Cubism
Description
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement which began in Paris. It revolutionized painting and the visual arts, and sparked artistic innovations in music, ballet, literature, and architecture.
Cubist subjects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form. Instead of depicting objects from a single perspective, the artist depicts the subject from multiple perspectives to represent the subject in a greater context. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. The term cubism is broadly associated with a variety of artworks produced in Paris (Montmartre and Montparnasse) or near Paris (Puteaux) during the 1910s and throughout the 1920s. Read more ↗
Key Artists
Pablo Picasso
Co-founder and radical pioneer of Cubism who shattered Renaissance one-point perspective by analyzing and reassembling objects from multiple simultaneous viewpoints.
Georges Braque
Co-founder who collaborated intensively with Picasso between 1908 and 1914, developing faceted Analytic Cubism and introducing papier collé and stenciled lettering.
Juan Gris
The 'Third Musketeer of Cubism' whose rigorous, mathematically precise Synthetic Cubist compositions brought clarity, rich architectural structure, and bold color to the movement.
Fernand Léger
Pioneering Cubist master who developed 'Tubism', breaking figures and industrial machines into cylindrical, metallic volumes celebrating modern mechanical life.
Jean Metzinger
Leading Salon Cubist and co-author of 'Du Cubisme' (1912), the first published theoretical treatise explaining the movement's non-Euclidean geometry and simultaneity.
Albert Gleizes
Co-author of 'Du Cubisme' and central organizer of the Salon Cubists whose large-scale paintings introduced Cubist spatial fragmentation to the broader Parisian public.
Famous Artworks
Fun Facts
The name 'Cubism' originated as a derisive remark in 1908 when French art critic Louis Vauxcelles repeated Henri Matisse's observation that Georges Braque's landscape paintings of L'Estaque were reduced to 'little cubes' (bizarreries cubiques).
↗ Source: moma.org
In 1912, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes published 'Du Cubisme', the very first theoretical treatise on Cubism, explaining that the movement rejected classical Renaissance perspective in order to depict objects from multiple angles simultaneously and reveal their true geometric existence in space and time.
↗ Source: britannica.com
