What is Cubism? Picasso, Braque and the fractured forms

Cubism is an art movement that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed in Paris between about 1907 and 1914. Instead of showing a subject from a single viewpoint, they broke it up into geometric forms and showed it from several sides at once. Cubism became one of the most important turning points in modern painting.

Facts

How Cubism began

In 1907 Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, five nude women with angular bodies and mask-like faces. The picture shocked even his friends. In the same year a large memorial exhibition of Paul Cézanne, who had died the year before, was shown, and his way of building nature from simple forms became a model.

Georges Braque saw Picasso's painting and began to paint landscapes at L'Estaque with the houses simplified into blocks. When he exhibited them in 1908 the critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote of “little cubes”, and that is where the name comes from. Over the following years Picasso and Braque worked so closely together that their pictures are sometimes hard to tell apart.

Analytical Cubism

The first phase, roughly 1909–1912, is called Analytical Cubism. The subject, often a person, a guitar or a still life on a café table, is broken down into small facets seen from different sides and placed next to one another. The colours are muted: brown, grey and ochre tones, so that form gets all the attention.

The picture becomes almost abstract, but it always has a subject. Small clues often remain, the neck of a bottle, a couple of letters or a pipe, helping the viewer find the way back to the objects. The Cubists wanted to show more of reality than a single moment, not less.

Synthetic Cubism and collage

From 1912 Picasso and Braque began to stick real materials into their pictures: newspaper cuttings, scraps of wallpaper and oilcloth. Braque made the first papiers collés that year, and Picasso glued a piece of oilcloth printed with a chair-caning pattern into a still life. Collage was a revolution: the picture became an object in its own right.

This phase is called Synthetic Cubism. The forms became larger and simpler, the colours brighter, and pictures were built up from parts rather than broken down. Juan Gris and Fernand Léger developed the style further, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay introduced strong colours in what was called Orphism.

The legacy of Cubism

Cubism influenced almost everything that came after. The Futurists in Italy took its fractured forms and set them in motion, Russian Constructivists and the Dutch De Stijl moved on towards pure abstraction, and architects and designers took up its clean, geometric forms. Read more in the guide to abstract art.

Picasso himself never completely left the pictorial language of Cubism. In Guernica of 1937, his response to the bombing of the Basque town, fractured forms and a muted grey scale are used to depict the horror of war.

Cubism in Sweden

Several Swedish artists studied in Paris around 1910 and were influenced by Cubism. Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, known as GAN, combined Cubism's forms with Futurism's movement, and Otto G. Carlsund moved on towards pure geometry. Cubism and the other avant-gardes are gathered in the app under the avant-garde.

Cubism's geometry lived on in Sweden in other ways than in painting: in the posters and stage designs of the 1920s and, after the Second World War, in concrete art with its clean, calculated forms.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who developed Cubism together with Picasso?