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Cubism was a revolutionary new art concept developed in Paris at the start of the 1900s as a new way of understanding the world within the rapid change that was happening at the time. It was minorly influenced by Paul Cezanne’s slight distortion of viewpoints in his still lives. However, it was artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque who paved the way for the cubist style in the 20th century. Cubism brought together the ability to view an object or person from any angle, all at once on one plane, resulting in a work that looks abstracted or fragmented.
Pablo Picasso's art inspired much of the twentieth century although he went through a variety of phases before he achieved his cubist style. The first major stage of the painter was the Blue period (1901-1904) followed by the Rose period (1905-1908), which later led to his cubist phase. The work that created the distinction between the previous periods was ‘Les demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1908-1909), which can be translated to ‘The Maids of Avignon’, believed to be known as the first true twentieth-century painting. His work displays five naked women, known to be prostitutes in a brothel, enclosed in a private space. The geometrical forms of their bodies and their distorted faces, make the painting unsettling to the viewer. The abstracted faces of the two figures on the right show Picasso’s inspiration from African masks that he had seen displayed when he first visited the Trocadero Ethnographical Museum in 1907. On this very trip, Picasso (1907) exclaimed that ‘The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things.’ It was a shocking painting at the time, and it even left Braque astonished when he saw the reveal.
Georges Braque and Picasso had met over these years and soon became great friends. Braque was also known for his cubist ways; ‘Le Portugais’ (1911) is one of his many works. Braque described that the painting represented a musician that he had seen playing in Marseilles. As one can see, it is hard to distinguish the figure and his guitar as it is fragmented into total abstraction and lost within the limited color scheme, almost monochromatic. As the viewer looks within the painting’s details, there are indications of what certain lines might mean and represent however it is mostly up to the viewer to try to make sense of what he is seeing.
This principle of geometrical form and fragmentation of flat shapes can be described in the term Analytic Cubism. Analytic Cubism, (1908) as identified in the works listed above, presents objects in a prismatic manner so that the viewer can see all sides of the subject at once. To attain this effect the objects and figures are shattered into geometric components and then flattened onto one plane.
In 1912, Picasso and Braque invented the collage technique that subsequently created another version of Cubism called Synthetic Cubism. This technique allowed the artist to make use of readymade objects and then paste them together to create a semi-representational whole. Picasso was the first to create a collage with the name of ‘Still Life with Chair Caning’(1912). He pasted cubist-formed shapes onto a chair caning printed oil cloth and additional details were added with oil paint. The picture frame was formed with a piece of rope, wrapped around so that it covers the perimeter of the oval-shaped canvas. The oval shape can also be understood as being the seat of the chair or the surface of the table. Inspired by this work, Braque invented a variant called papier collés, in which the flat object or material stuck onto the collage was cut and pasted onto a paper ground; such materials included pieces of wallpaper and newspaper.
Later within the Cubist period, Picasso and Braque expanded their range of forms and the manipulation of perspective, giving their works a sculptural feel and a sense of three-dimensionality. This gave rise to sculptural cubism which we can see in works such as Pablo Picasso’s Guitar (1912), constructed out of scraps of sheet metal. ‘Perhaps the most challenging question that cubist sculpture could now ask concerned the relationship between the sculptural object and the ordinary non-art object’(Cox, 2000, p.321)
A fundamental sculptor who took up Cubism in Paris was Henri Laurens who knew how to go about sculptural still life. Laurens continued to define his Cubist constructions throughout the war and moved back and forth between construction and Papiers Colles. His works ‘Bottle of Rum’ 1916-1917 and Bottle and Glass (1919) show Laurens' demonstration of handling still life without going close to the original form and creating something different. In these works, the sculptor is aware of color, light, and also the arithmetic patterns of shapes that produce a balanced composition.
The Cubism movement was so great that it not only influenced local artists and sculptors but also continued to spread to other parts of the world. The cubist style did not only limit itself to painting and sculpture but also persuaded designers of the time. A selection of furniture and architecture anatomies played about with cubism; such as Janak’s design for a monumental interior (1912) and Josef Gočár’s clock, (1913). Both works focus on the distortion of the natural line of the typically thought of design, and are creatively reimagined so that they both serve as a functional form but also pleasing the aesthetic of the cubist style.
To conclude, the Cubist art movement became a potent and immensely versatile instrument for making art. It was a form of expression that was “not an art of imitation, but an art of conception which tends towards creation.” (Apollinaire, p.189) This idea of being able to visualize something and interpret it unnaturally influenced modern art ideas further in time, changing the course of Western art.
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