5x What is cubism?

How can works of Cubism be recognized? We introduce you to this movement of modern art and the characteristics of cubism.

Cubism: origins and development

Cubism is an art style that emerged in France between 1906 and 1908 and is, from today's perspective, one of the most revolutionary innovations in art of the 20th century. TheThe term cubism is derived from the French word "cube" or from the Latin "cubus", meaning "cube". The decisive founders of this art movement are Pablo Picasso (1881-1976) and Georges Braque (1882-1963). Emerging from the avant-garde movement in painting, Cubism replaced Fauvism, and nevertheless, together with Fauvism, ushered in classical modernism.

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Cubism broke with the painting tradition that had prevailed until then byhis artistic method of representation. Picasso and Braque rejected a style of painting that made illusionistic attempts to represent people, landscapes and objects spatially and plastically. In their works, on the other hand, they were primarily concerned with the reduction of an object to geometric figures, such as a cone, sphere or pyramid. The cubist art movement thus brought the principle of artistic abstraction to a new height through a mathematical analysis of the object and the subsequent decomposition into its geometric shapes. However, Cubism had no theory or manifesto of its own.

An important precursor of Cubism was above all Paul Cézanne with his works and artistic views. Picasso was also inspired by paintings by El Greco, Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau, and the formal aesthetics of African art. In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, the art movement began to dissolve.

Cubism is mainly divided into two styles: analytical and synthetic cubism.

Analytical Cubism

Analytical Cubism lasted from 1910 to early 1912 and marked the first phase of the art movement. This is where the artists placed theirinvestigating the simultaneous display of different views of an object at the center of their work. Closed forms of the depicted objects and bodies were thus broken in favor of the formal rhythm. Picasso and Braque abandoned the rules of foreground, middle ground, background and central perspective. Even enlightenment was neglected in the methodology of Analytical Cubism. Moreover, the Cubists painted their paintings with only a few and rather pale colours.

Characteristics of Synthetic Cubism

In Synthetic Cubism, from about 1912, Picasso, Braque and then Juan Gris changed their artistic style. The object, which had been divided into separate geometric figures, was now joined together. Synthetic Cubism, unlike its stylistic predecessor, moved from the abstract to the concrete. In this phase the cubists now also used objects that did not belong together, but allowed them to flow into each other. Synthetic Cubism is thus further associated with the rise of "collage". The artists glued pieces of paper, newspaper, wallpaper, sand, wood and similar materials into their now more colorfulpaintings and thus created a plastic vision. Today, this "paper collé" collage technique, implemented by the Cubists, forms the basis of all later collage techniques up to and including the ready-made ones.

Another form of cubism is colour cubism or also called orphism, which was mainly represented by the artist Robert Delauney. The most important representatives of Cubism include Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris.

In short: Characteristics of cubism are: flattened volume, confusing perspective, collage, multiple points of view, still life, analytical, synthetic. The cubists pretended that nature consisted only of cubes, cones and spheres.

Examples of cubism

Examples of other cubist paintings are:

1. Fruit bowl, violin and bottle, 1914 from Pablo Picasso
2. Clarinet and bottle of rum on a mantelpiece, 1911 from Georges Braque
3. Still life, 1914 by Pablo Picasso
4. Bottle of rum and newspaper, 1914 from Juan Gris
5. The sunshade, 1914 by Juan Gris
6. Bottle and fish, 1910-1912 by Georges Braque
7. Mandora, 1909-1910 by Georges Braque