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Cubism

Cubism broke objects into geometric parts and showed them from several viewpoints at once. It changed how painting treats space.

Period
Early twentieth-century modernism
Approximate dates
c. 1907 to the 1920s
Place of origin
Paris, France
Key regions
France, Spain, Czech lands, Russia, Netherlands
Art forms
Painting, collage, sculpture, architecture
Major artists
Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, Sonia Delaunay

Visual introduction

  • Portrait of Pablo Picasso

    Juan Gris · 1912 · Oil on canvas · Art Institute of Chicago

    A Cubist portrait broken into shifting planes, by a painter who worked closely with Picasso and Braque.

    Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

  • Eiffel Tower

    Robert Delaunay · 1911 · Oil on canvas · Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

    The tower is broken and tilted in bright colour, a Cubist method that led to Delaunay's Orphism.

    Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

  • Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud)

    Albert Gleizes · 1912 · Oil on canvas · Philadelphia Museum of Art

    Gleizes breaks the sitter and the city behind him into overlapping planes in muted browns and greens. It shows Cubism spreading beyond Picasso and Braque to a group of Paris painters who used it for portraits and modern city life.

    Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Historical context

Picasso and Braque developed Cubism together in Paris from about 1907, building on Cezanne's way of constructing form and on the impact of African and Iberian sculpture that Picasso saw in Paris. It is common to divide the movement into two phases: Analytic Cubism, then Synthetic Cubism, which brought in collage.

It emerged in an age of new ideas about time and space, including photography, film and science, and it influenced almost every later modern movement.

Visual characteristics

Space: no single viewpoint. Objects are broken down and rebuilt in overlapping planes.

Colour: restrained browns, greys and ochres in Analytic Cubism, then brighter colour and paper in Synthetic Cubism.

Materials: collage, newspaper, and text brought into the picture.

Related movements

Sources and further reading

Further reading: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Tate, Art Terms. Smarthistory.