geometric «structure» itself.

Cubism emerged when artists, instead of striving to imitate reality, sought to intellectually «process» the object, demolish it and then reconstruct and present it from all sides at once, and while the reduction of natural forms to elementary volumes had precedents (for example, Egyptian reliefs), those were merely conventions, rather than intentional deconstructions of reality.

The inception of Cubism as a movement is dated to 1907, the year Picasso began his work on «Les Demoiselles d’Avignon». The painting marks the beginning of the conscious destruction of perspective and anatomy.

— Pablo Picasso;

— Georges Braque;

— Juan Gris.

— Guillaume Apollinaire («The Cubist Painters», 1913) divided Cubism into scientific, physical, and Orphic;

— Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger («On Cubism», 1912), argued for a multiplicity of viewpoints.

Picasso’s «Portrait of Ambroise Vollard» (1910), face dissolving into grey planes;

Braque’s «Violin and Palette» (1909), instrument fractured into simultaneous frontal and lateral views.

Juan Gris’s «Breakfast» (1914), which incorporates wallpaper.

Two decades later Picasso created «Guernica» (1937) in response to the bombing of a Spanish town by German aviation — a landmark work of Cubism (with a dose of Surrealism) that falls outside of the main period.

The movement lasted barely a decade, yet irrevocably altered art. The Cubists were the first to assert that a painting need not resemble anything beyond itself.

Without this Rupture, Abstraction, Collage, the Readymade, and the modern conception of art as an autonomous language of form would not exist at all.