Pablo Picasso draws near his wine glass as the warmth of the Parisian summer echoes outside.  He is relaxed and eager to speak to his contemporaries.  The date is 1907 and he is about to invent one of the most celebrated forms of art ever created.  Together with fellow painter George Braque, they would invent something called “Cubism”.

 

What this newfound conception revolved around was its approach to representing reality.  Specifically, “Cubism” was an aesthetic theory that brought together views of subjects (typically objects or figures) within the same image.  It thereby offered fragmented and abstract images that represented the different views.  Essentially different views are culminated into one image.

​

This newfound modus operandi derived from examples of fragmentation from the recent past.  Paul Cezanne was an important influencer.  He saw that pictorial tropes could be divided and capture different points of view.  As such, in the paintings of his later career, Cezanne conveys an early fragmentation.

​

However, living and breathing within Paris during the beginning of the 20th century, both Picasso and Brasque would converse and culminate their defining principles.  In essence what they created is known today as “Analytical Cubism”.  This differed in multiple ways to the only other alternative that was “Synthetic Cubism”.   What “Analytical Cubism” did was “analyse” natural forms, in the process reducing these forms into basic geometric parts.  Colour was minimal, instead dull colours of grey, blue and ochre were common.  What the “analytical” cubists ultimately preferred were simple objects.  It was objects which could be adapted and “analysed”.

   

Alternatively, the less famous form of “Synthetic Cubism” emerged slightly later – from 1912 to 1914.  This was characterized by simpler shapes and brighter colours.  It also often included collages of real elements such as newspapers and other ordinary life objects – another newfound development.

​

However, Pablo Picasso had been living in Paris from the start of the century.  He had been at the crux if “Cubism” from its very origins.  Having trained as painter under his father in 1890, he first arrived in Paris in 1900.  Paris, as everyone agreed, was the art capital of Europe at the time.  Amongst Parisian society, Picasso soon learnt the language, French literature and got to know various fellow housemates.  It was within Paris, several years later, that he, in fact, would go on to establish “Cubism” as an art form.

 

Today what most people agree is that “Cubism” was begun by a single art-piece.  This was the “Demoiselles D’Avignon” of 1907.  It demonstrates so many elements of “cubist” visual language that it is considered the founding artwork of the movement.  In fact, very soon subsequently the title “Cubism” itself was coined.  Reportedly, after an exhibition in Paris in 1908, the famous critic Louis Vauxcelles described a collection of Georges Braque’s paintings as decreasing everything to “geometric outlines, to cubes.”

​

What was so emphatic about Cubism was its antithesis to the previous “illusion” of the European tradition.   Such a tradition created an “illusion” of a real space, from a fixed viewpoint. To do so, the aesthetic school employed devices such as linear perspective… something that had dominated representation from the Renaissance onwards.

​

Cubism’s importance to art is represented in the acclaim it still receives today.  It revealed a plethora of new possibilities for art and visual language generally.  It posed a starting point for subsequent abstract styles such as “constructivism” and “neo-plasticism”.

​

Today, works of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and other exponents of “Cubism” are dotted across the world in various galleries and museums.  “Cubism” was not the single visual language of Picasso nor Braque, but today is quite rightly as one of the most important moments throughout the history of visual arts.