cubism art homework ideas

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Cubism Art Project for Kids

Famous Artists , Oil Pastel Tutorial

If you are searching for unique art projects for your student(s), we’ve got a creative cubism art project for kids! Don’t let the art term fool you into thinking it’s hard! With our easy step by step instructions along with video tutorial, it’s well worth the time.

What is Cubism Art?

What is cubism art? The cubism style of painting was developed in the early 1900’s. Many artists put together a variety of objects or figures, which resulted in paintings appearing fragmented and abstracted. You may have heard of some of these famous artists including Pablo Picasso and George Braque.

Why is it called Cubism?

The cubism term was used and seemed appropriate due to the objects in the art — they looked like cubes or geometrical shapes.

Whether you are looking for oil pastel art for kids or geometric art type projects, this activity is perfect for introducing the beautiful creations of art.

Cubism Art Project Materials

Giraffe Cubism Art Template
Pastel Crayons
Black Cardstock or Construction Paper

Giraffe Cubism Art Instructions

Print out Cubism Art with Giraffe Blank Template .
Using a ruler, draw several diagonal lines across the template. See video for visual.

3. Beginning with the top, begin to outline the ears with an orange pastel crayon.

4. Using a Q-Tip, fill in the remaining white space with the chosen pastel color.

5. Continue to follow the pattern shown on video to determine appropriate colors for each section of the giraffe.

6. Using various shades of yellow, red, brown, green, blue and purple, continue to use the correct pastel colors along with outlining and filling in remaining white space with Q-Tips.

7. Work your way down the art canvas until complete.

8. Getting close to the end! Grab a light green and dark green pastel to wrap up the gorgeous Cubism creation.

9. As you wrap up and finish the pastel colors, glue it onto black cardstock paper or construction paper to display or give as a gift!

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Valerie Mcclintick

Comments (3)

Hi there! I just came across this giraffe cubism project and it looks so great! I don’t see a link to the video though, and when I searched on youtube it did not show up. Has it been removed? Thanks

where is the video for this? there is no link on this page?

HI I was just wondering if there was a video for this project as it is referred to a number of time but there is no video links on the page???

I have searched online as well and tried to find it on your channel but I’ve had no luck???

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

How to Do a Cubist Style Painting

Last Updated: December 12, 2023 Approved

This article was co-authored by Kelly Medford . Kelly Medford is an American painter based in Rome, Italy. She studied classical painting, drawing and printmaking both in the U.S. and in Italy. She works primarily en plein air on the streets of Rome, and also travels for private international collectors on commission. She founded Sketching Rome Tours in 2012 where she teaches sketchbook journaling to visitors of Rome. Kelly is a graduate of the Florence Academy of Art. There are 10 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. This article received 14 testimonials and 83% of readers who voted found it helpful, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 268,902 times.

Cubism is a style of painting that originated with Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso between 1907 and 1914. [1] X Research source The Cubist style sought to show the two-dimensional nature of the canvas. Cubist artists fractured their objects into geometric forms and used multiple and contrasting perspectives in a single painting. It was called Cubism when Louis Vauxcelles, a French art critic, called the forms in Braque’s work “cubes.” Creating your own Cubist style painting can be a fun way to connect with art history and look at painting with a fresh perspective.

Preparing to Paint Your Cubist Art

Lay down newspaper in your work area to keep it clean.
Use a glass of water and a soft rag to clean your paintbrushes between colors.

If you just want to practice, you can also create paintings on large multi-media art paper.
Your local art supply store should carry paper and canvas.

You can use any type of paint to achieve a Cubist style, but acrylic works well, especially for beginners. Acrylic paints are versatile, often less expensive than oil paints, and make it easier to create crisp lines. [3] X Research source
Pick paintbrushes that are labeled for acrylic paints. Get a few different sizes for versatility while you paint.
Make sure you have a pencil and gum eraser on hand to sketch before you begin to paint.
You may also need a ruler or yardstick to help guide your lines and make them crisp and straight.

Decide whether you want to paint a human figure, a landscape, or a still life.
Choose something that you can look at and study in real life while you are painting. For example, if you want to do a figure, see if a friend can pose for you. If you’d like to paint a still life, arrange a group of objects or an object, like a musical instrument, in front of you.

Step 5 Sketch your subject in pencil onto your canvas.

Once you have a general sketch, use your ruler to sharpen the edges.
In any place you’ve sketched soft, rounded lines, go back over them and change them into sharp lines and edges.
For example, if you’re sketching a person, you might go over the rounded line of the shoulder and make it look more like the top of a rectangle.

Putting Your Idea on Canvas

Look at the light. Instead of shading and blending, in Cubism, you will use the light to create shapes. Outline, in geometric shapes, where the light falls in your painting.
Also, use geometric lines to show where you would generally shade in a painting.
Don’t be afraid to overlap your lines.

If you want to use bright colors, choose to use between one and three main bright colors so that your painting retains its striking geometry.
You can also use a monochromatic palette in a single color family. For example, Picasso did many paintings mainly in shades of blue.
Put your paints onto your palette or a paper plate in front of you. Use white to make shades lighter. Mix the colors that you want.

With acrylic paints, you can layer colors to make your paintings feel more dimensional.
If you need to do so, use your ruler to guide your paintbrush, like you did your pencil. You want your paint lines to be just as crisp as your pencil lines.

Making a Cubist Painting for Kids

Washable acrylic paints work well for painting with kids. You can also create a “painting” masterpiece with markers, crayons, or colored pencils.
Choose a large sheet of art paper or a notebook of paper to make your Cubist style painting.
You’ll also need paintbrushes, and a pencil and eraser.

Kelly Medford

Cubist paintings are a great way to stretch your kids' artistic imaginations. Kelly Medford, a plein air painter, says: “With kids, you want to encourage them with whatever they make, give them the skills to keep developing, and always challenge them. Teaching them new skills can help them to refine what they already know.”

Step 2 Choose the subject for your piece.

Choose something you have on hand. You want to practice drawing from life instead of just drawing from your imagination.
Practice making small sketches of your subject in a sketchbook. You want to decide exactly how you will draw it for your final painting.

As you are sketching, remember that your drawing doesn’t have to be completely realistic.
It’s okay to overlap lines and exaggerate features. You’re just going to make it even more abstract.

Step 4 Break up bigger shapes in your drawing.

You don’t want large areas of blank space in your drawing.
You also don’t want to create too many areas with a bunch of tiny geometric shapes.

Step 5 Paint the shapes in your drawing.

Use black or brown paint to create thin outlines around the shapes you made.
Try to stick to using only a few different colors.

These paintings make great decorations for children’s bedrooms.
They are also good gifts for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or Grandparents’ Day.

Community Q&A

↑ http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cube/hd_cube.htm
↑ http://www.parkablogs.com/content/choosing-right-canvas-your-paintings-and-artworks
↑ http://willkempartschool.com/what-is-the-difference-between-oils-vs-acrylic-paints/
↑ https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/cubism
↑ http://www.pablopicasso.org/cubism.jsp
↑ http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1997.149.12/
↑ http://www.craftsy.com/blog/2015/07/acrylic-painting-techniques-for-beginners/
↑ http://emptyeasel.com/2007/10/17/what-is-cubism-an-introduction-to-the-cubist-art-movement-and-cubist-painters/
↑ http://artfulparent.com/2014/01/our-25-favorite-kids-art-materials.html
↑ http://www.theartabet.com/what-should-you-teach-a-young-child-to-draw-ages-3-to-7/

About This Article

To do a Cubist style painting, begin by choosing a subject that appeals to you. Some possibilities include a still life with flowers or a self-portrait—although Cubism is an abstract style, most Cubist painters work from life. Once you’ve decided what to paint, sketch it on the canvas in pencil. Then, look for ways to break the shapes down into more basic geometric forms. Finally, settle on a color palette for your painting—anything from shades of blue to an entire rainbow—and begin filling in the shapes you’ve created with paint. For more beginner-friendly tips, such as how to do Cubist paintings if you’re a kid, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Easy Cubism Art Project

Cubism is one of my favorite art genres to teach. Because of the influences of contemporary artists (think Romero Britto), children are familiar with how artists transforms everyday objects into geometric shapes, which is a huge hit with this easy cubism art project.

An easy cubism art project to do with your kids. All you need is card stock and some colored markers.

The earlier influences of cubism (Picasso, Klee, Cézanne and Braque) are just as fun and colorful. When I taught my Cubist-Inspired Picasso lesson to Kinders, I drew a fish, cut the fish into sections and shapes. Then, as a group, we put the fish together again in a new and different way. This exercise was really fun and emphasized the concept of abstraction (to take apart) and ultimately cubism.

Cool way to teach cubism to young children.

My Easy Cubism Activities utilize the same concept: draw a familiar object then divide into shapes and lines. My third graders loved this project and although the instructions are the same, each child produced wildly different pieces.

I used Prismacolor markers for this project and are absolutely lovely. The colors are rich and heavy. Using card stock instead of sulfite paper makes coloring a pleasure. I read that using photo paper is a dream to use with markers so if you have a ream of that laying around, try it out!

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Look Closer

All about cubism

Discover the radical 20th century art movement. This resource introduces cubist artists, ideas and techniques and provides discussion and activities.

Pablo Picasso Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper (1913) Tate

What is cubism and why was it so radical?

In around 1907 two artists living in Paris called Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed a revolutionary new style of painting which transformed everyday objects, landscapes, and people into geometric shapes. In 1908 art critic Louis Vauxcelles, saw some landscape paintings by Georges Braque (similar to the picture shown above) in an exhibition in Paris, and described them as ‘bizarreries cubiques’ which translates as ‘cubist oddities’ – and the term cubism was coined.

By comparing a cubist still life with an earlier still life painted using a more traditional approach, we can see immediately just what it is that made cubism look so radically different from earlier painting styles. Both paintings are of musical instruments. The first is by Edward Collier and was painted in the seventeenth century. The second is by cubist Georges Braque.

Edward Collier Still Life with a Volume of Wither’s ‘Emblemes’ (1696) Tate

Georges Braque Mandora (1909–10) Tate

Compare the way the instruments are painted in the paintings. Which look the most real? How has Collier made the objects in his painting look realistic? (Look at how he has used shading or tone , colour, perspective and also how he has applied the paint). What rules do you think the cubists broke?

Collier's Still Life looks realistic because...

His use of colour to help us recognise the objects. A golden brown colour suggests the wood of the stringed instruments and table; the book and sheet music are black (ink) and white (paper); the grapes are a lush dark purple; and he has even cleverly recreated the metallic surface of the two-handled bowl using dark greys and whites
His use of light and dark tones (shadows and highlights) to suggest the three-dimensional quality of the objects. Look at the side of the stringed instrument at the front of the painting. Light reflects off the raised surface closest to us, but as this curves away from us, the tone used is darker to suggest that it is more in shadow.The background is a shadowy dark space behind the table
His use of perspective to create the impression of a real space with objects in the foreground looking bigger and clearer and objects behind looking smaller and less clear.

Braque's Mandora is different because...

Although the shape of the mandora (a stringed instrument similar to a lute) is fairly clear, and if we look closely we can make out a bottle behind it, there is very little difference between the way Braque has painted the objects and the space around them. He has fragmented the whole image into tiny flat geometric shapes so the edges of the objects are less clear
He has not used realistic colours for the different objects in the painting, instead he has used the same small range of muted colours – black, greys, ochres and earthy greens – for all the objects (no matter what they are) and the background
He has not used perspective, or tone (light and shadow) to create the illusion of three-dimensional space or three-dimensional objects. Although there are lighter and darker tones within the painting, and these do sometimes create the appearance of three-dimensions (a dark tone is used for the side of the mandora making it look like a solid object); the tone is not always used in this way and sometimes seems confusing. The mandora, the objects behind it, and the background all seem to sit on the same level – on the flat surface of the picture, with no foreground or background, and no illusion of receding space.

Meet the cubists

Brassaï, photo of Picasso in his studio at 23 rue La Boétie, standing in front of Rousseau’s Portrait of a Woman 1932. Musée Picasso © ESTATE BRASSAÏ -R.M.N.

Georges Braque , London 1946 (inner pages) from Tate Publishing

In 1907 Georges Braque visited Pablo Picasso’s studio. This studio visit marked the beginning of one of the most important friendships in the history of art. Over the next few months and years the two artists shared their ideas, scrutinized each other’s work, challenged and encouraged each other. At some stage in around 1907 or 1908 they invented an exciting new style of painting – cubism . Their close working relationship at that time was later described by Georges Braque:

The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain

Picasso and Braque were soon joined in their art adventure by other artists who were experimenting with different ways of depicting the world around them. Artists such as Juan Gris , Albert Gleizes , Jean Metzinger and Robert Delaunay who all worked in a cubist style.

Cubism explained

Georges Braque Bottle and Fishes (c.1910–12) Tate

Cubism looks very different to lots of other styles of painting. How does it work? What were Braque and Picasso's reasons for turning their back on traditional techniques? How did the cubists develop their new style?

The illusion of space

Since the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, European artists had aimed to create the illusion of three-dimensional space in their drawings and paintings. They wanted the experience of looking at a painting to be like looking through a window onto a real landscape, interior, person or object.

How do you make things look three-dimensional on a two-dimensional surface? Techniques such as linear perspective and tonal gradation are used. Perspective involves making things look bigger and clearer when they are close up, and smaller and less clear when they are further away. By doing this you can create the illusion of space. Artists also use tones (shadows) to create the illusion of three-dimensional objects. By gradually changing the darkness of a shadow, you can make something look solid.

These drawings by J.M.W Turner show how perspective and tone (or shadow) can be used to create the illusion of real, solid three-dimensional objects.

Joseph Mallord William Turner Lecture Diagram 42: Perspective Construction of a Tuscan Entablature (c.1810) Tate

Joseph Mallord William Turner Lecture Diagram 70: A Ruined Amphitheatre (c.1810) Tate

A new reality

The cubists however, felt that this type of illusion is trickery and does not give a real experience of the object.

Their aim was to show things as they really are, not just to show what they look like. They felt that they could give the viewer a more accurate understanding of an object, landscape or person by showing it from different angles or viewpoints, so they used flat geometric shapes to represent the different sides and angles of the objects. By doing this, they could suggest three-dimensional qualities and structure without using techniques such as perspective and shading.

This breaking down of the real world into flat geometric shapes also emphasized the two-dimensional flatness of the canvas. This suited the cubists’ belief that a painting should not pretend to be like a window onto a realistic scene but as a flat surface it should behave like one.

Look at this painting by Georges Braque of a glass on a table. Can you spot the techniques he has used to emphasize the flatness of the picture, but at the same time, made the objects look solid?

Georges Braque Glass on a Table (1909–10) Tate

The phases of cubism: Analytical vs synthetic

Cubism can be split into two distinct phases. The first phase, analytical cubism , is considered to have run until around 1912. It looks more austere or serious. Objects are split into lots of flat shapes representing the views of them from different angles, and muted colours and darker tones or shades are used. The second phase, synthetic cubism , involves simpler shapes and brighter colours (and looks more light-hearted and fun!)

Practical activities

David Hockney Caribbean Tea Time (1987) Tate

Use these activity suggestions to explore ideas and create a cubist masterpiece updated for the twenty-first century.

Activity 1: Research influences

Paul Cézanne The Grounds of the Château Noir c.1900–6 Lent by the National Gallery 1997

Carved wooden female figure (minsereh) Mende, probably late 19th century AD, From Sierra Leone Trustees of the British Museum

There were two key influences on the development of cubist style: the paintings of Paul Cézanne and sculptures created by non-European artists. Use these activities to explore these two artistic approaches

Cézanne’s approach

Braque and Picasso greatly admired Paul Cézanne . Cézanne’s paintings of figures and landscapes are made up of small planes (flat shapes) and repeated brush strokes. They often seem to be painted from slightly different viewpoints. It is this influence that we can see in the work of the cubists.

If you look at Cézanne’s painting of trees and rocks in the grounds of the Château Noir, the surface seems to vibrate with a mesh of tiny interlocking planes.

Select a small section of the image and copy it, enlarging it so that it fills your page
Use paint, crayons or pastels to copy the marks and colours

Sculptures from non-European cultures

Picasso and Braque were amazed by the sculptures they saw in the Trocadero museum in Paris. Picasso described sculptures from French Polynesia and Africa as ‘the most powerful and most beautiful things the human imagination has ever produced’.

Look closely at the sculpture above. Think about the following and make notes in your sketchbook

Where is it from?
How big do you think it is?
Is it realistic?
Has the sculptor simplified the figure?
Do parts of it seem exaggerated or emphasised?
What does the sculpture make you think and feel?
What do you think the sculpture was originally made for?

Create a portrait using sculptures from non-European cultures as your inspiration. This can be a self-portrait or a portrait of someone else.

Use your notes about the sculpture you chose from the slideshow above to help you with approach and technique
How has the sculptor simplified and exaggerated the forms. What effect does this have on your response to the work?
Can you create a similar effect in your portrait?

Activity 2: Investigate viewpoints

The cubists wanted to show the whole structure of objects in their paintings without using techniques such as perspective or graded shading to make them look realistic. They wanted to show things as they really are – not just to show what they look like. They did this by:

Emphasizing the flatness of the picture surface by breaking objects down into geometric shapes
Depicting objects from lots of different angles. In this way they could suggest the three-dimensional quality of objects without making them look realistic.

Create a simple still life using the cubist technique of multiple viewpoints

Choose three simple objects and group them together (e.g. trainer, mobile phone, apple, headphones, soft-drink can)
Sketch or photograph the group of objects from four different viewpoints. (Viewpoints could include from the front, from above, from each side, from close-up, from far away…)
Cut up each sketch or photograph into eight sections
Choose two sections from each original sketch / photograph and put them together to form one image .

If you have access to picture editing software you can use this to create your picture. Use the tips below:

Photograph your still life from four different viewpoints and save these images
Select a small section from each photograph using the square marquee tool
Open a new image and paste two sections from each original photograph to form your different viewpoint still life.

Activity 3: Explore shape, pattern, and texture

Juan Gris The Sunblind (1914) Tate

Pablo Picasso Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle (1914) Lent by the National Gallery 1997

Juan Gris Bottle of Rum and Newspaper (1913–14) Tate

From around 1912 Braque , Picasso , and other artists working in a cubist style such as Juan Gris , started to use simpler shapes and lines and brighter colours in their artworks. They also began to add textures and patterns to their work, often collaging newspaper or other patterned paper directly into their paintings. This approach was called synthetic cubism. Browse the slideshow to remind yourself what it looks like.

Create a still life in the synthetic cubist style that explores shape, pattern and texture. Use the three objects you selected earlier, but this time use only flat shapes, simple lines and patterns to depict them in a still life. Here are some ideas.

You could draw a simple outline of the objects onto brightly coloured or patterned sheets of paper such as newspaper or wrapping paper. Cut these shapes out and collage them into your still life
Think about the negative shapes (the shapes left in the paper once you have cut your object out of it). Could you add these to your still life?
Look at the shadows made by the objects. How can you make these shadow shapes part of the work?
If your objects include text or numbers (such as the title of a book or a brand name on trainers), use numbers or letters cut from a magazine or newspaper
Don’t be afraid to mix media. Use charcoal or wax crayon to draw shapes or details over collage. Use paint to cover flat bright areas, or to add texture or pattern to your still life.

If you are still stuck for ideas, this animation may help!

iMap animation: Pablo Picasso, Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle 1913

Activity 4: Be inspired by other artists

John Stezaker Third Person (1988–9) Tate

Phoebe Unwin Man with Heavy Limbs (2009) Tate

Richard Hamilton Interior (1964–5) Tate

Albert Gleizes Painting (1921) Tate

Francis Bacon Three Figures and Portrait (1975) Tate

Patrick Caulfield Hemingway Never Ate Here (1999) Tate

Braque and Picasso developed cubism a century ago, but artists and designers have been influenced by the ideas and techniques ever since. How have they updated cubism?

Choose a cubist-inspired artwork from the works above or from Tate’s collection . Make a quick drawing of it in your sketchbook. Think about the following and annotate (add notes to) your drawing with your thoughts:

How do you think the artist was influenced by cubism?
Why do you like the artwork? What does it make you think or feel?
Is there anything in the artist’s approach that gives you ideas for how you could update cubism?

Activity 5: Create your own cubist artwork

You have investigated cubist sources and approaches and have researched how other artists have used cubist ideas and style. Now plan your artwork using what you have discovered, and update cubism for the twenty-first century.

Review what you have found out about cubism
Decide what you think are the key features of cubism. Which of these will you make use of in your artwork? List your ideas in your sketchbook
Braque and Picasso painted ordinary objects that were part of their everyday lives. Think of objects that reflect your lifestyle and interests. Make a note of them in your sketchbook
Braque and Picasso experimented with techniques and approaches. Can you think of ways you could use technology to make a state-of-the-art still life?

You should now have plenty of ideas for your updated cubist still life. Picasso and Braque were innovators, experimenting with radical new approaches in the way they depicted the world they saw around them. Their artworks still seem exciting and daring to us one hundred years later. Make sure your artwork has what it takes to inspire others and stands the test of time!

Cubist artists in the collection

Pablo picasso, georges braque, related terms and concepts.

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted

Orphism was an abstract, cubist influenced painting style developed by Robert and Sonia Delaunay around 1912

Analytical cubism

The term analytical cubism describes the early phase of cubism, generally considered to run from 1908–12, characterised by a fragmentary appearance of multiple viewpoints and overlapping planes

Synthetic cubism

Synthetic cubism is the later phase of cubism, generally considered to run from about 1912 to 1914, characterised by simpler shapes and brighter colours

Creativity in the classroom and in life

Cubist Drawing with video tutorial

Miriam | May 12, 2021 April 9, 2021 | Art Techniques , Mixed media

You need just a drawing paper, some colored pencils and watercolors to create this still life in the style of CUBISM . Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.

To imitate this pictorial style we need to take three pictures of a still life: we can prepare it on a table, arranging some objects such as vases, bottles, glasses, fruit. We take three different shots of the same still life, changing framing and taking a front view, a top view and a three-quarter view.

We copy the pictures, overlapping the drawings on the same sheet of paper. After that, we color the drawing with colored pencils and paint it with watercolors (or coffee as I suggested in the video-tutorial. It was a time of lock down with closed shops!). Here below the video tutorial

You copy the three pictures on the same sheet of paper, overlapping the three different views.

Then with a ruler, you draw some straight lines that “break” and further break down the shapes.

The drawing is colored with colored pencils, choosing earthy, brown and monochromatic tones in the style of Analytical Cubism by Braque and Picasso.

Subsequently, some areas of the drawing are painted with watercolors (or coffee as you can see in the video), leaving a few small white areas. Eventually, once dry, further pencil shades can be added.

Here below some student’s drawings:

Here the drawings of Maria Castellano students from the Middle School G. Pascoli in San Giorgio Ionico (Ta) Italy , completed of still lives pictures. Thanks for sharing!

Here below the drawings of Gisella Nabissi students from the Middle School Giovanni III in Mogliano (MC) Italy . These works are full of variety, personality, and talent!

Copying a portrait using the Grid Method

Mandala with color theory, 1 thought on “cubist drawing with video tutorial”.

Hi Miriam… Love your site and the work you are doing! How long did it take for the children to do that assignement? Regards/Jorge

3.4: Cubism + early abstraction (I)

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Cubism and early abstraction c. 1907 - 1939

A new, modern world demanded new ways of seeing and representing the things in it.

The Case for Abstraction

by THE ART ASSIGNMENT

Video \(\PageIndex{1}\): Speaker: Sarah Urist Green

Additional resources:

Abstract art definition from the Tate

Abstract art resources from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Cubism c. 1907 - 1939

Picasso and Braque revolutionized painting with their new approach to representation.

Beginner's guide to Cubism

Pablo picasso and the new language of cubism.

by DR. BETH HARRIS and DR. STEVEN ZUCKER

Video \(\PageIndex{2}\): Pablo Picasso, The Guitarist , 1910, oil on canvas, 100 x 73 cm (Centre Pompidou, Paris)

Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:

Inventing Cubism

During the summer of 1908, Braque returned to Cézanne’s old haunt for a second summer in a row. Previously he had painted this small port just south of Aix-en-Provence with the brilliant irrevent colors of a Fauve (Braque along with Matisse, Derain, and others defined this style from about 1904 to 1907). But now, after Cézanne’s death and after having met Picasso, Braque set out on a very different tack, the invention of Cubism.

Cubism is a terrible name. Except for a very brief moment, the style has nothing to do with cubes. Instead, it is an extension of the formal ideas developed by Cézanne and broader perceptual ideas that became increasingly important in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These were the ideas that inspired Matisse as early as 1904 and Picasso perhaps a year or two later. We certainly saw such issues asserted in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. But Picasso’s great 1907 canvas is not yet Cubism. It is more accurate to say that it is the foundation upon which Cubism is constructed. If we want to really see the origin of the style, we need to look beyond Picasso to his new friend Georges Braque.

A New Perspective

The young French Fauvist, Georges Braque that had been struck by both the posthumous Cézanne retrospective exhibition held in Paris in 1907 and his first sight of Picasso’s radical new canvas, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Like so many people that saw it, Braque is reported to have hated it—Matisse, for example, predicted that Picasso would be found hanged behind the work, so great was his mistake. Nevertheless, Braque stated that it haunted him through the winter of 1908. Like every good Parisian, Braque fled Paris in the summer and decided to return to the part of Provence in which Cézanne had lived and worked. Braque spent the summer of 1908 shedding the colors of Fauvism and exploring the structural issues that had consummed Cézanne and now Picasso. He wrote:

It [Cézanne’s impact] was more than an influence, it was an invitation. Cézanne was the first to have broken away from erudite, mechanized perspective… \(^{1}\)

Like Cézanne, Braque sought to undermine the illusion of depth by forcing the viewer to recognize the canvas not as a window but as it truly is, a vertical curtain that hangs before us. In canvases such as Houses at L’Estaque ( 1908), Braque simplifies the form of the houses (here are the so called cubes), but he nullifies the obvious recessionary overlapping with the trees that force forward even the most distant building.

Brothers of Invention

When Braque returned to Paris in late August, he found Picasso an eager audience. Almost immediately, Picasso began to exploit Braque’s investigations. But far from being the end of their working relationship, this exchange becomes the first in a series of collaborations that lasts six years and creates an intimate creative bound between these two artists that is unique in the history of art.

Between the years 1908 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Braque and Picasso work together so closely that even experts can have difficulty telling the work of one artist from the other. For months on end they would visit each others studio on an almost daily basis sharing ideas and challenging each other as they went. Still, a pattern did emerge and it tended to be to Picasso’s benefit. When a radical new idea was introduced, more than likely, it was Braque that recognized its value. But it was inevitably Picasso who realized its potential and was able to fully exploit it.

By 1910, Cubism had matured into a complex system that is seemingly so esoteric that it appears to have rejected all esthetic concerns. The average museum visitor, when confronted by a 1910 or 1911 canvas by Braque or Picasso, the period known as Analytic Cubism, often looks somewhat put upon even while they may acknowledge the importance of such work. I suspect that the difficulty, is, well…, the difficulty of the work. Cubism is an analysis of vision and of its representation and it is challenging. As a society we seem to believe that all art ought to be easily understandable or at least beautiful. That’s the part I find confusing.

1. As quoted in William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism , New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989, p.353.

Cubism on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Picasso, The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro with Viewer

Cubism and multiple perspectives

by DR. CHARLES CRAMER and DR. KIM GRANT

At first sight the objects in Georges Braque’s Pitcher and Violin appear arbitrarily distorted, but they are not. One tactic that Braque uses here is depicting objects from multiple perspectives. While most of Braque’s violin is depicted frontally, like an illustration in an encyclopedia, the scroll at the top of the neck is represented from the side, and the bridge that holds the strings over the neck and sound board has been flipped up.

The pitcher is also depicted mostly from the side, but we see the top rim from above on the left-hand side, while the spout is depicted from a slightly less elevated angle. Similarly, while Braque appears to have depicted the violin standing improbably on its bottom edge, it is more likely that we are expected to understand it as lying flat on a table. Thus, we are looking down on the violin at the same time as we look straight ahead at the body of the pitcher and the wall behind the table.

Cubism as higher truth

This use of multiple perspectives became a hallmark of the Cubist style, but Braque and Picasso never explained why they employed this technique. One common contemporary interpretation argued that the use of multiple perspectives allows greater truth and accuracy than the traditional naturalistic style that had dominated art since the Renaissance. In 1912, the writer and art critic Jacques Rivière argued that linear perspective creates unrealistic distortions. For example, if we stand in the middle of railroad tracks, they appear to converge and meet at a point, when in fact they remain parallel.

François Bonvin’s painting of a violin shows how much the instrument is skewed and distorted when viewed in perspective. Parts nearer the viewer are larger than parts further away, and some parts are compressed by foreshortening while others are occluded entirely. Rivière wrote that such distortions are corrected in real life simply by moving around objects to see their true shapes.

A step to the right and a step to the left [can] complete our vision. The knowledge we have of an object is … a complex sum of perceptions … the object must always be presented from the most revealing angle. Jacques Rivière, “Present Tendencies in Painting” (1912), as translated in Edward Fry, ed., Cubism (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 77.

Braque represents the key parts of the violin from the most revealing angle. For example, the scroll is flipped to the side because if viewed from the front like the rest of the violin, it would not be visible at all. At the same time, though, if the scroll were viewed from the side, we would only see two of the tuning pegs, so Braque flips the view again to straight on so that all four pegs are visible.

Perspective is a deliberate lie

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In 1912, the writer Olivier-Hourcade provided another example of how Cubist paintings correct the distortions of perspective:

The painter, when he has to draw a round cup, knows very well that the opening of the cup is a circle. When he draws an ellipse, therefore, he is not sincere, he is making a concession to the lies of optics and perspective, he is telling a deliberate lie. Olivier-Hourcade, “The Tendency of Contemporary Painting” (1912), as translated in Fry, Cubism , p. 74.

Look at all of the ellipses (flattened circles) in the Heda still-life above: the lip of the glass, the goblet, and the silver pedestal bowl, as well as the two pewter plates and the sliced lemon. All of these shapes are circles in real life; they only appear to be ellipses because of the angle from which they are viewed. The painter can correct this illusion simply by depicting these shapes from straight on, so the circle reveals its true shape.

Recognizing objects in Cubism

The subject of this still life may be difficult to discern, but with the help of the title we can begin to pick out the represented objects. The clarinet is the white rectangular shape in the left of the painting. Four finger holes extend up its length, which is shaded with chiaroscuro to suggest its tubular volume.

Note that while the bulk of the instrument is seen from the side, the opening at the base in the center of the painting is round, and a semicircle and schematic triangle at the other end by the edge of the canvas suggest the wedge-shaped cut out of the mouthpiece where the reed sits.

Above the clarinet’s finger holes, we can see a wine bottle with schematic, squared-off shoulders. Its transparency is indicated by the fact that we can see the clarinet through it. Notice that here, too, while we see the bulk of the bottle from the side, Braque has rendered the bottle’s mouth as a circle, as though seen from above, while a quarter-circle indicates the round base below.

With familiarity, we can begin to recognize objects in Cubist still-lifes even when they are not explicitly mentioned in the title. In the upper right quadrant of this painting there is a stemmed glass, again seen mostly from the side, but circles at the base, lip, and stem indicate the perfect roundness of those parts.

An art of conception, not perception

Jacques Rivière also argued that monochromatic color and inconsistent lighting are more truthful means to depict reality than traditional naturalism. As the Impressionists had demonstrated, the appearance of objects changes radically in different kinds of light.

Monochromatic color eliminates the variables of lighting to represent objects in their true form, as we know them to be, rather than showing them distorted by our vision. For this reason, Cubism was often seen as an art of conception rather than perception. Cubist paintings represented the composite idea of objects that we have in our heads, rather than rendering objects from one point of view, at one moment in time, and in one kind of light.

Cubism vs. illusionism

Braque and Picasso were well aware of how revolutionary their new way of representing objects was. As if marking the very different approaches to “realism” employed by Cubism and traditional naturalism, Braque painted a nail in the top center of Pitcher and Violin . Although it is rendered in a relatively cursory manner, its darkness and cast shadow make it appear at first sight as though it were a real nail pinning the painting to the wall.

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This refers to a tradition of nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil painting that was the culmination of Renaissance naturalism. Trompe l’oeil paintings are so detailed and convincing that the viewer is fooled into thinking they are real.

Everything in this Harnett still life is painted: the violin, the door, the rusty hinges and nails, the lock, and even the wooden frame. Although this is the style that is usually taken as being the most “realistic,” it is in fact an illusion: it’s only paint on canvas. The use of multiple perspectives to show objects’ true shapes is arguably more true to reality.

Incomprehensible fins

The idea of Cubism as a more truthful representation of objects based on the use of multiple perspectives to build up a composite, conceptual representation was one of the dominant interpretations of the movement. It does not, however, fully account for what we see in the works, and it should be remembered that Braque and Picasso did not articulate or endorse this interpretation.

One thing that this interpretation does not account for is what can be called the “background noise” of Cubist paintings. While some shapes in Braque’s Pitcher and Violin and Clarinet and Bottle can be seen as articulating the shapes of those objects from multiple perspectives, others appear to be just arbitrary fragments. Also, as the style of Cubism evolved, Braque and Picasso broke objects up into smaller and smaller facets, until they are virtually unrecognizable in a shallow plane of monochromatic shards.

More oddly still, not only are the objects themselves faceted, it appears as though the empty space between them has also been shattered into facets. In some works, paint is applied in an almost brick-like fashion, further contributing to the background noise, until only a few clues (and the titles) hint at what is being represented.

Rivière found such paintings perplexing:

To each object they add the distance which separates it from neighboring objects … and in this way they show it prolonged in all directions and armed with incomprehensible fins. The intervals between forms—all the empty parts of the picture, all the places in it occupied by nothing but air, find themselves filled up by a system of walls and fortifications. Jacques Rivière, “Present Tendencies in Painting” (1912), as translated in Edward Fry, ed., Cubism , p. 79.

Although this is a fairly accurate description of late Cubist painting, Rivière was unable to explain its motivations and claimed that these were “mistakes.” His highly rational view of Cubism led him to dismiss the elements of the style that did not conform to his ideas. Rivière’s “multiple perspectives as higher truth” interpretation is compelling, and as we have seen backed by some visual evidence, but there are clearly other facets to Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubism.

Edward Fry, ed., Cubism (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966)

Read and listen to more about Still life with Banderillas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Synthetic Cubism, Part I

Starting in 1912, surprising new elements begin to turn up in works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque: cut-up pieces of newspaper, wallpaper, construction paper, cloth, and even rope. Although the resulting collages are visually very different from the largely monochromatic oil paintings most commonly associated with the movement, they are still considered to be part of Cubism.

Partly this is because these works often included drawings that use techniques associated with Cubism, such as deconstructing objects into fragmented, angular forms seen from multiple perspectives. Beyond this similarity, though, there is also another, more conceptual one. This new phase of Cubism is also dedicated to exploring the ambiguities of representation, now on an even wider scale.

Fruit Dish and Glass is Braque’s first work using papier collé (pasted paper), a subset of collage made using only paper. Picasso’s first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning preceded Braque’s Fruit Dish and Glass by a few months and was made from a variety of materials including oilcloth and rope. Papier collé was a central medium in the second phase of Braque’s and Picasso’s joint Cubist investigations commonly known as Synthetic Cubism.

Retreat from abstraction

During this phase both artists retreated from the verge of total abstraction they had reached in their late Analytic Cubist paintings . Synthetic Cubist works use multiple forms of representation, combining the abstracted forms of Analytic Cubism with color, collage, and even sometimes naturalistic representations, to create a complex whole.

In Fruit Dish and Glass , Braque combines Cubist drawing with illusionistic representation, words, and decorative paper printed with a wood grain pattern ( faux bois ). At the top we see a bunch of grapes drawn relatively naturalistically, with light and shade defining its three-dimensional forms. The remaining still-life objects are depicted in an Analytic Cubist style that deconstructs them into arcs, cylinders, and flat planes representing a fruit dish, plates, and glasses on a table. The words “BAR” and “ALE” are frequently seen on signs and labels in cafés and indicate the general location of the still life.

References to traditional illusionism

Charcoal drawing extends over the strips of wood grain paper that frame and anchor the central forms. The two vertical strips in the upper portion represent wood paneling on a café wall behind the still life, while the horizontal strip below represents a wooden table supporting the dishes and fruit. A circle drawn on the lower strip of wood grain paper suggests the round knob of a drawer pull. This is a reference to illusionistic paintings, which often depict handles and knobs facing the viewer to enhance the sense of the objects being real and within easy reach.

The naturalistic grapes framed by lines and pasted paper at the top of the work are also a specific reference to the Western tradition of illusionistic representation. A famous story from Ancient Greece describes how the painter Zeuxis was so skilled an artist that birds tried to eat the grapes he painted. Braque centers his drawn grapes as a well-known example of traditional naturalism and then surrounds them with alternative strategies of representation.

Signifying real objects by other means

The Cubist drawings of suggestive geometric forms are, like the words BAR and ALE, a means of referring to or signifying real objects. If we know the language we know what a word signifies; this is true of French and English, and it is (at least theoretically) true of Cubist forms as well. Once we are aware of Cubist conventions for drawing we can recognize that certain relationships of lines and shapes signify fruit, a glass, or a face. The wood grain paper is also a means of signification. The represented texture refers to the physical materials in the scene, providing further information.

In addition, wood grain paper is, like the drawn grapes, an illusion. The naturalistically depicted grapes represent the central achievement of the European fine art tradition. The wood grain paper is, by contrast, a cheap mass-produced item used for decorative purposes. Its presence undermines the exalted value of artistic skill in creating illusionistic representations, and demonstrates another feature of synthetic Cubism: the collapse of distinctions between “high” art and the cheap, ephemeral materials and techniques of mass-produced design.

A kind of certainty

Braque later wrote:

The papiers collés in my drawings have also given me a kind of certainty. Georges Braque, “Thoughts on Painting” (1917)

This is generally understood to mean that they allowed him a way to retreat from the increasingly unmoored abstraction of late Analytic Cubism and anchor his works more solidly in relation to reality. The vaporous spaces and ambiguous forms of Analytic Cubist paintings like The Portuguese are, however, replaced by a different type of ambiguity resulting from the complex and shifting relationships of disparate materials and modes of signification.

Braque’s association of papiers collés with certainty should also be understood in terms of literalism and materiality. Picasso and Braque often employed collage elements as a shortcut means to represent objects. A newspaper in a still life of a café table will be represented by simply gluing newspaper to the picture plane, rather than painstakingly imitating its appearance using paint. Similarly, literal wallpaper is used to represent the presence of wallpaper in the scene, and the actual label is used to show a label on a bottle of wine. This is a form of playful one-upmanship of the Western tradition of naturalistic depiction: the artist now offers reality itself, rather than illusion.

Collage elements also enhance the physical and tactile qualities of the artwork, which increasingly interested both Braque and Picasso. During this period they both also made sculptures and created pronounced surface textures in their paintings by adding sand, sawdust and other grainy materials to paint.

The strips of wood-grain paper in Fruit Dish and Glass confront the viewer with powerful dark shapes, which create a visually strong frame for the more immaterial charcoal drawing on white paper. In addition, the way the drawing continues onto the pasted paper enhances the typically Cubist interest in the tension between literal flatness and represented spatial depth.

Multiple readings

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In Siphon, Glass, Newspaper and Violin , Picasso displays the multiple ways charcoal drawing and papier collé can be used to represent objects. For example, on the left newspaper is cut into the shape of a siphon, while on the right it is used as a surface for drawings of a glass and part of a violin. Its edges also define the left side of the violin’s upper body and neck.

Analytic cubist techniques are used to depict the glass, violin, and top of the siphon from multiple perspectives , while on the far right, paper painted with illusionistic wood grain indicates the violin’s material. In the center the word ‘JOURNAL’ (the French word for newspaper) cut from a newspaper’s masthead represents that object in a particularly direct and literal way. Although we are not offered a coherent visual illusion of the objects in the title, these multiple media and representational strategies combine to give us all of the relevant information.

Papier collé and collage not only anchored Cubist forms more firmly as distinct material objects, they also gave the artists a particularly rich means for generating multiple possibilities of meaning through a combination of media, representational strategies, and suggestive shapes and their formal relationships. Collage shapes, materials, colors, and words all contribute to the complex significations that proliferate in Synthetic Cubism.

Read about Fruit Dish and Glass at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Synthetic Cubism, Part II

Pablo Picasso’s Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass is generally thought to have been made as a response to Georges Braque’s Fruit Dish and Glass . Both works bring a new tool into the already-complex collection of Cubist techniques of representation — the use of collage.

A wealth of associations

The subject of Picasso’s Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass is familiar from earlier Analytic Cubist paintings , which frequently depict café tables with drinks, newspapers, and musical instruments . Here, however, the abstracted geometric forms of Analytic Cubism are limited to the charcoal drawing of the glass on paper pasted on the right. It is one element in the collage, which includes seven different types of paper arranged on a wallpaper ground.

The pattern of the wallpaper is a diagonal lattice that frames flowers and recalls the overall patterns of lattices and grids that structure earlier Analytic Cubist paintings such as Braque’s Piano and Mandola .

While Braque’s Fruit Dish and Glass used only one type of pasted paper (the printed wood grain), Picasso uses many, and demonstrates that a wealth of associations can be generated from their juxtaposition.

Patterns of formal relations

An intricate pattern of formal relations is created between the varied shapes and colors of the pasted paper, which also generate a complex set of possible readings. The guitar is signified by multiple cut-paper elements.

On the left, the hand-painted wood grain paper cut into a double curve suggests the material and shape of the guitar’s body. A vertical trapezoid of blue paper is the neck in perspective, while the shallow black curve below stands for both the bottom of the guitar and the leading edge of the circular table on which the still-life sits.

In the center of the image, the white paper circle representing the sound hole in the guitar body looks like a hole cut out of the picture, while the fragment of sheet music simultaneously refers to itself, and to the sounds emanating from the instrument.

The glass drawn in charcoal is somewhat overwhelmed by the strong shapes of the pasted papers, but its ghostly appearance, as well as the semi-transparency of the paper on which it is drawn, suggests the transparency of glass. It is brought into the composition by the use of a visual rhyme — the circular lip of the glass directly echoes the white circle of pasted paper to the left.

The importance of text

One topic of debate among art historians has been the importance of the legible texts in Cubist collages. In this instance, it is generally agreed that the newspaper text in the lower left is relevant. The headline “La Bataille s’est engagé” (the battle has begun) is from an article about the Balkan War, but it is often interpreted as a competitive challenge to Braque, referring to the use of papier collé . In that reading, this work is a direct response to, and attempt to one-up, Braque’s Fruit Dish and Glass .

The truncated masthead of the newspaper “LE JOU” (short for le journal , French for “the newspaper”) is also meaningful. It appears in many Cubist works and not only signifies the newspaper’s presence in the still life, but also a pun on the French words for “to play” ( jouer ) and “toy” ( le jouet ). This is a verbal echo of the many formal rhymes and visual puns that appear in Synthetic Cubist works. These allow for multiple readings of individual elements and the relationships between them.

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In Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass , for example, “LE JOU” also recalls the French word for day ( le jour ), and suggests another reading for the forms in the work. The circle of white paper overlapping the trapezoid of blue paper above it can be interpreted as representing not only a guitar’s sound hole and neck, but as the sun rising into the sky at the beginning of a new day. Battles often begin at dawn, and the paired juxtaposition of the papier collé guitar and the Analytic Cubist drawing of a glass suggests a competition between older and newer Cubist techniques.

Political references

Most early discussions of Cubist collages stressed their formal innovations and the novel representational strategies they employed. More recently, however, some art historians have looked more closely at the texts of the newspaper clippings in Picasso’s works and discovered references to his political interests.

Still Life with Bottle of Suze is another work that uses legible clippings of articles about the contemporary Balkan war. This one also includes a clipping about a socialist demonstration against that war held in a Paris suburb. When asked about it years later Picasso said he used that particular clipping because it was a huge event and to show that he was against the war.

While it is unlikely that Picasso expected viewers to carefully read the fine print text in the newspaper clippings he used, headlines and sub-headers often stand out and appear to make relevant comments. In Still Life with Bottle of Suze a bold face sub-header on the left, “La Dislocation”, is easily legible and placed next to the still-life objects that have been separated and dislocated by Cubist representational techniques.

An art of ordinary activities and cheap materials

Most early Cubist collages depict still-life subjects, usually the types of objects found on café tables. They represent the ordinary places where the artists would have a drink, listen to a musical act, read a newspaper, and meet their friends. Newspaper clippings represent the sort of topical events discussed in cafés. Preserved in the artworks, the newspapers and other ordinary non-art materials such as wallpaper, labels, tickets, etc. now seem like mementos of a specific time and place.

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In their collages Picasso and Braque avoided conventional, often expensive, art materials and overt displays of technical skill that would indicate artistic training. Prior to its use by Braque and Picasso, collage was primarily a craft technique used by women and hobbyists in the 19th century to make scrapbooks. Collages are “poor” art works that do not employ the professional artist’s traditional manual skills.

Picasso’s Au Bon Marché proclaims its cheapness not only in its materials, but by its title as well. Bon marché is a French term meaning “good deal” or “cheap” as well as being the name of a prominent Paris department store. At the top of the collage, an advertisement for a rival Paris department store, Samaritaine, suggests another persistent theme of the collages: references to brand name products, mass media, advertisements, and commerce. Many artists, starting with the Dadaists during World War I and continuing to the present day, adopted the Cubists’ use of cheap found materials, employing them as a critical strategy to question the commercial values of the art world and modern society.

An enormous influence

For many people the appeal of early Cubist collage and papier collé is more intellectual than conventionally aesthetic. These works prompt the viewer to enjoy the multiple references and significations to be found in the combinations of forms and punning texts, rather than displaying the sensuous qualities of the painted surface or the artist’s skilled touch.

Despite its somewhat arcane intellectual appeal, however, Cubist collage had an enormous influence on modern art in the 20th century. Its employment of simplified planar forms was instrumental in the establishment of non-representational art, especially the geometric abstraction of movements such as Suprematism , Constructivism , De Stijl , Color Field painting , and Minimalism . And, the way the collages combine disparate found materials, refer to mass consumer culture, and collapse distinctions between ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture contributed to the development of Dada, Surrealism , assemblage, Pop art , and the various trends associated with post-modernism .

Still Life with Bottle of Suze at the Kemper Art Museum

Salon Cubism

The face of cubism.

Today, most people associate Cubism with Picasso and Braque , but in the early 1910s when the style was new, the works of many other Cubist artists, including Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Fernand Léger, were better known. These artists are often called the Salon Cubists because they participated in the large annual public exhibitions in Paris known as Salons. Picasso and Braque, by contrast, had an exclusive contract with their dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and only showed their Cubist works in Paris at his private gallery.

The Salon Cubists lived and worked in Paris neighborhoods, mostly Montparnasse and suburban Puteaux, some distance from Picasso and Braque’s studios in Montmartre. They met frequently with writers and intellectuals to discuss a range of ideas including mathematics, physics, politics, and philosophy. The group was large; thirty artists exhibited over 200 works at their 1912 exhibition, La Section d’Or (The Golden Section). In the early 1910s their works appeared in modern art exhibitions throughout Europe.

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A public profile

The Salon Cubists cultivated publicity; they showed their works as a group in order to attract attention in the overcrowded Salons. The Cubist Room at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants gained them public notice from purportedly scandalized viewers along with extensive critical recognition in newspapers and magazines.

By the time Cubism appeared, public outrage over modern art was a cliché. A long succession of modern art movements had led the public to expect incomprehensible new art works, and in the 1910s the number of “-isms” began to proliferate exponentially in both visual arts and literature. Cubism was one of the most prominent and successful movements claiming to represent the modern world in new, specifically modern ways. How it did so was, however, a matter of constant debate.

Big, ambitious paintings

Like Picasso and Braque, the Salon Cubists extended Cézanne’s exploration of the tensions and ambiguities of depicting three-dimensional objects in space on the flat surface of the picture plane. Salon Cubist paintings were, however, notably different from Picasso’s and Braque’s.

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The first difference is scale. Many Salon Cubist paintings were large. Henri Le Fauconnier’s Abundance , which was considered an important example of Cubist painting and exhibited widely throughout Europe in the 1910s, measures slightly over six by four feet. Picasso’s and Braque’s contemporary Cubist works were rarely more than a quarter that size, and often much smaller.

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Another difference is subject matter. Picasso and Braque painted mostly still lifes and single figures in portrait format, while the Salon Cubists addressed grand themes and painted multi-figure compositions, landscapes, and cityscapes. Albert Gleizes’ The Bathers combines a pastoral scene of nude figures bathing in the foreground with the factory chimneys of a modern suburb smoking in the background. In Le Fauconnier’s Abundance an allegorical female nude and a child are surrounded by fruit symbolizing the fertility of the land, and by extension, nationalistic pride in France itself.

Conflicting interpretations

While Picasso and Braque never provided any explanation of their Cubist work, some Salon Cubists were more forthcoming. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger published Du Cubisme (1912), which, despite its often vague and theoretically inconsistent text, was the most popular book on Cubist art for years. It was one of many texts on Cubism by critics, writers, and theorists eager to explain the new style.

Interpretations were often in conflict as critics attempted to explain how and why Cubist painters developed their non-naturalistic techniques of representation in relation to almost every scientific discovery and philosophical theory popular in the early 20th century. Some prominent critics and theorists analyzed Cubism as an art of conception (depicting what is known) rather than perception (depicting what is seen) in terms of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Cubist approaches to depicting figures and space were also frequently linked to non-Euclidean geometry and conceptions of space and time derived from both occultism and non-Newtonian physics. Another source for Cubist innovations was seen in the enormously popular anti-rationalist philosophy of Henri Bergson.

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Bergsonian Cubism

Jean Metzinger’s Le Goûter can be used to illustrate a Bergsonian approach to interpreting Cubism. The painting, whose title translates both to “taste” and “tea-time,” shows a seated woman holding a spoon and touching a tea saucer. Bergson’s philosophy stressed the importance of the physical senses, particularly touch, taste, and smell, as sources of intuitive knowledge. Le Goûter is all about sensory experience. Its female subject is partially nude, traditionally intended to appeal to the (implied) heterosexual male viewer’s sense of touch as well as sight, and it depicts her using her own senses, touching the tea saucer while smelling and tasting her tea.

Typical Cubist techniques can also be interpreted in Bergsonian terms. In Le Goûter the woman’s head and the cup are depicted from different angles. We see the cup and saucer from the side on the left and from above on the right. The woman faces us directly on the right, and is in profile on the left. According to Bergson the world is not composed of static objects isolated in empty space. Instead everything exists in duration — a continuous flow of time and space. The Cubist technique of depicting things simultaneously from different vantage points can be understood as presenting a Bergsonian conception of reality by rejecting a static single view point and showing the object as constantly changing in the temporal and spatial flux. This is also indicated by the technique of passage , breaking the boundaries between solid objects and surrounding space, as Gleizes does on the woman’s left shoulder in Le Goûter .

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Bergson’s concepts of intuition and élan vital can also be used to interpret Cubism. Élan vital is Bergson’s concept of a universal life force. In Le Fauconnier’s Abundance the vibrant and chaotic interlocking planes unify the figures, fruit, village and distant Alpine landscape into a visually active, faceted surface that suggests a vital force pulsating through everything. Élan vital cannot be directly perceived or even rationally understood, but it can be intuited. Bergson believed artists were particularly sensitive and intuitive beings in tune with the élan vital , and in their art they communicated their insights to the masses.

Products of the artist’s intuitive understanding, Cubist paintings with their non-rational spaces and ambiguous forms also prompted viewers to use their own intuition to complete the images in their minds. Gleizes’ The Path (Meudon) is a patchwork of geometric shapes that on examination reveals a scene of trees towering over a suburban village with a man walking in the foreground and a church on the horizon. The dynamic interlocking planes convey both a sense of movement and of unity, a world in which each part is connected to the whole in a vibrant, oscillating pattern suggestive of the vital force that animates the Bergsonian universe.

A kaleidoscope of modern experience

Some painters used Cubist forms to suggest a more abstract and extended interpenetration of space and time than Metzinger depicted in Le Goûter .

Fernand Léger’s The Wedding combines fragmented images of a crowded wedding celebration with aerial views of rooftops and a tree-lined street, interspersed with cloudy white abstract planes. His multiple views are more complex and disjointed than the comparatively legible scenes by Gleizes, Metzinger, and Le Fauconnier.

Léger’s painting suggests floating fragments of memory brought together in a kaleidoscope of shifting images. This conflation of different scenes in a single painting can be connected to Bergson’s notion of duration and to the related concept of simultaneity, which was understood by many artists of the time as a synthesis of memory and vision.

Ultimately, the work of the Cubist artists exhibiting in the Paris Salons was no more the product of a single unified theory than were the less public Cubist works of Picasso and Braque. The Salon Cubists used the new style to address a broad range of subjects and ideas, from traditional allegories and the celebration of nature to contemporary concepts of time and space.

View a digitized copy of Du Cubisme at MoMA

Pablo Picasso

Picasso’s early work, age twenty and looking rather goth.

When I’m in the galleries at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, I obviously spend a good deal of time looking at the art. But I also watch people look at the art and listen to what they have to say. The comments that people make can be quite thoughtful and visitor comments and questions have added enormously to my appreciation of the art over the years. Still, there are many comments that are born of pure befuddlement. And many of these target Picasso.

Many people seem to believe that Picasso’s abstraction of the human figure, his penchant for reconfiguring the body by mis-aligning a nose or an eye, for instance, is the result of his inability to draw. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is an old anecdote that tells of Picasso, who, upon emerging from an exhibition of drawings by young children, says, “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”

Perhaps this quote is apocryphal, but it points to something undeniably true: Picasso was an extraordinary craftsman, even when measured against the old masters. That he chose to struggle to overcome his visual heritage in order to find a language more responsive to the modern world is an important triumph that has had a vast effect upon our world. Picasso’s art has transformed and inspired not only artists, but also architects, designers, writers, mathematicians, and even philosophers. We may look at Picasso’s art in museums, but his art—via these translators—has therefore had a profound influence on what we see in our everyday life. Just think of the advertisements for products we buy, buildings in which we live and work, books we read, and even the way we conceive of reality.

“My kid could make that”

There is no question that Picasso’s art has had a most profound impact on the twentieth century. While Picasso suggests the value of unlearning the academic tradition, it is important to remember that he had mastered its techniques by a very early age. His father, Don José Ruiz Blasco, was a drawing teacher and curator at a small museum. The young Picasso began drawing and painting by age seven or eight. By age ten, Picasso assisted his father, sometimes painting the minor elements of the elder’s canvases. Soon after his father became a professor at the art academy in Barcelona, the young Picasso completed the entrance examinations (in record time) and was advanced to the school’s upper-level program. He repeated this feat when he applied to the Royal Academy in Madrid.

Picasso in Paris

Like Van Gogh had done before him, Picasso arrived in Paris determined to work through the avant-garde’s techniques and subjects to better understand such art. An example of his explorations of the achievements of contemporary art in Paris can be seen by comparing a painting by Degas to one by Picasso.

It is not surprising that Picasso, the great draftsman, would be interested in the work of the “odd man out” Degas, who nearly alone among the Impressionists retained the primacy of line. In the example Woman Ironing , Picasso has infused a somewhat maudlin weariness to his attenuated and curiously sensual laborer. Still, Picasso understands Degas’s experimentation with abstraction. Note how in Degas’s image, the luminous negative space defined between the arms refuses to recede beyond the figure, remaining trapped instead. Likewise, Picasso defines and centers an almost identical form. Notice, too, the bowl that Picasso places in the lower right corner. Like everything in this canvas, it is roughly formed with a dry brush. Still, the simple strokes of white and dark gray that define the volume speak to the magical pleasure of rendering space, a love that Picasso carries with him through out his career.

Family of Saltimbanques

This great, early painting by Picasso portrays a family of saltimbanques. These are wandering circus performers that move from town to town—never truly welcome, and only briefly tolerated for their ability to entertain.

Like so many of Picasso’s early subjects during his so-called Blue and Rose periods in the first years of the twentieth century, here is a group of disenfranchised, alienated people that live on the fringes of society. This particular group includes characters from the sixteenth-century Italian performing tradition of commedia dell’arte . One such figure is the rogue wit known as the Harlequin, who wears a suit of multicolored triangles. Picasso seems to have identified with such characters at this time. As he often reminded people, he was very poor at this point in his career. A Spaniard in France who did not yet speak the language, and still an unknown artist only in his mid-twenties, Picasso might well have felt an affinity with itinerant outsiders such as the saltimbanques.

The Laundry Barge

In Paris in 1904, Picasso rented a studio in an old, dilapidated building filled with artists and poets. Located at 13 Rue Ravignan, the building was dubbed the Bateau-Lavoir (or laundry barge) by poet-in-residence, Max Jacob. It is at this time that Picasso first came into contact with French painter Henri Matisse, as well as American ex-pat Gertrude Stein, who—along with her brother Leo—was one of the foremost patrons of modern art in Paris.

Pablo Picasso on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Cubism on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Portrait of Gertrude Stein at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pablo Picasso, Guernica

by LYNN ROBINSON

What would be the best way today to protest against a war? How could you influence the largest number of people? In 1937, Picasso expressed his outrage against war with Guernica , his enormous mural-sized painting displayed to millions of visitors at the Paris World’s Fair. It has since become the twentieth century’s most powerful indictment against war, a painting that still feels intensely relevant today.

Antiwar icon

Much of the painting’s emotional power comes from its overwhelming size, approximately eleven feet tall and twenty five feet wide. Guernica is not a painting you observe with spatial detachment; it feels like it wraps around you, immerses you in its larger-than-life figures and action. And although the size and multiple figures reference the long tradition of European history paintings, this painting is different because it challenges rather than accepts the notion of war as heroic. So why did Picasso paint it?

In 1936, Picasso (who was Spanish) was asked by the newly elected Spanish Republican government to paint an artwork for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. The official theme of the Exposition was a celebration of modern technology. Yet Picasso painted an overtly political painting, a subject in which he had shown little interest up to that time. What had happened to inspire it?

Crimes against humanity: an act of war

In 1936, a civil war began in Spain between the democratic Republican government and fascist forces, led by General Francisco Franco, attempting to overthrow them. Picasso’s painting is based on the events of April 27, 1937, when Hitler’s powerful German air force, acting in support of Franco, bombed the village of Guernica in northern Spain, a city of no strategic military value. It was history’s first aerial saturation bombing of a civilian population. It was a cold-blooded training mission designed to test a new bombing tactic to intimidate and terrorize the resistance. For over three hours, twenty five bombers dropped 100,000 pounds of explosive and incendiary bombs on the village, reducing it to rubble. Twenty more fighter planes strafed and killed defenseless civilians trying to flee. The devastation was appalling: fires burned for three days, and seventy percent of the city was destroyed. A third of the population, 1600 civilians, were wounded or killed.

Picasso hears the news

On May 1, 1937, news of the atrocity reached Paris. Eyewitness reports filled the front pages of local and international newspapers. Picasso, sympathetic to the Republican government of his homeland, was horrified by the reports of devastation and death. Guernica is his visual response, his memorial to the brutal massacre. After hundreds of sketches, the painting was done in less than a month and then delivered to the Fair’s Spanish Pavilion, where it became the central attraction. Accompanying it were documentary films, newsreels and graphic photographs of fascist brutalities in the civil war. Rather than the typical celebration of technology people expected to see at a world’s fair, the entire Spanish Pavilion shocked the world into confronting the suffering of the Spanish people.

Later, in the 1940s, when Paris was occupied by the Germans, a Nazi officer visited Picasso’s studio. “Did you do that?” he is said to have asked Picasso while standing in front of a photograph of the painting. “No,” Picasso replied, “you did.”

World traveler

When the fair ended, the Spanish Republican forces sent Guernica on an international tour to create awareness of the war and raise funds for Spanish refugees. It traveled the world for 19 years and then was loaned for safekeeping to The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picasso refused to allow it to return to Spain until the country “enjoyed public liberties and democratic institutions,” which finally occurred in 1981. Today the painting permanently resides in the Reina Sofia, Spain’s national museum of modern art in Madrid.

What can we see?

This painting is not easy to decipher. Everywhere there seems to be death and dying. As our eyes adjust to the frenetic action, figures begin to emerge. On the far left is a woman, head back, screaming in pain and grief, holding the lifeless body of her dead child. This is one of the most devastating and unforgettable images in the painting. To her right is the head and partial body of a large white bull, the only unharmed and calm figure amidst the chaos. Beneath her, a dead or wounded man with a severed arm and mutilated hand clutches a broken sword. Only his head and arms are visible; the rest of his body is obscured by the overlapping and scattered parts of other figures. In the center stands a terrified horse, mouth open screaming in pain, its side pierced by a spear. On the right are three more women. One rushes in, looking up at the stark light bulb at the top of the scene. Another leans out of the window of a burning house, her long extended arm holding a lamp, while the third woman appears trapped in the burning building, screaming in fear and horror. All their faces are distorted in agony. Eyes are dislocated, mouths are open, tongues are shaped like daggers.

Picasso chose to paint Guernica in a stark monochromatic palette of gray, black and white. This may reflect his initial encounter with the original newspaper reports and photographs in black and white; or perhaps it suggested to Picasso the objective factuality of an eye witness report. A documentary quality is further emphasized by the textured pattern in the center of the painting that creates the illusion of newsprint. The sharp alternation of black and white contrasts across the painting surface also creates dramatic intensity, a visual kinetic energy of jagged movement.

Visual complexity

On first glance, Guernica’s composition appears confusing and chaotic; the viewer is thrown into the midst of intensely violent action. Everything seems to be in flux. The space is compressed and ambiguous with the shifting perspectives and multiple viewpoints characteristic of Picasso’s earlier Cubist style. Images overlap and intersect, obscuring forms and making it hard to distinguish their boundaries. Bodies are distorted and semi-abstracted, the forms discontinuous and fragmentary. Everything seems jumbled together, while sharp angular lines seem to pierce and splinter the dismembered bodies. However, there is in fact an overriding visual order. Picasso balances the composition by organizing the figures into three vertical groupings moving left to right, while the center figures are stabilized within a large triangle of light.

There has been almost endless debate about the meaning of the images in Guernica. Questioned about its possible symbolism, Picasso said it was simply an appeal to people about massacred people and animals. ”In the panel on which I am working, which I call Guernica , I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain into an ocean of pain and death.” The horse and bull are images Picasso used his entire career, part of the life and death ritual of the Spanish bullfights he first saw as a child. Some scholars interpret the horse and bull as representing the deadly battle between the Republican fighters (horse) and Franco’s fascist army (bull). Picasso said only that the bull represented brutality and darkness, adding “It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words. The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.”

In the end, the painting does not appear to have one exclusive meaning. Perhaps it is that very ambiguity, the lack of historical specificity, or the fact that brutal wars continue to be fought, that keeps Guernica as timeless and universally relatable today as it was in 1937.

This painting at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Guernica: Testimony of War (PBS)

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein

Video \(\PageIndex{3}\): Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein , 1905-06, oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In 1904, Picasso rented a studio in an old, dilapidated building in Paris filled with artists and poets. Located at 13 Rue Ravignan, the building was dubbed the Bateau-Lavoir (or laundry barge) by poet-in-residence, Max Jacob. It was at this time that Picasso first came into contact with French painter Henri Matisse, as well as the American expatriate Gertrude Stein. Gertrude commissioned a portrait by Picasso in 1905, around the same time that her brother Leo bought Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre . As the strong solid woman of Picasso’s painting suggests, Gertrude Stein was a formidable presence in Paris of the early 20th century. An influential writer, she, along with her brother, was an important patron of the arts, known for hosting salons that brought together some of the period’s most famous artists, writers, and intellectuals.

Gertrude and Picasso

At the time of his commission, Picasso hoped to cultivate a relationship with the wealthy Stein, who had already been impressed by the innovative style of Matisse.

In contrast to Matisse’s bright colors and sensuous undertones in paintings like Bonheur de Vivre , Picasso’s portrait demonstrates the angular distortions and formal experimentation that would characterize his artwork through the invention of Cubism.

The story goes that Stein sat for Picasso so many times (as many as 90 sittings) that eventually he said he could no longer see her when he looked at her. He then wiped out her face in the painting and left on a trip to Spain. When he returned to Paris in the fall, Picasso quickly completed the portrait—supposedly from memory—in a way that challenged traditional expectations of portraiture. Whereas most portraits tell us about the sitter through their physical likeness and expressive detail, Picasso instead showed his subject as a massive hulking figure who stares blankly past the viewer.

Painted in dull, muted colors, Stein’s broad body fills Picasso’s canvas. Her bulky form sits on a large armchair or sofa and stiffly leans forward, imposing in the way she rests her arms and large hands heavily on the folds of her skirt. In contrast to the rounded mass of the figure, Stein’s face has a planar quality that seems hard and mask-like—an effect heightened by the geometric treatment of the eyes, nose, and mouth, and the dark modeling that distinguishes its angular contours from the rest of her head and body.

Picasso’s odd rendering of Stein’s features reflects the influence of African and Iberian art on the artist, but it might also allude to art’s inability to reveal the truth about an individual. Like many European artists at the time, Picasso looked to ancient and non-western art as a source of primitive inspiration—a colonialist notion that viewed “uncivilized” cultures to be more spiritually authentic than the sophisticated cities of Europe. Thus, while Picasso admired the formal qualities of these sculptural influences, he also believed them better able to communicate deeper meaning and ideas that could not be conveyed through the established traditions of Western art.

The Power of the Artist

By reworking Gertrude Stein’s portrait in a primitive style, Picasso claimed for himself the power to represent the woman as she really is, not merely as a likeness of her physical appearance. Stein’s response to the image supports this point of view. In her book on Picasso, she wrote:

I was and I still am satisfied with my portrait, for me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me. \(^{1}\)

Like Picasso’s reliance on the expressive potential of primitive forms, Stein’s repetitive word play demonstrates her own interest in how language could convey meaning through formal effect instead of descriptive content. For the artist and the author, both challenged the conventions of their media in order to explore the power of art to communicate in new ways that would be appropriate to the modern era.

\(^{1}\) Gertrude Stein, Picasso (London: B.T. Batsford, LTD, 1938); reprinted by Dover Publications, 1984, p. 8.

This painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre at The Barnes Foundation

Biography of Gertrude Stein from The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States

The Collections of Gertrude and Leo Stein (Smithsonian.com)

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Video \(\PageIndex{4}\): Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , 1907, oil on canvas, 243.9 x 233.7 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Cézanne’s ghost, Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre , and Picasso’s ego

One of the most important canvases of the twentieth century, Picasso’s great breakthrough painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was constructed in response to several significant sources.

First amongst these was his confrontation with Cézanne’s great achievement at the posthumous retrospective mounted in Paris a year after the artist’s death in 1907.

The retrospective exhibition forced the young Picasso, Matisse, and many other artists to contend with the implications of Cézanne’s art. Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre of 1906 was one of the first of many attempts to do so, and the newly completed work was quickly purchased by Leo & Gertrude Stein and hung in their living room so that all of their circle of avant-garde writers and artists could see and praise it. And praise it they did. Here was the promise of Cézanne fulfilled—and one which incorporated lessons learned from Seurat and van Gogh, no less! This was just too much for the young Spaniard.

Pablo becomes Picasso

By all accounts, Picasso’s intensely competitive nature literally forced him to out do his great rival. Les Demoiselles D’Avignon is the result of this effort. Let’s compare canvases. Matisse’s landscape is a broad open field with a deep recessionary vista. The figures are uncrowded. They describe flowing arabesques that in turn relate to the forms of nature that surround them. Here is languid sensuality set in the mythic past of Greece’s golden age.

In very sharp contrast, Picasso, intent of making a name for himself (rather like the young Manet and David), has radically compressed the space of his canvas and replaced sensual eroticism with a kind of aggressively crude pornography. (Note, for example, the squatting figure at the lower right.) His space is interior, closed, and almost claustrophobic. Like Matisse’s later Blue Nude (itself a response to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ), the women fill the entire space and seem trapped within it. No longer set in a classical past, Picasso’s image is clearly of our time. Here are five prostitutes from an actual brothel, located on a street named Avignon in the red-light district in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia in northern Spain—a street, by the way, which Picasso had frequented.

Picasso has also dispensed with Matisse’s clear, bright pigments. Instead, the artist chooses deeper tones befitting urban interior light. Gone too, is the sensuality that Matisse created. Picasso has replaced the graceful curves of Bonheur de Vivre with sharp, jagged, almost shattered forms. The bodies of Picasso’s women look dangerous as if they were formed of shards of broken glass. Matisse’s pleasure becomes Picasso’s apprehension. But while Picasso clearly aims to “out do” Matisse, to take over as the most radical artist in Paris, he also acknowledges his debts. Compare the woman standing in the center of Picasso’s composition to the woman who stands with elbows raised at the extreme left of Matisse’s canvas: like a scholar citing a borrowed quotation, Picasso footnotes.

The creative vacuum-cleaner

Picasso draws on many other sources to construct Les Demoiselles D’Avignon . In fact, a number of artists stopped inviting him to their studio because he would so freely and successfully incorporate their ideas into his own work, often more successfully than the original artist. Indeed, Picasso has been likened to a “creative vacuum cleaner,” sucking up every new idea that he came across. While that analogy might be a little coarse, it is fair to say that he had an enormous creative appetite. One of several historical sources that Picasso pillaged is archaic art, demonstrated very clearly by the left-most figure of the painting, who stands stiffly on legs that look awkwardly locked at the knee. Her right arm juts down while her left arm seems dislocated (this arm is actually a vestige of a male figure that Picasso eventually removed). Her head is shown in perfect profile with large almond shaped eyes and a flat abstracted face. She almost looks Egyptian. In fact, Picasso has recently seen an exhibition of archaic (an ancient pre-classical style) Iberian (from Iberia–the land mass that makes up Spain and Portugal) sculpture at the Louvre. Instead of going back to the sensual myths of ancient Greece, Picasso is drawing on the real thing and doing so directly. By the way, Picasso purchased, from Apollinaire’s secretary, two archaic Iberian heads that she had stolen from the Louvre! Some have suggested that they were taken at Picasso’s request. Years later Picasso would anonymously return them.

Spontaneity, carefully choreographed

Because the canvas is roughly handled, it is often thought to be a spontaneous creation, conceived directly. This is not the case. It was preceded by nearly one hundred sketches. These studies depict different configurations. In some there are two men in addition to the women. One is a sailor. He sits in uniform in the center of the composition before a small table laden with fruit, a traditional symbol of sexuality. Another man originally entered from the left. He wore a brown suit and carried a textbook, he was meant to be a medical student.

The (male) artist’s gaze

Each of these male figures was meant to symbolize an aspect of Picasso. Or, more exactly, how Picasso viewed these women. The sailor is easy to figure out. The fictive sailor has been at sea for months, he is an obvious reference to pure sexual desire. The medical student is trickier. He is not there to look after the women’s health but he does see them with different eyes. While the sailor represents pure lust, the student sees the women from a more analytic perspective. He understands how their bodies are constructed, etc. Could it be that Picasso was expressing the ways that he saw these women? As objects of desire, yes, but also, with a knowledge of anatomy probably superior to many doctors. What is important is that Picasso decides to remove the men. Why? Well, to begin, we might imagine where the women focused their attention in the original composition. If men are present, the prostitutes attend to them. By removing these men, the image is no longer self-contained. The women now peer outward, beyond the confines of the picture plane that ordinarily protect the viewer’s anonymity. If the women peer at us, like in Manet’s Olympia of 1863, we, as viewers, have become the customers. But this is the twentieth century, not the nineteenth and Picasso is attempting a vulgar directness that would make even Manet cringe.

Picasso’s perception of space

So far, we have examined the middle figure which relates to Matisse’s canvas; the two masked figures on the right side who refer, by their aggression, to Picasso’s fear of disease; and, we have linked the left-most figure to archaic Iberian sculpture and Picasso’s attempt to elicit a sort of crude primitive directness. That leaves only one woman unaccounted for. This is the woman with her right elbow raised and her left hand on a sheet pulled across her left thigh. The table with fruit that had originally been placed at the groin of the sailor is no longer round, it has lengthened, sharpened, and has been lowered to the edge of the canvas. This table/phallus points to this last woman. Picasso’s meaning is clear, the still life of fruit on a table, this ancient symbol of sexuality, is the viewer’s erect penis and it points to the woman of our choice. Picasso was no feminist. In his vision, the viewer is male.

Although explicit, this imagery only points to the key issue. The woman that has been chosen is handled distinctly in terms of her relation to the surrounding space. Yes, more about space. Throughout the canvas, the women and the drapery (made of both curtains and sheets) are fractured and splintered. Here is Picasso’s response to Cezanne and Matisse. The women are neither before nor behind. As in Matisse’s Red Studio, which will be painted four years later, Picasso has begun to try to dissolve the figure/ground relationship. Now look at the woman that Picasso tells us we have chosen. Her legs are crossed and her hand rests behind her head, but although she seems to stand among the others, her position is really that of a figure that lies on her back. The problem is, we see her body perpendicular to our line of sight. Like Matisse and Cezanne before him, Picasso here renders two moments in time: as you may have figured out, we first look across at the row of women, and then we look down on to the prostitute of our/Picasso’s choice.

African masks, women colonized

The two figures at the right are the most aggressively abstracted with faces rendered as if they wear African masks. By 1907, when this painting was produced, Picasso had begun to collect such work. Even the striations that represent scarification is evident. Matisse and Derain had a longer standing interest in such art, but Picasso said that it was only after wandering into the Palais du Trocadero, Paris’s ethnographic museum, that he understood the value of such art. Remember, France was a major colonial power in Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Much African art was ripped from its original geographic and artistic context and sold in Paris. Although Picasso would eventually become more sophisticated regarding the original uses and meaning of the non-Western art that he collected, in 1907 his interest was largely based on what he perceived as its alien and aggressive qualities.

William Rubin, once the senior curator of the department of painting and sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, and a leading Picasso scholar, has written extensively about this painting. He has suggested that while the painting is clearly about desire (Picasso’s own), it is also an expression of his fear. We have already established that Picasso frequented brothels at this time so his desire isn’t in question, but Rubin makes the case that this is only half the story. Les Demoiselles D’Avignon is also about Picasso’s intense fear…his dread of these women or more to the point, the disease that he feared they would transmit to him. In the era before antibiotics, contracting syphilis was a well founded fear. Of course, the plight of the women seems not to enter Picasso’s story.

This painting at MoMA

Conserving a Modern Masterpiece (from MoMA)

Pablo Picasso, Three Women

Pablo Picasso’s Three Women shows both a simplification of the human body to basic geometric forms and a novel approach to representing the figure in space. Rather than depicting the figures as independent forms in an open spatial environment, Picasso’s women form an interlocking whole, fitting together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

The jutting hip of the central figure forms a common edge with the right-hand figure’s torso and breast, and the left-hand figure’s shoulder, arm, and head help to define the central figure’s right side. The figure on the right merges with the surrounding form, which is probably a curtain. On the left and at the top of the painting there is a greater distinction between the orange and red tones of the figures and the blues and greens of the background, but here too the relation of the figures’ physical forms to the surrounding space is ambiguous.

The geometrically schematized blue drapery covering part of the left-hand figure echoes the the color of the background, and both are divided into a pattern of diamonds and triangles. The effect of these repeated patterns and ambiguities is a painting that shifts oddly from conveying a strong sense of solid volumes and space, and a reminder that the painting is literally a flat surface covered in a pattern of painted geometric shapes.

A new approach

Three Women is closely related in subject and style to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , painted the previous year, but in the later painting the women no longer confront the viewer. Their eyes are shut, and their faces are depicted using very similar simplified forms rather than the varied approaches used in Les Demoiselles . The women’s faces are, however, still mask-like and echo the forms of African masks that Picasso admired in the ethnographic museum in Paris.

The mood of Three Women is also very different from Les Demoiselles ; it is restrained and calm rather than expressive and aggressive. Three Women is focused on formal qualities — the creation of geometric patterns using the simplified shapes of the women’s bodies. This simplification of the bodies’ forms into basic shapes was also deeply indebted to the African sculptures Picasso had seen.

Les Demoiselles uses similar formal devices, but they are just one among many concerns. In the differences between the two paintings we can see Picasso turning away from using painting as a means of emotional expression and instead adopting a much more restrained approach directed to exploring ways of representing figures in space. This ultimately led to the revolution in representation known as Cubism .

Georges_Braque_1908_Maisons_à_lEstaque_Houses_at_LEstaque_oil_on_canvas_73_x_59.5_cm_Kunst_Museum_Bern-870x1079.jpg

Three Women also reflects Picasso’s encounter with Georges Braque’s recent L’Estaque landscapes in its random deployment of light and shadow. Although both painters used chiaroscuro to depict three-dimensional form, neither Braque’s Houses at l’Estaque nor Picasso’s Three Women reveals a consistent light source. This further confuses our perception of objects in space and is a key way the painting ignores the conventions of naturalistic representation established in the Renaissance.

The origin of “Cubism”

Braque’s landscapes were the source of the term Cubism, which originated in an art critic’s passing comment. In a brief newspaper review, Louis Vauxcelles (who also “named” Fauvism by making a similarly casual comment) described Braque’s paintings of l’Estaque as reducing all forms to geometrical schemas and cubes. Vauxcelles’ description caught on, and the label “Cubism” became a catch-all term referring to a broad range of experimental modern painting and sculpture created in the early decades of the 20th century.

What broadly connects the disparate artworks labeled Cubist is not cubes, however, but the use of abstracted forms to represent objects in space. In many instances, Cubist forms can be described as geometric schemas (to use Vauxcelles’ other descriptive term for Braque’s 1908 landscapes). But more important than any particular stylistic feature is the way Cubism attempts to revolutionize the representation of the third dimension in art, arguably for the first time since the invention of linear perspective in the 1400s.

This project evolved and shifted over time, both formally and conceptually, and its main catalysts, Picasso and Braque, did not explain what they were doing or trying to achieve. Contemporary critics and subsequent art historians were left to figure out the significance of the new style, and while they all agreed it was interesting and important, they came to no ultimate consensus. Despite the many and varied interpretations, one thing that underlies Picasso and Braque’s Cubism is an inquiry into the problems of perceiving and representing volume and space in art.

Building on Cézanne

By 1908, abandoning naturalistic conventions was far from new. What made Braque’s and Picasso’s early Cubist paintings distinctive was their emphasis on depicting three-dimensional forms and spatial relationships. Their early Cubist works build on Paul Cézanne’s exploration of the tensions between representing three-dimensional forms in space and the flatness of the painting’s surface.

In Bathers Cézanne used a mosaic of brushstrokes to unify the painting and emphasize the flatness of its surface. Although the figures are situated in a landscape, there is minimal indication of spatial recession, and the background is a flat pattern of color that vaguely suggests trees and a cloudy sky.

As in Picasso’s Three Women , a piece of drapery on the left is painted the same color as the background sky and contributes to the painting’s lack of recession. Also like Picasso’s painting, the figures are simplified and arranged into tight-knit groups, a pyramid on the left and an oval on the right. In comparison to Cézanne’s painting, however, the figures in Three Women are more sculptural and massive, the space more compressed.

Although primarily interested in the human figure, during this period Picasso followed Cézanne and Braque in painting landscapes as he extended his exploration of new strategies for representing three dimensional forms in space.

Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro is markedly more abstract than Cézanne’s Houses in Provence , but both paintings unify the forms of the landscape into a consistent surface pattern that renders spatial depth ambiguous. Cézanne’s surface pattern is created by a mosaic of identical parallel brushstrokes, while Picasso uses repeating patterns of geometric shapes; the diamond pattern of the sky is a prominent example.

Pablo_Picasso_1909_Maisons_à_Horta_Houses_on_the_Hill_Horta_de_Ebro_oil_on_canvas_65_x_81_cm_private_collection-870x697.jpg

The abstraction of Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro is more pronounced than that of Three Women , although many of the formal strategies are the same. The viewer is confronted with an array of advancing and receding geometric forms defined by sharply delineated edges and chiaroscuro shading. The light source is inconsistent, as is the vantage point; some of the barely identifiable houses are depicted from the side, while those next to them are shown from above. The overall effect suggests that the viewer, instead of being fixed solidly in place relative to the scene, is floating above and around it, combining views from multiple perspectives . This concept would become increasingly important to the understanding of Cubism, but it is only embryonic here.

Rather than being situated in clear relation to the land, the buildings are spread out as if on a sloped table top and appear to be sliding out of the canvas and into the viewer’s space. While the figures in Three Women are tightly interlocked and neatly contained with the limits of the canvas, the buildings in Houses on the Hill seem to teeter on the brink of losing their balance. Maintaining a precarious balance between representation and abstraction would preoccupy Picasso and Braque for the next six years.

A daring and dangerous pursuit

Braque’s and Picasso’s early Cubist paintings privileged three dimensional form over color and explored new but very ambiguous ways of representing forms in space. This approach was only the beginning of their Cubist adventure. Picasso described his relationship with Braque during the Cubist years 1908-1914 as being like two mountain climbers roped together.

The artists also referred to themselves as the American aviation pioneers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, indicating that they saw themselves as pursuing a daring and dangerous course. It would lead them away from the representation of solid three dimensional forms to the shadowy ambiguities of late Analytic Cubism and then to the collage techniques associated with Synthetic Cubism .

Read about African influences in Modern art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Watch a video about Georges Braque”s Houses at L’Estaque at the Kunstmuseum, Bern

Pablo Picasso, The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro

Video \(\PageIndex{5}\): Pablo Picasso, The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro , summer 1909, oil on canvas, 24-1/8 x 20-1/8″ (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, fractional and promised gift)

Picasso, The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro, with girls

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning

Video \(\PageIndex{6}\): Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning , 1912, oil and oilcloth on canvas framed with rope, 29 x 37 cm (Musée Picasso, Paris)

Pablo Picasso, Guitar

by SAL KHAN and DR. STEVEN ZUCKER

Video \(\PageIndex{7}\): Pablo Picasso, Guitar , 1914, ferrous sheet metal and wire 30 1/2″ x 13 3/4″ x 7 5/8″ / 77.5 x 35 x 19.3 cm (MoMA)

I have seen what no man has seen before. When Pablo Picasso, leaving aside painting for a moment, was constructing this immense guitar out of sheet metal whose plans could be dispatched to any ignoramus in the universe who could put it together as well as him, I saw Picasso’s studio, and this studio, more incredible than Faust’s laboratory, this studio which, according to some, contained no works of art, in the old sense, was furnished with the newest of objects… Some witnesses, already shocked by the things that they saw covering the walls, and that they refused to call paintings because they were made of oilcloth, wrapping paper, and newspaper, said, pointing a haughty finger at the object of Picasso’s clever pains: “What is it? Does it rest on a pedestal? Does it hang on a wall? What is it, painting or sculpture?’ Picasso, dressed in the blue of Parisian artisans, responded in his finest Andalusian voice: ‘It’s nothing, it’s el guitare!’; And there you are! The watertight compartments are demolished. We are delivered from painting and sculpture, which already have been liberated from the idiotic tyranny of genres. It is neither this nor that. It is nothing. It’s el guitare! (André Salmon, New French Painting , August 9, 1919)

Georges Braque

Georges braque, le viaduc à l’estaque, (the viaduct at l’estaque).

Video \(\PageIndex{8}\): Georges Braque, Le Viaduc à L’Estaque, (The Viaduct at L’Estaque) , 1908, oil on canvas, 28-5/8 x 23-1/4″ / 72.5 x 59 cm (Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris)

Braque, Viaduct at L'Estaque with viewers

Cubist sculpture

Cubist sculpture i.

Picasso’s Guitar hangs from the wall like a painting or a real guitar, but we wouldn’t mistake it for either one. Unlike a painting, it’s a complex three-dimensional object, and it’s clearly not a functional guitar to be played. It’s an abstract representation of a guitar, an artwork, but one that doesn’t fit neatly into the tradition of Western representational sculpture. It is not a solid mass carved from marble or cast in bronze; it is not on a pedestal, nor is it attached to a background like a relief.

An unprecedented subject

Furthermore, the guitar as a subject is unprecedented in a sculptural tradition almost exclusively devoted to representations of human and animal figures. Picasso’s own earliest Cubist-based sculptures were of a woman’s head.

Guitar represents Picasso’s attempt to expand his Cubist investigations of the ambiguities of represented form and space into three dimensions. Both Picasso and Braque began making paper and cardboard Cubist sculptures of still-life objects around the same time that they began making collages.

None of these early sculptures survive, and only a few photographs document their existence. They were, however, seen by other artists who visited Picasso’s and Braque’s studios. Vladimir Tatlin’s counter-reliefs were made in direct response to these early Cubist sculptures.

Innovations derived from an African mask

The surviving sheet-metal Guitar in MoMA’s collection is a later version of a now lost cardboard model (also known as a maquette). It is an important work, not only because it is one of the earliest surviving Cubist sculptures by Picasso, but also because of what Picasso’s friend and art dealer D. H. Kahnweiler wrote about it. He claimed that the innovative treatment of forms in Guitar was directly derived from an African Grebo mask Picasso owned. In that mask the eyes are represented by projecting cylinders. Human eyes, of course, are recessed in the head and do not project out from the face. In Guitar Picasso used a similar strategy for representing the guitar’s sound hole as a tube projecting from the empty space at the base of the fretboard. Space becomes shaped forms, while solid forms — the body of the guitar in this case — become, in places, empty space.

Guitar follows the example of the Grebo mask in radically simplifying forms to basic geometric shapes and arranging them to convey information. We see the double curve of the guitar’s body in the flat frontal plane of the sculpture as well as a larger flat plane in the back. We also are shown the guitar’s hollowness by the rectangle cut into the guitar shape between the front and back curved planes. The cylinder projects from the center of this empty space; it is itself hollow, so it is both a projecting form and one signifying emptiness.

Kahnweiler explained that Picasso derived a crucial concept from the Grebo mask — that it was possible to use signs to represent things rather than imitating their appearance. This, far more than mere formal similarities, is central to understanding the way Picasso’s art as a whole was affected by insights prompted by African and Oceanic masks and sculptures . We recognize the facial features in the Grebo mask by the placement and relationship of the parts rather than their specific details. The mouth, for example, is simply a rectangle with stripes. Alone it would not be recognized as a mouth, but in the context of the mask it is a very effective representation of one.

A new type of sculpture

With Guitar, Picasso extended his collage explorations into three dimensions. By doing so he made a new type of sculpture, which is now called assemblage because it is assembled from multiple parts rather than formed as a single mass. The move into three dimensions added an important element to the work — cast shadows. These contribute to the visual complexity of Guitar by creating planes and patterns, and suggesting much greater depth and solidity than is actually created by the rather delicate metal planes. In this photograph the shadow projected on the wall to the left seems to represent the side of the guitar.

Of course, because it is a three dimensional object, the shadows projected by Guitar will change with changes in lighting. Shadows add an additional layer of complexity to Picasso’s Cubist investigation of the ambiguities that can arise from the juxtaposition of real things and their representations.

A workman’s lunch

Picasso’s Still Life is another Cubist sculpture attached to a wall that plays with reality and representation. The still life subject is unconventional for a sculpture. It represents a working man’s simple lunch of sausage and bread accompanied by a glass of wine and a knife. All of the elements are painted wood except for a real piece of tasseled upholstery fringe attached to the semicircular plane representing the table top. The bread and sausage are crudely painted imitations of the subject, the knife is a simplified basic form, while the wineglass is Cubist in style. A strip of wood painted with a repeating pattern represents a decorative railing on the wall.

The sculpture uses a real decorative object, the strip of upholstery tassels, in combination with representations of objects depicted with varying degrees of naturalism. Adding to the complex display of reality and illusion is the painted decorative railing, which is attached to the wall as part of the sculpture, but could be a “real” decorative railing on the gallery wall.

Despite the inclusion of real objects and the realistically painted bread and sausage, Picasso clearly wanted the viewer to see Still Life as art, a hand-made object. The semi-circular plane representing the table top does not project from the wall at 90 degrees; it is tipped down like the table tops in Cubist paintings and collages, and could not support a real glass or knife. The quality of the workmanship is intentionally crude and roughly finished, in keeping with the simple workman’s lunch depicted.

Fine art versus craft

Still Life leads us to consider different possible approaches to representation and decoration, fine art and craft, and what they signify. The work juxtaposes the crafts of woodworking and upholstering, both associated with working class labor, with the illusionistic representation of still life objects associated with fine art. In uniting these two very differently-valued types of craft labor Picasso calls into question the traditional high valuation of the fine arts in relation to the so-called crafts, as well as challenging established distinctions between fine art and decoration. Known for his working class sympathies, Picasso here seems to claim an affinity with the artisans who work in the decorating trades.

Although they were little known at the time they were made, the innovations of Picasso’s Cubist assemblages foreshadowed many developments of twentieth-century sculpture. His use of found materials, rejection of the traditional materials and techniques of European sculpture, and elimination of a clear distinction between artwork and object make his early Cubist assemblages important early contributions to the breakdown between art and life that would become a key theme of twentieth-century sculpture.

Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

A Technical Study of Picasso’s Construction Still Life , 1914 in the Tate Papers

The Cubist City – Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger

Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower seems to slash up through the canvas, bending and distorting the surrounding city as it climbs into a fractured sky. This is one of many paintings in which Delaunay attempted to convey the dominating and disorienting presence of the famous nineteenth-century Paris monument — a product of modern engineering and a symbol of modernity.

In this painting we see the tower from different angles , looking simultaneously up at the supporting legs and arch, and down at the central portions of the tower. Some sections seem to dissolve, while others morph into extra supports and towers as if a different side view has been attached to the main form.

Although the details of the structure are often confused, the overall triangle formed by the central tower projecting from its splay-legged base is clear and shapes everything that surrounds it. The tall buildings on the sides of the painting curve and sway as if responding to the tower’s contours. The sky shatters into crystalline angles, and clusters of round shapes — suggesting trees or clouds or smoke — solidify the space around the tower into a cacophony of shifting planes.

Modern style for a modern subject

This is a vision of the modern city in the most modern painting style of the day, Cubism . Delaunay exhibited with many other Cubist painters in the Paris Salons, where his work was notable for its focus on Paris as a subject.

Although the group of Cubists with whom Delaunay was associated, the Salon Cubists , were dedicated to modern artistic techniques, their subjects were often not especially modern. Delaunay was unusual in his devotion to representing the experience of the modern city, and he was particularly drawn to the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of modern Paris.

Constructed as a temporary monument for the 1889 Universal Exposition, the Eiffel Tower was intended to display advanced structural engineering. It was, and remains, completely out of scale with the surrounding buildings. It is also remarkably different in kind from the city’s buildings; it has no external walls and no solid form. Although massive in scale, it seems light and airy because of its open structure, through which the sky is visible. In the early twentieth century, it was a center for modern communications and scientific technology, serving as a telegraph relay station as well as a post for studying weather and aerodynamics.

Delaunay often depicted Paris and the Eiffel Tower as viewed through a window. In The City , curtains are visible on the sides as light, curved forms framing the central scene. The dark shadowed buildings and rooftops of the city rise up from below and stretch into the distance, where the red and black silhouette of the Eiffel Tower can just be seen surging up into the faceted sky. In addition to the Cubist fracturing of forms and space, Delaunay here used a Neo-Impressionist -like technique of small brushstrokes to create the effect of shimmering highlights on the surface of the canvas. The following year he would devote himself to an analysis of color and light partly derived from Neo-Impressionism that would lead him to non-representational painting.

Unanimist spectacles

Delaunay’s depictions of the Eiffel Tower as a conjunction of fragmented and discontinuous views have been linked to the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s early twentieth-century theories about the way memory informs perception to combine past and present experiences. The unification of different views of the tower in a single image has also been connected to the contemporary French literary movement Unanimism, which celebrated the collective soul of individuals united by group experiences.

In Delaunay’s paintings, the Eiffel Tower becomes a focus for all of the city’s inhabitants. The simultaneous depiction of different viewing angles can be understood as a way of representing the union of all the different people’s viewpoints, and perhaps even the people’s spiritual unification, as they look at the tower.

In The Cardiff Team the Eiffel Tower form is joined by two other aggressively modern subjects, a biplane and the enormous Paris Ferris wheel, which hover over the ball players and billboards in the lower half of the canvas. The title refers to a recent Paris-Cardiff rugby match, and the active figures in the foreground are based on a contemporary newspaper photo. The spectacle of modern team sports is an example of a popular group activity that created a Unanimist experience of collectivity.

The painting’s billboards advertise Astra, an airplane construction company, and “Magic Paris.” (In another version of the painting “Magic Paris” is replaced by “Delaunay,” indicating how closely the painter identified with the Eiffel Tower rising above the sign.) The contrasting planes of brilliant colors that structure the painting reflect Delaunay’s contemporary exploration of abstract color relationships, but this work is clearly a representation of Paris as a modern urban spectacle.

The Urban Experience

Fernand_Léger_The_City_1919-870x671.jpg

Delaunay’s friend and fellow Salon Cubist, Fernand Léger , also painted the modern city in a modern style. His huge painting The City , painted after World War I, is an amalgam of the chaotic visual experience of the twentieth-century urban environment. A cacophony of brightly colored geometric shapes and letters compete for attention. Vertical rectangles create a rhythm across the surface of the canvas, while depth is suggested by layering and diagonal planes jutting into the painting from the lower corners.

In the upper half of the painting there are two simplified shapes of a human head and torso, one green and one purple and red. These immediately recognizable human silhouettes are figures in advertising posters, similar to those in Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team , a nod to another aspect of modern life — the increasing presence and stridency of commercialism.

While most Cubist painters tended to depict traditional subjects, both Delaunay and Léger found the flat, hard-edged geometric style of Cubism an appropriate vehicle for representing the modern world of machines and mass production. Léger’s highly abstract style contrasts with the more legible, painterly, and nuanced representation of the city in Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team , but there are nevertheless important similarities.

Both artists represent the modern city by combining disparate elements, including letters and billboards, in complex abstract compositions based on ambiguous spatial relationships and color patterns. Léger’s painting builds on Delaunay’s earlier work and even has a coded homage to his fellow artist in the form of the initial R on the left paired with the bisected target shape, which forms a D. These are surrounded by open ironwork scaffolding that suggests fragments of the Eiffel Tower. The target shape also echoes Delaunay’s investigations of color in disc-shaped abstract paintings.

Transforming people

A striking aspect of these paintings of the city is the treatment of the human figure, which is starkly impersonal. The rugby players in The Cardiff Team are part of the modern spectacle. They have no faces, and in the case of the main central figure, no head at all.

Similarly, in the lower center of The City are two charcoal-gray figures. The featureless face of one confronts us at the bottom of the canvas, while the other is on a dark-gray and white staircase in the background.

The anonymous, geometric rendering of these figures shows that Léger, like Delaunay, had no interest in depicting human beings as individuals. It may even suggest that modernity is transforming not only the environment, but also humankind, to match its own mechanical rationality.

Delaunay and Léger used Cubism’s abstract language of fractured forms and spatial dislocations to express the unique qualities of the modern urban experience. Their paintings focused on the distinctively modern aspects of Paris and depicted the way in which people are absorbed into and perhaps even transformed by modernity. Neither artist saw this as a bad thing; their paintings celebrate the union of modern humans and their new environment.

Read more on Fernand Léger’s art and the modern city

A lithograph of Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower at MoMA

Fernand Léger, Contrast of Forms

by THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Video \(\PageIndex{9}\): Video from The Museum of Modern Art

View this work in MoMA’s collection

Georges Braque

French Painter, Collagist, Draftsman, Printmaker, and Sculptor

Summary of Georges Braque

Georges Braque was at the forefront of the revolutionary art movement of Cubism . Braque's work throughout his life focused on still lifes and means of viewing objects from various perspectives through color, line, and texture. While his collaboration with Pablo Picasso and their Cubist works are best known, Braque had a long painting career that continued well beyond that period.

Accomplishments

Though Braque started out as a member of the Fauves , he began developing a Cubist style after meeting Pablo Picasso. While their paintings shared many similarities in palette, style and subject matter, Braque stated that unlike Picasso, his work was "devoid of iconological commentary," and was concerned purely with pictorial space and composition.
Braque sought balance and harmony in his compositions, especially through papier collés , a pasted paper collage technique that Picasso and Braque invented in 1912. Braque, however, took collage one step further by gluing cut-up advertisements into his canvases. This foreshadowed modern art movements concerned with critiquing media, such as Pop art .
Braque stenciled letters onto paintings, blended pigments with sand, and copied wood grain and marble to achieve great levels of dimension in his paintings. His depictions of still lifes are so abstract that they border on becoming patterns that express an essence of the objects viewed rather than direct representations.

The Life of Georges Braque

Although Braque and Picasso were very close for a period, the two art giants were almost polar opposites. Braque stayed married with one woman, fought in World War I, and was reserved and tall.

Important Art by Georges Braque

Houses of l'Estaque

Braque's paintings made over the summer of 1908 at l'Estaque are considered the first Cubist paintings. After being rejected by the Salon d'Automne, they were fortunately exhibited that fall at Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler's Paris gallery. These simple landscape paintings showed Braque's determination to break imagery into dissected parts. The brown and green palette here also predicts a palette that Braque employed in many paintings to come.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Art, Berne

Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on the Mantlepiece

Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on the Mantlepiece is typical of Braque's subject matter, yet is unique as an early example of collage. In this painting, he stenciled the word "valse" to mean "waltz," in continuation with his interest in musical themes and instruments. "RHU" are first three letters for the French word for rum. Again using an exploded perspective, the viewer barely perceives a scroll in the lower right corner, which could allude to a human head, a violin or cello, or the mantelpiece in the title.

Oil on canvas - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Bottle and Fishes

Braque depicted both bottles and fishes throughout his entire painting career, and these objects stand as markers to differentiate his various styles. Bottle and Fishes is an excellent example of Braque's foray into Analytic Cubism , while he worked closely with Picasso. This painting has the restricted characteristic earth tone palette rendering barely perceptible objects as they disintegrate along a horizontal plane. While there are some diagonal lines, Braque's early paintings tended to work vertically or horizontally.

Violin and Pipe

Collage helped Braque to realize that, "color acts simultaneously with form but has nothing to do with it,". He made collages to inspire painting compositions, but also as works themselves. In Violin and Pipe , he chooses a stringed instrument as his subject matter. Since there is no concrete evidence that this is a violin, one can understand better how Braque is studying the shapes within the object and pulling them apart to move them around, as if shuffling a deck of cards.

Paper, mixed media, pencil on paper - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Fruit on a Table-cloth with a Fruit Dish

The subject matter of this painting commemorates a banquet held in Braque's honor upon returning from the war. Picasso and Gris made headway in Synthetic Cubism, while Braque resumed the development of his own style, still Cubist, but more concentrated on color and texture. Fruit on a Table-cloth with a Fruit Dish shows a table display flattened out in the pictorial plane as Braque had done many times before, but here he replicates the texture of wood and marble, and even shades the fruit.

Oil on canvas - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Balustre et Crane

Balustre et Crane predicts a series of still lifes Braque created called Vanitas , in which objects symbolize agony or mental misery. He painted skulls repeatedly following his return from war and during the onset of World War II. In these paintings, Balustre et Crane in particular, Braque uses a bright array of colors to represent emotional reactions to the political discomfort he felt about the war.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

Biography of Georges Braque

Georges Braque was guided from a young age toward creative painting techniques. His father managed a decorative painting business and Braque's interest in texture and tactility perhaps came from working with him as a decorator. In 1899, at age seventeen, Braque moved from Argenteuil into Paris, accompanied by friends Othon Friesz and Raoul Dufy.

Early Training

Braque's earliest paintings were made in the Fauvist style. From 1902-1905, after giving up work as a decorator to pursue painting full-time he pursued Fauvist ideas and coordinated with Henri Matisse . He contributed his colorful Fauvist paintings to his first exhibition at the Salon des Independants in 1906. However, he was extremely affected by a visit to Pablo Picasso's studio in 1907, to see Picasso's breakthrough work - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon . After this encounter, the two artists forged an intimate friendship and artistic camaraderie. "We would get together every single day," Braque said, "to discuss and assay the ideas that were forming, as well as to compare our respective works". The drastic change in Braque's painting style can be directly attributed to Picasso. Once he understood Picasso's goals, Braque aimed to strengthen "the constructive elements in his works while foregoing the expressive excesses of Fauvism". His landscape paintings in which scenes were distilled into basic shapes and colors inspired French art critic, Louis Vauxcelles, to coin the term Cubism by describing Braque's work as " bizarreries cubiques ." During this pre-war, highly-producive time, Braque (with Picasso) made large contributions to modern art, particularly through their exploration of Cubism - through the so-called Analytic and Synthetic phases of the movement.

Mature Period

Braque and Picasso worked in synchronicity until Braque's return from war in 1914. When Picasso began to paint figuratively (joining what is known as Interwar Classicism), Braque felt his friend had betrayed their Cubist systems and rules, and continued on his own. However, he continued to remain influenced by Picasso's work, especially in regards to papier collés , a collage technique pioneered by both artists using only pasted paper. His collages featured geometric shapes interrupted by musical instruments, grapes, or furniture. These were so three-dimensional that they are considered important in the development of Cubist sculpture. By 1918, Braque felt he had sufficiently explored papier collés , and returned to still life painting.

Viewers noted a more limited palette at Braque's first post-war solo show in 1919. Yet he steadfastly adhered to Cubist rules about depicting objects from multi-faceted perspectives in geometrically patterned ways. In this, he continued as a true Cubist longer than did Picasso, whose style, subject matter and palettes changed continuously. Braque was most interested in showing how objects look when viewed over time in different temporal spaces and pictorial planes. As a result of his dedication to depicting space in various ways, he naturally gravitated towards designing sets and costumes for theater and ballet performances, doing this throughout the 1920s.

Late Years and Death

In 1929, Braque took up landscape painting once again, using new, bright colors influenced by Picasso and Matisse. Then in the 1930s, Braque began to portray Greek heroes and deities, though he claimed the subjects were stripped of their symbolism and ought to be viewed through a purely formal lens. He called these works exercises in calligraphy, possibly because they were not strictly about figures but more about sheer line and shape. In the latter half of the 1930s, Braque embarked on painting his Vanitas series, through which he existentially considered death and suffering. Growing increasingly obsessed with the physicality of his paintings, he explored the ways in which brushstrokes and paint qualities could enhance his subject matter.

The objects used in his still lifes were highly personal to Braque, however, he did not reveal these meanings. Skulls, for example, were objects he painted repeatedly at the onset of World War II. In 1944, when World War II ended, Braque began to embrace lighter subjects like flowers, billiard tables, and garden chairs. His final series of eight canvases made from 1948-1955, each titled Atelier , or Studio, depicted imagery that represented the artist's inner thoughts on each object rather than clues to the outside world. At the very end of his life, Braque painted birds repeatedly, as the perfect symbol of his obsession with space and movement.

The Legacy of Georges Braque

Braque is remembered as a progenitor of Cubism, who was both rational and sensuous in his still life paintings. He was a classic painter in this sense, and has influenced the likes of Jim Dine and Wayne Thiebaud , who focused on still life painting. Braque is also a celebrated colorist, and can be traced through contemporary art to those painters who work with color in similar ways. Perhaps Braque is most remembered for his use of collage, as many contemporary artists, from sculptors like Jessica Stockholder to painters like Mark Bradford, apply paper to their works as a means to comment on society and its products.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Georges Braque

Georges Braque, A Life Our Pick By Alex Danchev
Picasso and Braque Pioneering Cubism By William Rubin
Braque (Modern Masters Series) By Karen Wilkin
Braque Cameo Our Pick By Jose Maria Faerna
Georges Braque: Illustrated Notebooks By Georges Braque
Georges Braque: He Changed Western Painting For Ever By Richard Dorment / The Telegraph / September 23, 2013
The Other Father of Cubism Our Pick By Roberta Smith / The New York Times / October 13, 2011
After Him, Who? By Alex Danchev / The Guardian / May 6, 2005
From Braque's Later Years, The Products of Slow Time By John Russell / The New York Times / February 16, 1997
1942: A Puppet performance inspired by Braque
Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life 1928-1945 Our Pick
Clip from Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies
Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies By Martin Scorsese

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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

The Art Teacher

Art Lesson Ideas, Plans, Free Resources, Project Plans, and Schemes of Work. An 'outstanding' art teacher in Greater Manchester. Teaching KS3 and KS4 art and design.

Category: KS3 Art & Design Activities

Ks3 mini art & photography project.

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KS3 Clay Project – Coil Bowls

This is a super simple but REALLY effective clay project that my students love. I teach this clay coil bowl project to my Year 8 students and their results are lovely – and can take their plates home with them when they’re finished. The project is inspired by the coiling techniques and shapes used in […]

KS3 Art Project: Painting Patterns

After teaching a dry media pattern design project previously, I altered this pattern design scheme of work to focus more on colour theory and develop students’ painting skills. This is the first year I have taught the project this way, and I am so chuffed with the results! Get this full pattern painting project on […]

KS3 Easy 3D Pop Art Sculpture Project

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KS3 Easy Clay Project: Textured Vessels

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KS3 Oil Pastel Cubism Art Project

I’m really excited to share this easy oil pastel art project because I have only just finished teaching it and the students have created some really wonderful work – I love their final pieces! (Although I do feel like I’m getting a bit obsessed with teaching Cubist inspired art lessons 😂 ) I was struggling […]

KS3 Art Project – 3D Design and Build

This 3D art project is great because it engages boys, uses minimal materials (mainly just paper and card), introduces new equipment and materials AND it can be really easily adapted. I teach this Design and Build architecture project every year because it is so much fun (and not just for the students 😂 ). Once […]

KS3 Art – Cubism Home Learning Project

It sounds bad to say but “I’m making this project up as I go along” 😂 as in, it’s not finished yet! I’m creating the home learning Cubism Scheme of Work for my KS3 (Year 9) classes and I am going to add lessons weekly depending on how my students respond to it and how […]

KS3 Art – Op Art Home Learning Project

I have made this home learning KS3 Op Art project for our Year 7 students to work on during lockdown, but it could easily be used for Year 8 or Year 9 (or maybe even art cover lessons?). I have been teaching these Op Art lessons online via Google Classroom. I have designed this Op […]

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Cubism Key Ideas

CHANGING EXPERIENCE OF SPACE, MOVEMENT, AND TIME IN THE MODERN WORLD Cubists explored open form, piercing figures and objects by letting the space flow through them, blending background into foreground, and showing objects from various angles. Some historians have argued that these innovations represent a response to the changing experience of space, movement, and time in the modern world. This first phase of the movement was called Analytic Cubism.

ACUTELY AWARE OF CURRENT EVENTS In the second phase of Cubism, Synthetic Cubists explored the use of non-art materials as abstract signs. Their use of newspaper would lead later historians to argue that, instead of being concerned above all with form, the artists were also acutely aware of current events, particularly WWI.

UNITY BETWEEN A DEPICTED SCENE AND THE SURFACE OF THE CANVAS Cubism paved the way for non-representational art by putting new emphasis on the unity between a depicted scene and the surface of the canvas. These experiments would be taken up by the likes of Piet Mondrian, who continued to explore their use of the grid, abstract system of signs, and shallow space.

9 CUBISTS EVERY ARTIST SHOULD KNOW: Pablo Picasso Albert Gleizes Georges Braque Juan Gris Jacques Lipchitz Jean Metzinger Robert de la Fresnay Sonia Delaunay Fernand Léger

Reference: The Art Story | https://www.theartstory.org/movement-cubism.htm

Musée du Louvre Collection

Who Decides What Art Means?

Cubism art was a modern movement that is known today as the most influential period in 20th-century art . It has also inspired subsequent styles in architecture and literature. It is known for its deconstructed, geometric representations and breakdowns of spatial relativity. Developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque among others, Cubism drew on post-impressionist art, and particularly the works of Paul Cézanne, which challenged traditional notions of perspective and form. Below are 10 iconic cubist works and the artists who produced them.

Proto Cubism Art

Proto-Cubism is the introductory phase of Cubism that began in 1906. This period reflects the experimentation and influences that resulted in geometric shapes and a more muted color palette in sharp contrast to the preceding Fauvist and post-impressionis t movements.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, printmaker, sculptor, and ceramicist who is known as one of the most prolific influences on 20th-century art. He, along with Georges Braque, founded the Cubism movement in the early 1900s. However, he also made significant contributions to other movements including Expressionism and Surrealism . His work was known for its angular shapes and challenging traditional perspectives.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon depicts five nude women in a brothel in Barcelona. The piece is rendered in muted, paneled block colors. All the figures stand to confront the viewer, with slightly disconcerting facial expressions. Their bodies are angular and disjointed, standing as if they are posing for the viewer. Below them sits a pile of fruit posed for a still life. The piece is one of the most famous examples of Cubism’s divergence from traditional aesthetics.

Houses at L’Estaque (1908) by Georges Braque

houses at lestaque painting by Georges Braque

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Georges Braque was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman and sculptor who was a leading artist in both the Fauvism and Cubism movements. He was closely associated with Pablo Picasso during early Cubism and remained loyal to the movement throughout the rest of his career despite changing his style and color use. His most famous work is characterized by bold coloration and sharp, defined angles.

Houses at L’Estaque reflects the transition from post-impressionism into Proto-Cubism. The viewer can see the influence of Paul Cézanne in the uniform brushstrokes and thick paint application. However, Braque incorporated elements of cubist abstraction by removing the horizon line and playing with perspective. The houses are fragmented, with inconsistent shadows and a background that blends in with the objects.

Analytical Cubism

Analytical Cubism in the early phase of Cubism, beginning in 1908 and ending around 1912. It is characterized by the deconstructed representations of objects with contradictory shadows and planes, which play with traditional notions of perspective. It also featured the restricted color palette of Proto-Cubism.

Violin and Candlestick (1910) by Georges Braque

Violin and Candlestick depicts an abstracted violin and candlestick still life. It is composed on a grid with deconstructed elements that form a single composition, allowing the viewer to draw their interpretation of the piece. It is rendered in muted tones of brown, grey and black, with juxtaposing shadows and a flattened perspective. It consists mainly of flat, horizontal brush strokes and sharp outlines.

I and the Village (1911) by Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was a Russian-French painter and printmaker who used dream iconography and emotive expression in his work. His work predated the imagery of Surrealism and used poetic and personal associations rather than traditional artistic representations. He worked in several different mediums throughout his career and studied under a stained-glass maker which led to him to take up its craftsmanship.

I and the Village depicts an autobiographical scene from Chagall’s childhood in Russia. It portrays a surreal, dream-like setting with folk symbols and elements from the town of Vitebsk, where Chagall grew up. The piece is thus highly emotional and focuses on several associations with the artist’s significant memories. It has intersecting, geometric panels with blended colors, confusing the perspective and disorienting the viewer.

Tea Time (1911) by Jean Metzinger

Jean Metzinger was a French artist and writer who wrote the leading theoretical work on Cubism with fellow artist Albert Gleizes . He worked in the Fauvist and Divisionist styles in the early 1900s, utilizing some of their elements in his cubist works including bold colors and defined outlines. He was also influenced by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who he met when he moved to Paris to pursue a career as an artist.

Tea Time represents Metzinger’s hybridization of classical art with modernism. It is a portrait of a woman having tea in a characteristic cubist composition. It resembles classical and Renaissance bust portraiture but has a modern, abstracted figure and elements of spatial distortion. The woman’s body and the teacup are both deconstructed, featuring plays on light, shadow and perspective. The color scheme is muted, with elements of red and green blended into it.

Synthetic Cubism

Synthetic Cubism is the later period of Cubism spanning between 1912 and 1914. While the precedent Analytical Cubism period was focused on fragmenting objects, Synthetic Cubism emphasized experimentation with textures, flattened perspective and brighter colors.

Portrait of Pablo Picasso (1912) by Juan Gris

Juan Gris was a Spanish painter and a leading member of the Cubism movement. He was part of the 20th-century avant-garde, working alongside Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse in Paris. He also designed ballet sets for the art critic and founder of the ‘Ballets Russes’ Sergei Diaghilev. His painting was known for its rich colors, sharp forms and reformation of spatial perspective.

Portrait of Pablo Picasso represents Gris’ homage to his artistic mentor, Pablo Picasso. The piece is reminiscent of Analytic Cubism works, with spatial deconstruction and paradoxical angles. However, it also features a more structured geometric composition, with clear color planes and pops of color. The background angles fade into those of Picasso’s face, flattening the piece and blending the subject with the background.

Guitar (1913) by Pablo Picasso

Guitar perfectly represents the shift between Analytical Cubism and Synthetic Cubism. The piece is a collage combined with drawn elements, made up of paper and newspaper clippings, adding varying degrees of depth and texture. It portrays disjointed and asymmetric parts of a guitar, recognizable only by the central shape and circle. Its mainly beige, black and white color scheme is contrasted by a bright blue background, emphasizing the bold colors of Synthetic Cubism.

The Sunblind (1914) by Juan Gris

The Sunblind portrays a closed blind partially covered by a wooden table. It is a charcoal and chalk composition with collage elements, adding in textures typical of a Synthetic Cubism piece. Gris uses perspective and size distortions between the table and the blind to add an element of confusion. The bright blue color both contracts against and frames the central table, adding textural variation and an asymmetrical balance.

Later Work with Cubism Art

While Cubism’s innovation peaked between 1908-1914, the movement had a monumental impact on modern art. It appeared throughout the 20th-century in European art and had a considerable impact on Japanese and Chinese art between 1910 and 1930.

Cubist Self-Portrait (1926) by Salvador Dalí

cubist self portrait salvador dali painting

Salvador Dalí was a Spanish artist who was closely linked to Surrealism. His work is some of the most notable and recognizable of the movement, and he remains one of its most prominent contributors. His art is known for its precision and is characterized by dreamlike imagery, Catalonian landscapes and bizarre imagery. However, despite his primary interest with Surrealism, Dalí also experimented with the Dadaism and Cubism movements during the first half of the 20th century.

Cubist Self-Portrait exemplifies the work done in Dalí’s cubist phase between 1922-23 and 1928. He was influenced by the works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and experimented with other outside influences during the time that he made cubist works. His self-portrait exemplifies these combined influences. It has an African style mask at its center, surrounded by collaged elements typical of Synthetic Cubism, and featuring the muted color palette of Analytical Cubism.

Guernica (1937) by Pablo Picasso

Guernica is both one of Picasso’s most famous works and is renowned as one of the most prolific anti-war artworks in modern history. The piece was done in response to the 1937 bombing of Guernica, a Basque town in Northern Spain, by Fascist Italian and Nazi German forces. It depicts a group of animals and people suffering at the hands of wartime violence, many of which are dismembered. It is rendered in a monochrome color scheme, with thin outlines and geometric block shapes.

Everything You Need to Know about Cubism

By Charlotte Davis BA Art History Charlotte is a contributing writer from Portland, Oregon now based in London, England. I’m an art historian with extensive knowledge in art history, classics, ancient art and archaeology.

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Easy Cubism Art Activities
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Easy Cubism Art Activities
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How to Do a Cubist Style Painting: 14 Steps (with Pictures)
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COMMENTS

KS3 Art
Lesson / week 3 in this Cubism project focused on artist's use of tone. Students identified 'successful' tonal work, then applied their understanding of colour theory again (from the previous lesson). I asked students to work in warm tones this week to ensure they didn't start adding too many colours all at once.
Cubism Art Project for Kids
Print out Cubism Art with Giraffe Blank Template. Using a ruler, draw several diagonal lines across the template. See video for visual. 3. Beginning with the top, begin to outline the ears with an orange pastel crayon. 4. Using a Q-Tip, fill in the remaining white space with the chosen pastel color. 5. Continue to follow the pattern shown on ...
Cubism
Cubism is a style of painting that was developed in the early 1900s. Cubist paintings show objects from many angles at once. Two main artists, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, developed Cubism. They believed that painters should not just present realistic views of subjects. Instead, they wanted to show every part of the whole subject.
PDF LESSON OVERVIEW/OBJECTIVES KEY IDEAS THAT CONNECT ...
the world's most famous artists. Cubist art depicts real people, places or objects, from an array of viewpoints. In the Cubist style, students will create self-portraits focusing on shape, viewpoint and composition. KEY IDEAS THAT CONNECT TO VISUAL ARTS CORE CURRICULUM: Based on Utah State Visual Arts Core Curriculum Requirements (3rd Grade)
Picasso inspired Art Activity & Cubism Lesson Pack
The Picasso inspired art activity resource pack also includes teaching ideas and an interactive worksheet that allows students to channel Picasso, experimenting with proportion and form, expressing emotion, and demonstrating learning about Cubism in imaginative ways. By the end of this Picasso and Cubism lesson, students will be able to:
How to Do a Cubist Style Painting: 14 Steps (with Pictures)
Choose an area with plenty of natural light and either a table or an easel to hold your canvas. Lay down newspaper in your work area to keep it clean. Use a glass of water and a soft rag to clean your paintbrushes between colors. 2. Choose your canvas. [2]
Easy Cubism Art Project
Easy Cubism Art Project. 3. Cubism is one of my favorite art genres to teach. Because of the influences of contemporary artists (think Romero Britto), children are familiar with how artists transforms everyday objects into geometric shapes, which is a huge hit with this easy cubism art project. The earlier influences of cubism (Picasso, Klee ...
Cubism Movement Overview
Crystal Cubism (1915-22) As a response to the chaos of war, there was a tendency among many French artists to pull back from radical experimentation; this inclination was not unique to Cubism. One art historian has described this stage of Cubism as the "end product of a progressive closing down of possibilities."
KS1 All About Cubism PowerPoint (teacher made)
This terrific All About Cubism PowerPoint is a great way to introduce KS1 children to the art movement known as Cubism and its key figures. They can learn all about the theory behind this revolutionary art style, see examples of cubist style artwork and find out more about Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the pioneers of Cubism.
All about cubism
Cubism can be split into two distinct phases. The first phase, analytical cubism, is considered to have run until around 1912. It looks more austere or serious. Objects are split into lots of flat shapes representing the views of them from different angles, and muted colours and darker tones or shades are used.
Cubism, a Complete Guide to the Revolutionary Modern Art Movement
By Kelly Richman-Abdou on August 6, 2022. Since its emergence over 100 years ago, Cubism has been regarded as one of modern art 's most famous and fascinating art movements. Cubism is closely associated with iconic artists like Pablo Picasso, whose avant-garde approach to everyday subject matter turned art history on its head.
25 Cubism art homework ideas
Jun 18, 2014 - Explore Andrea Ireland's board "cubism art homework" on Pinterest. See more ideas about cubism art, cubism, cubist.
Cubist Drawing with video tutorial
The drawing is colored with colored pencils, choosing earthy, brown and monochromatic tones in the style of Analytical Cubism by Braque and Picasso. Subsequently, some areas of the drawing are painted with watercolors (or coffee as you can see in the video), leaving a few small white areas. Eventually, once dry, further pencil shades can be added.
Inventing Cubism (article)
Inventing Cubism. Georges Braque, Landscape of l'Estaque, 1907, oil on canvas, 37 x 46 cm. (Musée d'Art moderne, Troyes, France) During the summer of 1908, Braque returned to Cézanne's old haunt for a second summer in a row. Previously he had painted this small port just south of Aix-en-Provence with the brilliant irrevent colors of a Fauve ...
How to Draw Cubism Art
How to Draw Cubism Art. Part of the series: Drawing Projects. Cubism art involves using pencils to create a variety of objects from as many sides as possible...
3.4: Cubism + early abstraction (I)
But now, after Cézanne's death and after having met Picasso, Braque set out on a very different tack, the invention of Cubism. Figure 3.4.17 3.4. 17: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, 8 x 7 feet and 8 inches (Museum of Modern Art, New York) Cubism is a terrible name.
What is cubism?
Updated: 27th January 2023. Cubism is a modern style of art, which shows different viewpoints of subjects at once and does not create an illusion of depth in the canvas. This was a departure from the linear perspective used in European art traditions until that point. It got its name from paintings with many geometric and angular shapes, which ...
27 Cubist art homework ideas
Jan 16, 2016 - Explore Samantha Jackman's board "Cubist art homework" on Pinterest. See more ideas about cubist art, cubist, cubism art.
Georges Braque Paintings, Bio, Ideas
Braque's earliest paintings were made in the Fauvist style. From 1902-1905, after giving up work as a decorator to pursue painting full-time he pursued Fauvist ideas and coordinated with Henri Matisse. He contributed his colorful Fauvist paintings to his first exhibition at the Salon des Independants in 1906.
Cubism
Cubism, highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created principally by the artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories that ...
KS3 Art & Design Activities
KS3 Art Project - 3D Design and Build. This 3D art project is great because it engages boys, uses minimal materials (mainly just paper and card), introduces new equipment and materials AND it can be really easily adapted. I teach this Design and Build architecture project every year because it is so much fun (and not just for the students ).
Cubism Key Ideas
Cubism Key Ideas. Cubist artists abandoned perspective, which had been used to depict space since the Renaissance, and they also turned away from the realistic modeling of figures. Cubists explored open form, piercing figures and objects by letting the space flow through them, blending background into foreground, and showing objects from ...
10 Iconic Cubist Artworks and Their Artists
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso, 1907, MoMA. Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, printmaker, sculptor, and ceramicist who is known as one of the most prolific influences on 20th-century art. He, along with Georges Braque, founded the Cubism movement in the early 1900s.