Art: Cubism

Cubism is highly influential visual art style of the 20th century. It was created mainly by the artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1907 and 1914. It emphasized flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, this rejected the traditionl techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro. It refuted theories that art should imitate nature. Cubist painters presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects.

Cubism got its name from remarks that the critic Louis Vauxcelles about Braque´s 1908 painting "Houses T L'Estaque" that it was composed of cubes. Nevertheless, it was "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" by Picasso in 1907 that led to the new style.

The development of this movement, which was from 1910 to 1912, is often referred to as Analyticxal Cubism. The works created by Picasso and Braque during this time are almost indistinguishable from one another because they are so similar. They both favored right-angle and straight-line costruction. Their color schemes were almost a monochromatic scale so the viewer would not get distracted from the primary interest of the artist: the structure of form.
After 1912, a new phase called Synthetic Cubism appeared. This focuses on emphasizing the combination, or synthesis, of forms in the picture. Color has a strong role in this works, shapes are larger and more decorative, smooth and rough surfaces are contrasted, and foreign materials might be pasted to the canvas in combination with paint. This technique is called collage and further emphasizes the differences in texture and aasks what is reality and what is illusion.

Some other painters that adopted and developed this art style are Fernand Leger, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, Roger de la Fresnaye, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger. This movement, although mainly linked to painting, also influenced sculpture and architechture in the 20th century. The major cubist sculptors were Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Lipchitz. It can be seen in the shapes of the houses Le Corbusier, a Swiss arquitect, designed as well.

This movement was a revolutionry approach of representing reality, they had different views of subjects in the same picture, whih resulted in it looking fragmented and abstracted.