Cubism is a modernist movement of the early 20th century, its origin is attributed to 1907 and is associated with the works of Picasso and Braque. In this period, the departure from the naturalistic tradition prevailed in the visual arts. With the development of new visual means and increased expression, the creation of universal symbols was aimed at displaying the inner world of a person (O’Brien, 2018). At the same time, they were focused on improving the expressiveness and information content of the bodily structure of objects, to updating the vision of the objective world to construct a new reality. If the painting of the impressionists proclaimed the conditional character of color, the Cubists expressed a new approach to reality through the conditional character of space.
The first phase is called analytic cubism when Braque and Picasso tried to design a pictorial whole by combining various viewpoints. For example, Braque was impacted by surrealism, namely, by a series of still lives with comprehensive linear-planar representations of objects. The second phase is synthetic cubism which refers to the use of abstraction and figuration (Kleiner, 2016). In other words, the picture is created as a painted collage of separate aspects of a form, as if it is cut into small parts, which appear simultaneously from different sides.
Among the most influential cubism artists, there is Braque and his Homage to J. S. Bach, where the forms become more decorative, and letter stencils and various stickers are introduced into the drawing to form collages. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon painting can be noted as one of the most influential artworks that determined further cubism tendencies (O’Brien, 2018). The purposes of Picasso and Braque were to construct a three-dimensional shape on a plane, thus dividing it into geometric elements; both artists gravitated towards simple, tangible forms and uncomplicated subjects.
References
Kleiner, F. S. (2016). Gardner’s art through the age: A global history (15th ed.). Cengage Learning.
O’Brien, D. (2018). Cubism: Art and philosophy. ESPES, 7(1), 30-37.