Centered in Paris in the first two decades of the 1900s, Cubism was one of the most significant of the visual modern art movements in the early 20th century. Cubism is among the first examples of abstraction in Western painting and its influence extends throughout the 20th century and beyond.
Significance
Art Historian Sabine Rewald of The Metropolitan Museum of Art explains that "the Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening." In rejecting the traditions of representational art, Cubists, instead, depicted objects and people as abstract, geometric forms. Objects in Cubist works are often broken apart, distorted and combined in seemingly random ways to emphasize the contrast between the two-dimensional space of the canvas and the three-dimensional perception of the viewer.
History
Cubism was developed by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963) in Paris, France, between 1907 and 1914. According to Rewald, "the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism after seeing the landscapes Braque had painted in 1908" in the style of late impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, "Vauxcelles called the geometric forms in the highly abstracted works 'cubes.'"
Influences
Along with the painting of Cézanne, other important influences on Cubism include Primitivism and non-Western art. For example, Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," one of the seminal Cubist works, draws on the forms of African Art, which Picasso had viewed at an exhibit in Paris.
Developments
Early Cubism generally focused on specific objects that, while distorted, were clearly distinguishable. However, as Rewald points out, in the period of "Analytic" Cubism (1910-1912), "Picasso and Braque so abstracted their works that they were reduced to just a series of overlapping planes and facets mostly in near-monochromatic browns, grays, or blacks." In these "Analytic" works, the objects represented can no longer be determined.
Considerations
Many contemporaries of Picasso and Braque were highly influenced by their Cubist works and produced Cubist works of their own. Other notable painters who were associated with the movement include Fernand Léger, Juan Gris and Marcel Duchamp. The influence of Cubism even stretched outside of painting to affect sculpture and architecture, and Cubism also proved inspirational to later visual arts movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism.
