Cubism was the creation of two artists – Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso – who worked closely together between 1908-1914. Inspired by the shifting planes and ambiguous spatial relations of Cézanne’s paintings, Cubism represented a deeply intellectual analysis of form and space, and the invention of an entirely new way of seeing.

At the turn of the 20th century, political, social, and innovations continued to change daily, and artists began to paint in a new style to reflect the struggles of life in the world around them, painting two-dimensional styles with cubes from multiple perspectives and giving the movement its name. Cubist artists painted the essence of their subjects in fragmented pieces forming multiple perspectives in one painting.

Picasso

The father of Cubism is Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), yet in his first years of painting, he created works in a naturalistic manner, similar to other artists at the time. Au Lapin Agile (1905) is an iconic painting of the Bohemian life in Paris at the turn of the century.

The Girl with a Mandolin is noted for the progressive elimination of a subject and pushing the boundaries of abstraction. The color palette is subdued, and he uses monochromatic colors for depth. In 1910, the painting approached the apex of the cubism period and was rectangles, squares, and circles. The Cubist period opened the door for abstracted geometric forms.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was a monumental change from the traditional depiction of females as he painted the flat, splintered figures all compressed into a small overlapping space.

Georges Braque

Georges Braque, Houses at L’Estaque, 1908 Kunstmuseum Bern

One of his first Cubist paintings, this work by Georges Braque was directly influenced by Cézanne. Like Cézanne’s Bay of Marseilles, Houses at L’Estaque portrays a group of houses nestled amongst trees. The houses have been abstracted into simple cubes, but they also seem to be breaking apart, like an unfolding cardboard box. This essentially describes the analytic process of Cubism: three-dimensional forms are analyzed into their component parts, broken apart, and then rearranged on the canvas. Rather than seeing the houses from a single, fixed point of view, we see them from multiple and shifting perspectives.

Georges Braque, Houses at L’Estaque (Highlights of the Kunstmuseum Bern Collection)

Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911 Kunstmuseum, Basel

As Braque and Picasso continued their experiments with Cubism, their pictures became increasingly flat, and they also became harder to read!  This painting depicts a Portuguese guitar player. We can just make out his cartoonish profile, and other telltale signs such as the circle with lines through it, indicating the guitar. The picture resembles a scene reflected in a shattered mirror, or the way the scene might appear if we were zooming around it at high speed – and this was the intention. Rather than depicting the world from a fixed and static viewpoint, the Cubists endeavored to incorporate the dimension of time by incorporating multiple perspectives simultaneously.