How to identify Cubist art (1908-1920)?
Note: This page lists first features of Analytic Cubism, the first phase of the art movement. Scroll down for features of Synthetic Cubism.
1. Paintings are composed of little cubes and other geometric shapes (e.g. squares, triangles and cones). Objects are deconstructed and “analysed” from different angles, and turned into a fragmented composite. That explains why the first of the two phases of Cubism was called Analytic Cubism.
Le Pigeon aux petits pois (Pigeons with peas) by Pablo Picasso
Portrait of Pablo Picasso by Juan Gris
Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) by Albert Gleizes
Behind the female nude bathers, there’s boulders or rock formations along with trees which seems to be intertwined with the foreground. The bottom of the canvas shows reflective blue water. On the horizon (top of the painting) we see a blue sky and factory chimneys of the nearby town releasing smoke. The encroaching of “the industrial” into the natural landscapes was observed by artists of all types around Europe at the time.
2. The paintings are flattened (two-dimentional). For example, if you look at the heads and arms of subjects, they are rendered flat. There is little or no sense of depth. No foreshortening or chiaroscuro. (The former is visually compressing an object to give the illusion of depth and the second is contrasting light and shadow, also for depth.)
Girl with a Mandolin by Pablo Picasso
Guernica by Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon) by Pablo Picasso
The painting shows five hideous whores in a brothel. The one in the top right is pulling a curtain to reveal the scene. They’re partially naked. Their bodies are deformed due to Picasso not adhering to a single pictorial view. For example, the eyes of some of the women are looking straight at the viewer but their noses are depicted from the side. This painting is considered one of the earliest Cubist works.
3. Perspective is mobile: several sides of the same subject are shown simultaneously from different angles and sometimes different points of time.
Etude pour Le Goûter by Jean Metzinger
In this painting, we find a seated woman who’s nude, with drapes around her and on her arms, holding a spoon. In front of her is a table with a cup of tea and behind her a commode or table with a vase on top of it. All her body parts are composed of geometric shapes, even her breast which is depicted as a triangle and a sphere. With each of her eyes, she’s simultaneously looking at us and looking sideways. The cup is also shown from the side and from the top.
L’Aubade by Pablo Picasso
4. Paintings are fragmented. Its haters once described the Cubist canvas as a field of broken glass. True! When you’re confronted by a Cubist painting, you have to put the pieces together in your mind to understand what it represents. Sometimes the object and background interpenetrate one another. With the same painting displaying different viewpoints, different lighting, and even different times of day, sometimes it’s too complex to understand.
L’Oiseau bleu (The Blue Bird) by Jean Metzinger
Can you spot the following in the above painting: a basilica, a steam ship, a boat, a necklace, a pyramid, a mirror, a fan, a fruit bowl, four different birds, three nude women?
The central figure is holding a blue bird. Another figure, wearing a necklace, is reclining next to a red bird. On the left of the central figure, another one is gazing into a mirror in her left hand, while holding a fan in her right hand The boat is placed on the right side under the steam ship. The Sacré-Cœur Basilica is at the top of the painting.
La noce by Fernand Léger
A wedding procession is theme of this painting. The bride occupies the center. Her white dress takes up all the space to the bottom of the painting. Next to her, dressed in green, is the groom whose hand is on her shoulder to support her. The identity of the man in blue (in the upper half of the painting) is not clear. His hand is above the couple in a way to bless their union. He might be a priest or a parent of the bride or the groom. The artwork is Cubist as it shows mutliple viewpoints of the crowded scene. Note the pipe-shaped bodies parts of the wedding guests on the left of the bride. The painting also foreshadows the Futurist movement by depicting repeated elements to show dynamism and motion of the crowd.
Portrait de Jacques Nayral by Albert Gleizes
Deux Nus (Two Nudes) by Jean Metzinger
5. Cubist paintings are often monochromatic. You’ll find only muted colors. Artists would choose one basic color for the entire work, and its variations when needed.
Le guitariste by Pablo Picasso
The Accordionist by Pablo Picasso
The Portuguese by Georges Braque
Braque portrayed a Portuguese guitar player he saw in a bar Marseilles. You could see a docking post and a nautical rope in the top right. You also see parts of the musician and his guitar. But because the canvas looks like broken glass, it’s impossible to have complete reading of the painting. And just for fun (and to play with the flattening effect), the artist stenciled letters and numbers. It was hint of what was called later Synthetic Cubism.
How to identify Synthetic Cubism? How it differs from Analytic Cubism?
Synthetic Cubism is was less concerned with representation of the subject, and more with the use of various materials, textures and colors. Analytic Cubism is intellectual while Synthetic Cubism is playful.
Artists of Synthetic Cubism did not create paintings, but built “collages.” Canvases displayed a “synthesis” (combination) of different media beyond paint: newsprint, textual images, cloth, paper and even sand. Also, they expanded their color palette.
Still Life with Chair Caning by Pablo Picasso
This 1912 work by Picasso is considered the first collage. There’s an oil cloth with an imprint of a cane chair design, popular at the time in cafés which is the setting of this artwork. In a typical Cubist fashion, one sees multiple perspectives of items on top of the table at once. By adding a physical piece to the painting which simulates something else, he’s a play on a multiple levels of reality. The whole work is framed by a rope. Around the top right corner, you’ll see a cut out lemon with a knife handle and blade on top of it. Look lower for a napkin. In the middle, you’ll see a wine glass. On the top left, there’s a journal with the letters JOU on top (standing for “game” in french, or journal). On top of it, there’s a white clay pipe.
Fruit Dish and Glass by Georges Braque
In this 1912 artwork, Braque was the first to use sand which he mixed with gesso, a white paint mixture. Also, here, he was the first to use papier collé (pasted paper), a form of collage, where he added cutouts of faux bois (fake wooden) wallpaper. The viewer could see a fruit bowl, grapes, and pears. With such physical elements and the words BAR and ALE added, he prevents the user from having any spatial perception of the work. It’s impossible to tell apart the background from the foreground.
Bottle, Glass, and Newspaper by Georges Braque
Woman with a Guitar by Georges Braque
Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle by Pablo Picasso
Le Violon by Pablo Picasso
Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper by Pablo Picasso
Fantomas by Juan Gris
Still life with fruit bowl and mandolin by Juan Gris
How Cubist art got its name? and where?
In 1907, Pablo Picasso showed off to Georges Braque what would become known as the first Cubist artwork: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Young Ladies of Avignon). Picasso and Braque, who lived in Paris, are the founders of Cubism. A famous French critic, Louis Vauxcelles, in 1908, saw the paintings and rejected the style as “bizarre cubiques,” thus giving it its name. That’s the same guy who also criticized Fauvism and inadvertently gave it its name!
What gave rise to Cubism?
One of the challenging questions to ask about the evolution of art is to wonder why a particular style appeared at a certain point in history. Why Picasso and other Cubist artists went into that direction? Artists by nature attempt to find new ways of viewing art. Perhaps the reason is the generations that preceded them had already covered so much ground: experiments with light (Impressionism), color (Fauvism) and texture (Expressionism). So much had already been done! And certainly artists were not willing to go back to perfectly representational art of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. So continuing on the route of modern semi-abstraction started by the earliest Impressionists led them to deconstruct compositions. The end result is a painting broken up into cubes, squares, spheres and cones. They eliminated depth and made the image fragments transparent and overlapping. Then they rearranged the bits and pieces to make the paintings intentionally hard to interpret.
The father of Cubism, Picasso, went on to invent a new style by 1912, that is Synthetic Cubism. For the first time, artists used more than paint, they integrated everyday materials into their paintings. Never in the history of art did it evolve so much in such a short period of time!
Rebels of a New Generation
Cubist artists rebelled against the conventional representation of forms by turning them into fractured, geometrical shapes. That was yet another step towards complete abstraction seen in the Abstract styles and Futurism.
They also challenged the very idea of what a painting is. Conventionally, you’d expect only, well, paint! They introduced new materials transforming the traditional 2-dimensional painting into a 3-dimensional collage. That which was revolutionary a hundred years ago is now ironically a standard part of art classes in schools, i.e. creating collages.
2. How Cubism got its name and what gave rise to it?
3. Why Cubist artists were rebels?