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A nonobjective school of painting and sculpture developed in Paris in the early 20th century, characterized by the reduction and fragmentation of natural forms into abstract, often geometric structures usually rendered as a set of discrete planes.
cubist cub'ist n.Term derived from a reference made to 'geometric schemas and cubes' by the critic Louis Vauxcelles in describing paintings exhibited in Paris by Georges Braque in November 1908; it is more generally applied not only to work of this period by Braque and Pablo Picasso but also to a range of art produced in France during the later 1900s, the 1910s and the early 1920s and to variants developed in other countries. Although the term is not specifically applied to a style of architecture except in former Czechoslovakia (see CZECH CUBISM), architects did share painters' formal concerns regarding the conventions of representation and the dissolution of three-dimensional form (see
See the Abbreviations for further details.
For more information on Cubism, visit Britannica.com.
Movement in art originating with the work of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963), and mainly dating from c.1905 to 1914. Cubism departed from the notion of art as an imitation of Nature that had been paramount in Europe from Renaissance times, and also retreated from traditional
The relationship of Cubism and architecture was at best tentative, often involving the application of Cubist decorations to stripped Neo-Classical buildings. Hints of Cubist themes are found in
Bibliography
The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)
Artistic Cubism developed from Picasso's fusion in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) of the lessons of Cézanne and the forms of Negro and Iberian sculpture. Working first separately, then together, Picasso and Braque sought to represent the complete structure of the object and its relationship of volume and space by juxtaposing different views of it in interlocking planes. As Cubism evolved, this analysis of the object's volumes and spatial extension became subordinate to the construction of an internal unity of planes, colours, and shapes in which the object was the means rather than the end.
The label ‘Cubist’ covers a multitude of pictorial practices which create difficulties of taxonomy when it is extended beyond painting. Even as these practices evolved during the period 1908-14, such were the contacts in Paris between avant-garde painters and poets that this extension was inevitable. Apollinaire, in Les Peintres cubistes (1913), related Cubist painting to Nietzsche and non-Euclidian geometry. The same year, Cendrars published ‘the first simultaneous book’, the Prose du Transsibérien, illustrated by Sonia Delaunay. Jacob considered his own poetry in Le Cornet à dés (1917) and that of Reverdy to be the most Cubist. In the first issue of Nord-Sud (1917), Reverdy's important essay ‘Sur le cubisme’ established a theoretical framework for the analogies between Cubist painting and literature (notably in his aesthetic of the image), and his various projects in collaboration with Juan Gris offer important examples.
Though the diversity and range of Cubist painting make precise analogies between poems and paintings difficult to establish, it is clear that Cubism gave an important impetus to avant-garde poetics during the period 1908-14. It reinforced the idea that poetry was an autonomous intellectual structure, freed from the obligation to represent external reality, an interplay of fragmented, discontinuous verbal segments, simultaneously rather than hierarchically presented (with all that this implied for syntax, punctuation, linguistic register). This in turn led poets to define a literary lineage for these developments in the work of Mallarmé and Rimbaud, sometimes even to see Cubist painting as an offshoot of it. The poetry of Apollinaire, Jacob, Reverdy, Salmon, Cocteau, and Albert-Birot continued actively to engage these issues.
[James Kearns]
The term "cubism" was first used by the French critic Louis Vauxcelles in his review of a 1908 exhibition of paintings by Georges Braque. Cubist artists abandoned academically correct representation, which approximated the actual appearance of objects. Instead, the Cubists represented objects from multiple points of view and forms were reduced to basic geometric configurations. In theory, the Cubists justified their experiments as a search to uncover the essential structure of an object and its relation to other parts of a composition. Cubist painters such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris were profoundly affected by the art of Paul Cézanne, who maintained that natural forms could be reduced to simple geometric figures such as the cube, the sphere, and the cylinder. The Cubists also admired the art of so-called primitive cultures such as those of Africa and Egypt. Cubism made a decisive break with the centuries-old Western tradition of illusionistic representation, and in so doing initiated a revolution in the visual arts that all subsequent painters dealt with in some way.
A few American painters were exposed to cubism early on—notably Max Weber, who worked in Paris from 1905 until 1909, when he returned to New York City. Weber certainly knew such cubist artists as Picasso and in New York City during the winter of 1910–1911 Weber adopted cubist theory to American subject matter in canvases such as his Rush Hour, New York (1915). Weber's urban subjects combine his interest in cubism with the Italian avant-garde futurist artists' concern for dynamic movement and nature in flux. Weber's interest in cubist-futurist experiments lasted only a few years, but had a profound impact on John Marin and Joseph Stella, both active in New York City. Marin's The Woolworth Building (1912) and Stella's Brooklyn Bridge (1917) illustrate how lessons from both the French and Italian avant-gardes could be used to express the hectic pace of big city America. Cubist painting in France after World War I was increasingly concerned with creating compositions from areas of flat, often bright colors. Artists such as Stuart Davis, who encountered cubism at the 1913 Armory Show, owed their subsequent highly individual development to their early study of cubist work.
Still other expatriate American artists such as Morgan Russell, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, and Patrick Henry Bruce formed a movement that they called synchronism, which combined cubist analysis of form with a colorful palette inspired by the work of contemporary French artists such as Robert Delaunay. By the mid-1920s, the importance of cubism for American artists was in decline, but the movement was the stepping-off point for the subsequent development of American abstract art.
Bibliography
Golding, John. Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907–1914. London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988.
Rubin, William. Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989.
—Victor Carlson
Cubist Theory
Cubism began as an intellectual revolt against the artistic expression of previous eras. Among the specific elements abandoned by the cubists were the sensual appeal of paint texture and color, subject matter with emotional charge or mood, the play of light on form, movement, atmosphere, and the illusionism that proceeded from scientifically based perspective. To replace these they employed an analytic system in which the three-dimensional subject (usually still life) was fragmented and redefined within a shallow plane or within several interlocking and often transparent planes.
Analytic and Synthetic Cubism
In the analytic phase (1907–12) the cubist palette was severely limited, largely to black, browns, grays, and off-whites. In addition, forms were rigidly geometric and compositions subtle and intricate. Cubist abstraction as represented by the analytic works of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris intended an appeal to the intellect. The cubists sought to show everyday objects as the mind, not the eye, perceives them—from all sides at once. The trompe l'oeil element of collage was also sometimes used.
During the later, synthetic phase of cubism (1913 through the 1920s), paintings were composed of fewer and simpler forms based to a lesser extent on natural objects. Brighter colors were employed to a generally more decorative effect, and many artists continued to use collage in their compositions. The works of Picasso, Braque, and Gris are also representative of this phase.
The Scope of Cubism
In painting the major exponents of cubism included Picasso, Braque, Jean Metzinger, Gris, Duchamp, and Léger. The chief segments of the cubist movement included the Montmartre-based Bâteau-Lavoir group of artists and poets (Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude and Leo Stein, Modigliani, Picabia, Delaunay, Archipenko, and others); the Puteaux group of the Section d'Or salon (J. Villon, Léger, Picabia, Kupka, Marcoussis, Gleizes, Apollinaire, and others); the Orphists (Delaunay, Duchamp, Picabia, and Villon; see orphism); and the experimenters in collage who influenced cubist sculpture (Laurens and Lipchitz).
Cubist Inspiration and Influence
In painting the several sources of cubist inspiration included the later work of Cézanne; the geometric forms and compressed picture space in his paintings appealed especially to Braque, who developed them in his own works. African sculpture, particularly mask carvings, had enormous influence in the early years of the movement. Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) is one of the most significant examples of this influence. Within this revolutionary composition lay much of the basic material of cubism.
The cubist break with the tradition of imitation of nature was completed in the works of Picasso, Braque, and their many groups of followers. While few painters remained faithful to cubism's rigorous tenets, many profited from its discipline. Although the cubist groups were largely dispersed after World War I, their collective break from visual realism had an enriching and decisive influence on the development of 20th-century art. It provided a new stylistic vocabulary and a technical idiom that remain forceful today.
Bibliography
See G. Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters (1913, tr. 1949); R. Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (rev. ed. 1967); D. Cooper, The Cubist Epoch (1971); C. Green, Cubism and Its Enemies (1987); W. Rubin, Pioneering Cubism (1989).
A movement in modern art that emphasized the geometrical depiction of natural forms (see geometry). Pablo Picasso was one of the leading cubists.
Cubism was a 20th century art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. Analytic Cubism, was both radical and influential, it initially developed as a short but highly significant art movement between 1908 and 1911 in France. In its second phase Synthetic Cubism, the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity.
During the late 19th century and into the early 20th century the European cultural elite was discovering the art of Africa, Micronesia, and Native Americans for the first time. Europeans were fascinated, intrigued and educated by the newness, wildness and the stark power embodied in the art of those faraway places. During the late 1890s Paul Gauguin led the way, and younger artists like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso in the early days of the 20th century were inspired and motivated by the raw power and simplicity of the so-called Primitive art of those foreign cultures. Around 1904, Picasso met Henri Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when both artists had recently acquired an interest in African sculpture. Picasso and Matisse became friendly rivals and competed with each other throughout their careers. Possibly because of this rivalry and friendship, Picasso's work entered a new period by 1907 marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian and African art, and masks in particular. His paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, the antecedent of Cubism. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form — instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles presenting no coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the ambiguous shallow space characteristic of cubism.
Some believe that the roots of cubism are to be found in the two distinct tendencies of Paul Cézanne's later work: firstly to break the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of paint, thereby emphasising the plural viewpoint given by binocular vision, and secondly his interest in the simplification of natural forms into cylinders, spheres, pies and cones.
The cubists went farther than Cézanne; they represented all the surfaces of depicted objects in a single picture plane as if the objects had had all their faces visible at the same time, in the same plane.(citation needed) This new kind of depiction revolutionised the way in which objects could be visualised in painting and art.
The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the movement's main innovators. A later active participant was the Spaniard Juan Gris. After meeting in 1907 Braque and Picasso in particular began working on the development of Cubism. Picasso was initially the force and influence that persuaded Braque by 1908 to move away from Fauvism. The two artists began working closely together in late 1908 - early 1909 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The movement spread quickly throughout Paris and Europe.
French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term "cubism", or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture - that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas."[1]
Cubism was taken up by many artists in Montparnasse and promoted by art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, becoming popular so quickly that by 1911 critics were referring to a "cubist school" of artists. However, many of the artists who thought of themselves as cubists went in directions quite different from Braque and Picasso. The Puteaux Group was a significant offshoot of the Cubist movement, and included artists like Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, his brother Jacques Villon, and Fernand Léger.
In 1913 the United States was exposed to cubism and modern European art when Jacques Villon exhibited seven important and large drypoints at the famous Armory Show in New York City. Braque and Picasso themselves went through several distinct phases before 1920, and some of these works had been seen in New York prior to the Armory Show, at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery.
Czech artists who realized the epochal significance of cubism of Picasso and Braque attempted to extract its components for their own work in all branches of artistic creativity - especially painting and architecture. This developed into so-called Czech Cubism which was an avant-garde art movement of Czech proponents of cubism active mostly in Prague from 1910 to 1914.
Analytical Cubism is one of the two major branches of the artistic movement of Cubism and was developed between 1908 and 1912. In contrast to Synthetic cubism, Analytic Cubists "analyzed" natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the two-dimensional picture plane. Color was almost non-existent except for the use of a monochromatic scheme that often included grey, blue and ochre. Instead of an emphasis on color, Analytic cubists focused on forms like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent the natural world. During this movement, the works produced by Picasso and Braque shared stylistic similarities.
Analytic cubism is the first form of cubism; it was developed by Picasso and Braque between the years 1908 through 1912. Both painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque moved toward abstraction, leaving only enough signs of the real world to supply a tension between the reality outside the painting and the complicated meditations on visual language within the frame, exemplified through their paintings Ma Jolie (1911), by Picasso and The Portuguese (1911), by Braque.
In Paris in 1907 there was a major museum retrospective exhibition of the work of Paul Cezanne shortly after his death. The exhibition was enormously influential in establishing Cezanne as an important painter whose ideas were particularly resonant especially to young artists in Paris. Both Picasso and Braque had gotten the inspiration for Cubism from Paul Cezanne, who said to observe and learn to see and treat nature as if it were composed of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Picasso was the main analytic cubist, but Braque was also prominent, having abandoned Fauvism to work with Picasso in developing the Cubist lexicon. The main concept of analytic cubism was to analyze the object, hence the name analytic, and then to make them into basic geometric shapes. These shapes were used to represent the natural world. By the name, a person would think it was cubes, but it’s more breaking the 3 dimensional objects up into other shapes. The paintings depict the object from many different perspectives because of this. There wasn’t much emphasis on color, the paintings consisting of primarily simple, monotone colors, like gray and blue.
Synthetic Cubism was the second main branch of Cubism (the earlier being Analytic cubism) developed by Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris and
others between 1912 and
The first work of this new style was Picasso's Still Life with Chair-caning (1911-1912), which includes oil cloth pasted on the canvas. At the upper left are the letters "JOU", which appear in many cubist paintings and may refer to a newspaper titled "Le Journal". Newspaper clippings were a common inclusion in this style of cubism, whereby physical pieces of newspaper, sheet music, etc. were included in the collages. JOU can at the same time be a pun on the French word(s) for "game" or "play": "jeu" and "jouer" respectively. Picasso and Braque had a constant friendly competition with each other and including the letters in their works may have been an extension of their game.
Whereas analytic cubism was an analysis of the subjects (pulling them apart into planes), synthetic cubism is more of a pushing of several objects together. Picasso, through this movement, was the first to use text in his artwork (to flatten the space), and the use of mixed media—using more than one type of medium in the same piece. Opposed to analytic cubism, synthetic cubism has fewer planar shifts (or schematism), and less shading, creating flatter space.
Another technique used was called papier collé, or stuck paper, which Braque used in his collage Fruit Dish and Glass (1913).
Paris before World War I was a ferment of politics. New anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and women's rights movements were especially new and vigorous. There were strong movements around patriotic nationalism. Cubism was a particularly varied art movement in its political affiliations, with some sections being broadly anarchist or leftist, while others were strongly aligned with nationalist sentiment.
Gertrude Stein's written works employ repetition and repetitive phrases as building blocks and as structure in passages and whole chapters, that add up to the construction of whole novels as in The Makings of Americans (written, 1906-08), and most of her important works. Not only were they the first important patrons of Cubism, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were also important influences on Cubism as well. Picasso in turn was an important influence on Stein's writing.
The poets associated with Cubism are Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, André Salmon and Pierre Reverdy. As American poet Kenneth Rexroth explains, Cubism in poetry "is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. This is quite different from the free association of the Surrealists and the combination of unconscious utterance and political nihilism of Dada."[2] Nonetheless, the Cubist poets' influence on both Cubism and the later movements of Dada and Surrealism was profound; Louis Aragon, founding member of Surrealism, said that for Breton, Soupault, Éluard and himself, Reverdy was "our immediate elder, the exemplary poet."[3] Though not as well remembered as the Cubist painters, these poets continue to influence and inspire; American poets John Ashbery and Ron Padgett have recently produced new translations of Reverdy's work.
Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is also said to demonstrate how cubism's multiple perspectives can be translated into poetry.
In architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright gained widespread notoriety for his three-dimensional cubist building designs with highly fractured floor plans.
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This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Français (French)
n. - cubisme
Deutsch (German)
n. - Kubismus, (Kunstform, Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts)
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - κυβισμός (τεχνοτροπία)
Português (Portuguese)
n. - cubismo (m) (Art.)
Español (Spanish)
n. - cubismo
中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
立体派
中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 立體派
日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 立体派, キュービズム
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) الفن التكعيبي في الرسم
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - זרם באמנות הציור בו מיוצגים עצמים כאוסף של צורות הנדסיות, קוביזם (באמנות)
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