Cubism was an influential art movement of the 20th century, especially regarding painting. The term is broadly associated with a wide variety of art produced in the area in and around Paris during the 1910s and until the 1920s.
Influence that led to Cubism was the modes of three-dimensional form in the works of Paul Cézanne. In Cubist artwork, objects were analysed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form. Artists abandoned perspectives with a single viewpoint in favour of different views onto objects and figures, resulting in images that appeared abstracted and fragmented. Use was made of interlocking planes, simple geometric shapes, and later collage.
The art movement was pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, joined by Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Fernand Léger. Seminal Cubist works of the early phase were the 1907 painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque’s 1908 Houses at L’Estaque, which the art critic Louis Vauxcelles referred to as “bizarreries cubiques” (cubic oddities), from which the name “Cubism” was derived.
Art historians have categorized the Cubist movement in different phases. One common scheme is the division into three periods:
- Proto-Cubism, exemplified by Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, reducing objects, places, architecture, and figures to geometric schemas, to “cubes”;
- Analytical Cubism, generally considered to have run from 1908 – 1912, characterised by a fragmentary appearance of multiple viewpoints and overlapping planes;
- Synthetic Cubism, generally considered to have run from about 1912 – 1919, characterised by simpler shapes, brighter colours, and the use of collage techniques.
Cubism influenced artists in France and other European countries and prepared the ground for movements like Futurism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Dada, Vorticism, De Stijl, and Art Deco.