Cubism

I

Introduction

Cubism, movement in modern art, especially in painting, invented by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and French artist Georges Braque in 1907 and 1908. Although the look of cubism and the ideas behind it evolved over time, cubism retained certain general characteristics throughout. Cubist paintings create an ambiguous sense of space through geometric shapes that flatten and simplify form, spatial planes that are broken into fragments, and forms that overlap and penetrate one another. Art historians generally consider cubism to have been the most influential art movement of the first half of the 20th century.

II

Origins

The exact date of cubism's first appearance in art has been the subject of heated debate among art historians. Some see its onset in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), a painting of women composed of jagged shapes, flattened figures, and forms borrowed from African masks.

Other historians feel that the influence of French artist Paul Cézanne on the work of Picasso and Braque provided the primary catalyst for the new movement. Before his death in 1906, Cézanne increasingly simplified and flattened forms. In addition, Cézanne began to use what art historians have called passage, a device in which one physical object is allowed to penetrate another physical object. In a painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-1904, Philadelphia Museum of Art), for example, Cézanne left the outer contour of the mountain unfinished so that at intervals no clear boundary separates the sky from the mountain. This innovation—allowing air and rock to merge and interpenetrate—became especially important to the cubists for two reasons. First, passage defied the laws of physical experience. Second, it encouraged artists to view paintings as having an internal logic—or integrity—that functions independently of, or even contrary to, physical experience.

Profoundly influenced by these late Cézanne paintings, Picasso and Braque executed a series of landscapes in 1908 that were very close to Cézanne's, both in their color scheme (dark greens and light browns) and in their drastic simplification of form into geometric shapes. In Braque's Houses at L'Estaque (1908, Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland) and in Picasso's Houses on the Hill, at Horta de Ebro (1909, Museum of Modern Art, New York), houses have a three-dimensional, cubic quality. It was upon seeing these paintings that French art critic Louis Vauxelles coined the term cubism.

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In these early cubist paintings, Picasso and Braque introduced other devices that undermine the illusion of space. For example, they abandoned conventional perspective: Buildings, instead of appearing one behind the other, appear one on top of the other. Moreover, in Houses at Horta, Picasso not only reduced the houses into cubic shapes but also transformed the background in the same manner. By treating earth and sky in the same way, Picasso made the canvas appear more unified, but in the process he also introduced ambiguity—by no longer differentiating what is solid from what is void.

The first cubist paintings also stood out because they avoided using a consistent light source, unlike paintings that seek to create the illusion of three-dimensional space. In some parts of cubist paintings, light appears to cast shadows from the left; in others, from the right, the top, or the bottom. In addition, planes intersect in ways that leave the spectator guessing whether angles are concave or convex. A delight in confusing the spectator is a regular feature of cubism.

III

Analytical and Synthetic Cubism: Picasso and Braque

Art historians generally divide Picasso and Braque’s early cubism into two phases. Analytical cubism, the earlier phase, continued until 1912. It was followed by synthetic cubism, which lasted through 1915. Analytical cubism fragments the physical world into intersecting geometric planes and interpenetrating volumes. Synthetic cubism, by contrast, synthesizes (combines) abstract shapes to represent objects in a new way.

A

Analytical Cubism

By 1910, when Picasso painted his Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia), the language of cubism had become flatter and more consistent, but also more ambiguous. In this work, Picasso fragmented a human figure into a series of transparent geometric planes that intersect at a variety of angles. But none of these planes give the illusion of three-dimensionality—that is, of volume as in a cube. By this stage in analytical cubism, it had become progressively evident that there were no cubes in cubism. In fact, Picasso seemed to be dismantling the idea of three-dimensional form altogether, not only by fragmentation, but also by his use of Cézanne's passage technique. With Portrait of Ambroise Vollard Picasso merged figure and environment, solid and void, background and foreground. The resulting composition is visually consistent but does not appear to conform to the physical laws of nature.

On the basis of analytical cubism’s fragmented, intersecting planes, many people have argued that the underlying intention of cubist artists was to depict an object or human figure from multiple perspectives. For example, the mouth of a bottle might be shown from the top, with the rest of the bottle shown in profile. But this is only one aspect of cubism and does not account for much of its appearance. A more persuasive interpretation is that cubism aimed to invent a new visual language that had its own internal logic and consistency, one that did not attempt to imitate nature directly. The cubists never intended to depict nature accurately, whether from one point of view or many. After all, Picasso and Braque intentionally limited their color scheme to dark browns and grays, an approach that could only have resulted from a radical departure from nature.