Cubism (Meaning and Explanation)

We explain what cubism is, the characteristics and artists of this movement. In addition, analytical, synthetic cubism and some works.

What is Cubism?

It is known as cubism. an artistic movement of the 20th century which burst onto the European art scene in 1907, marking a strong departure from traditional painting and setting a vital precedent for the emergence of the artistic avant-garde.

His characteristic style explore a new geometric perspective of reality looking at the objects from all possible points of view, which was a break with pictorial models in force since the Renaissance.

The term “cubism” however It was not proposed by the painters themselves, but by the critic Louis Vauxcelles the same man who once named Fauvism, who after attending an exhibition by Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963) stated that his works “reduced the landscape and the human body to insipid cubes,” and then proceeded to talk about cubism. In this regard, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, considered the movement's greatest exponent, would later affirm that “When we did cubism, we had no intention of doing cubism, but only of expressing what we had inside.”

Characteristics of cubism

Despite what its name may suggest, cubism It's not about painting through buckets. On the contrary, Cubism recognizes and embraces the two-dimensional nature of the canvas and renounces three-dimensionality, instead trying to represent in its paintings all possible points of view of an object, simultaneously. By doing so, he revolutionized the precepts in force in painting since ancient times, which is why Cubism is considered the first of the artistic avant-garde movements.

cubism artists

The greatest exponent of Cubism was the Spanish Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) who is assumed to be the founder of aesthetics and the first cultivator of his style. However, other artists recognized for their Cubist work were the French Georges Braque (1882-1963), Jean Metzinger (1883-1956), Albert Gleizes (1881-1953) and Robert Delanay (1885-1945), and the Spanish Juan Gris (1887-1927) and María Blanchard (1881-1932).

Analytical Cubism (1909-1912)

Analytical Cubism or Hermetic Cubism was the initial stage of the movement, whose paintings were almost all monochrome and gray focused on the point of view and not on the chromaticity. This approach was such that in many cases the works became practically abstract, since the planes became unrecognizable and independent of the volume of the painted object. This caused the new style to receive a lot of rejection from the traditionalist sectors of painting, at the same time as the enthusiasm of avant-garde artists and cultural personalities such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein, who wrote critical pieces on the importance of cubism. nascent.

Synthetic Cubism (1912-1914)

The second period of cubism was born as a result of Braque's tendency to incorporate, starting in 1912, numbers and words in your pictures as well as the use of wood, discolored papers and other materials.

That same year Picasso made his first collage, and this incorporation of other elements added color to the until then monochrome cubist trend. Cubist paintings then become more figurative and therefore easier to interpret, more docile, and in them the objects are reduced to their elemental characteristics, instead of to superimposed volumes and planes.

This It is considered the most imaginative stage of cubism especially in the work of Juan Gris, who granted himself greater amounts of freedom and color. However, the First World War put an end to the movement, as many painters were called to the front, and in the post-war period only Juan Gris remained faithful to Cubism, although in a much simpler and austere style.

Cubism works

Some of the most representative paintings of cubism are:

Guernica (1937) by Pablo Picasso.
The ladies of Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso.
Violin and palette (1909) by Georges Braque.
The anise bottle (1914) by Juan Gris.
Woman reading on the beach (1937) by Pablo Picasso.

literary cubism

Literary cubism is a adaptation fruit of the ingenuity of the Frenchman Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) renowned poet and essayist. In this trend he tried to mix images and concepts in a more or less random way, thus venturing into calligrams: poems that formed a specific image on the page, due to their distribution on the blank paper.

This trend is taken to its maximum by Apollinaire in his Caligramas. Poems of peace and war (1918), where he broke the syntactic and logical structure of the poem, prefiguring what the surrealists would later do.

Pablo Picasso

Picasso was not only the central figure of Cubism, but an internationally renowned painter and sculptor considered one of the most influential artists of numerous artistic movements, as well as a cultivator of other forms of art such as drawing, engraving, book illustration, set and costume design for theatrical productions, and even had a very brief literary work.

Picasso was also a pacifist and communist militant a member of both the Spanish and French Communist Parties, until his death in 1973. The indisputability of his work also contrasts with his personal and love life, of notorious promiscuity and misogyny, to the point of reaching consider women as “suffering machines.”