ART 101: Cubism 

Picasso shocked and disturbed critics by simplifying his forms into blocks of color and sharp angles. He offered many different simultaneous perspectives on a flat picture plane. This was an entirely new way of painting, and one that required the viewer to work hard to decipher the canvas.

Around this same time, Georges Braque began paring landscapes down into cube-like shapes. It is almost impossible to read his paintings comfortably; like Picasso, Braque rearranged background and foreground elements, colors, and clues about spatial recession so that we simply cannot read any illusionism in them.

Years before Picasso and Braque’s experiments, Paul Cézanne had tried to use paint to offer new insights into sensory experience. He wanted to capture the passage of time and the vibrations he felt in landscapes via painting. Cézanne’s work would come to be crucial to artists in the following years searching for ways to access subjects’ truths in more holistic ways. These examples make clear that Cubism does not have a single point of origin, but rather several tangential branches that took years to meet, only to veer off again in multiple iterations.

There were two distinct, yet overlapping, groups of Cubist artists and writers based around Paris just prior to World War One. Picasso and Braque found representation with the prominent art dealer Henry Kahnweiler, who quickly exercised a monopoly on the painters’ works. In 1911 and into late 1912, several other artists interested in breaking apart formal elements in their works and offering them in new, challenging arrangements began to exhibit together at the Salon d’automne and the Salon des Indépendents in Paris.

The “Salon” Cubists, as they were known, included Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, and later Marie Laurencin. The Salon Cubists enjoyed more freedom to exhibit, unbound by the restrictions that Picasso and Braque experienced. But these groups were fluid: members corresponded with each other and learned about each other’s work.

Art historians have divided the works and theories that the artists in Kahnweiler’s orbit explored into two categories. The first, lasting roughly from 1908 until 1912, is known as ‘Analytical Cubism. During these years, Picasso, Braque, and Gris tried to capture multiple viewpoints all at once by dividing their subjects into fragmentary planes, analyzing their subjects in an unprecedented way.

Then, from 1912 until 1914, the period of “Synthetic Cubism” ushered in new materials and collage. Instead of deconstructing, analyzing, and then reconstructing their subjects, the Synthetic Cubists eradicated any reference to three-dimensionality, instead exploring patterns, textures, and the very materiality of art.

This constellation of artists was all occupied with the problem of how to best represent an experience or a three-dimensional subject and all the weight and movement it carried. Each artist looked for answers in different ways. Braque and Gris, for example, incorporated items like chair caning, newspaper, and wallpaper onto their works during their Synthetic phase, shattering previous limitations of what constituted a work of art. Salon Cubists Delaunay and Metzinger would explore subjects in motion, trying to use color or line to convey the complexities of time and velocity on a canvas.

All these artists believed that there was much more to reality than what the eye had been conditioned to read.