The term Analytical Cubism describes the early period of Cubism running from 1907 – 1012. It was invented by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque at a time when Impressionism had transformed from the once avant-garde status into mainstream and Fauvism was ruling the Salons in Paris.
Analytical Cubism was the result of an approach, in which artists focused heavily on the analysis and simplification of form. Overthrowing the theory of art as the imitation of nature – a concept, that had been mastered by the Impressionists – the artists now sought intellectual expressionism that would allow portraying a new reality based on the two-dimensional picture plane, using multiple perspectives to produce images that featured only snatched glimpses of everyday objects. This approach initiated a way of thinking about art that went beyond the limits of fixed perspective compositions.
Paintings of this phase were characterised by a fragmentary appearance of multiple viewpoints and monochromatic colour application. Picasso and fellow Cubists used structured segmentation and overlapping planes to dissect the subject. Only a simplified palette of colours was applied to not distract the viewer from the structure of the form and the density of the image at the centre of the composition. The phase of Analytical Cubism was quickly followed by Synthetic Cubism, which moved away from the multi-perspective approach in favour of flattened images that dispensed with earlier allusions of three-dimensional space.