Cubism: what it is and characteristics of this artistic movement

In 1907, Picasso finished his canvas. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Ladies of Avignon). Many see in the painting the beginning of cubism, although it is rather an almost experimental work, in which Picasso plays with various elements: faces that look like masks, "broken" and fragmented perspective, arbitrary colors... However, all these elements had already been used before, so, in principle, they did not imply any novelty in themselves.

Cubism itself was not born until later, when, through the so-called analytical cubism, the forms were refined and the emotional subjectivity of painting was completely eliminated. But, let us start at the beginning. What is cubism? Let's see it next.

cubism features

At the beginning of the 20th century, the avant-garde had forcefully broken into the European art scene. In 1905 we have the Fauves artists at the Salon d'Automne in Paris and, a few years later, the German Expressionists take the chromatic power of these Fauves and create their own language. All these artists had in common their passion and the highly emotional charge of their compositions.

Cubism, however, is something else. In fact, the cubists distance themselves from the expressionists and impressionists (occupied only with the subjectivity of the image) and focus on form and structure. In this way, colour, which had been so important to both the Impressionists and the Fauves, remains relegated to a strict background: from now on, the cubists will only be interested in the composition of the volumes.

The cubists promulgated an "intellectual" art. In other words, an art that would not limit itself to recording reality, but would also carefully structure it through meticulous purification to leave only the essentials. The painting had to come out, then, of the "brain", and not of the emotion, as it did happen with the expressionists. This new art would have, as Guillaume Apollinaire stated in his aesthetic meditations (1913), geometry as the basis, in the same way that grammar was the basis of writing.

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The background of cubism

As always, a new art is not born out of nowhere. Artists influence each other and create aesthetic currents that are constantly followed and rejected, molded, adapted, reinvented. So, we find two painters who are clear antecedents of cubism: Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859-1891) and Paul Cézanne (1839-1906).

From the first, the cubists took the concept of divisionism. In this sense, they were not the first: the fauves they had already been inspired by Seurat some years before. The "Seuratian" divisionism advocated the approximation of colors without mixing them, so that the person in charge of building the final image was the eye of the beholder. From the second, the cubists picked up their interest in overcoming impressionism by means of a solid painting of defined forms, and also a certain geometrization of these forms.

When it comes to understanding where cubism came from, one cannot forget the historical context that shaped it. Thus, it is inseparable from scientific discoveries in subjects such as optics, physics and chemistry. The Theory of Relativity (1905) by Albert Einstein had a powerful impact on cubist artists, since he questioned the validity of the concepts of space and time.

On the other hand, the rise of the so-called "primitivism", that is, the attraction to demonstrations artistic forms of the peoples of Africa or Oceania, especially influenced artists such as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Henri Matisse, the undisputed leader of the Fauves, had shown a young Picasso the magic of African masks, and their flattened and rotund forms would have a powerful influence on the work of the Malaga.

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The two cubist stages

Art historians distinguish mainly two stages in Cubism: Analytical Cubism, which would develop between the years 1909 and 1910, and synthetic cubism, which would see the light at the end of 1910, once the first one had already faded. To these two, let's say, “canonical” stages, we could add a third, which would actually be the preamble to the other two, which we could call primitive or intuitive cubism. But let's go in parts.

The beginnings of cubism

In 1907, a retrospective of Paul Cézanne, who died the previous year, is held at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. The exhibition impresses three young artists: Picasso, Georges Braque (1882-1963) and Fernand Léger (1881-1955). In Cézanne's painting they saw the dawn of a new art, an art that disdained impressionist transience and searched for a “true” art, lasting over time. The painter achieved this through certain formal inconsistencies: he represented all the planes of the object at the same time, and thus frozen in the painting its complete reality. Cézanne "broke" the form and restructured it. The cubists would go further and completely destroy classical perspective. An object would no longer be seen from a single point of view, but from several at the same time.

Picasso and Braque, infected by the enthusiasm of this discovery, began to make attempts at what would be this new and "definitive" art. It is at this time that we must situate The Ladies of Avignon, where Picasso experiments with authentic vehemence. The works of this period are not yet analytical, and exude an intuitive passion that still does not make them fully cubist.

analytical cubism

The next stage of cubism is the so-called analytical cubism. In this period, the evident emotion of previous years has been "overcome" and an exclusively "cerebral" execution is advocated. So, the object is definitively “broken”, it is dissected, it is analyzed. On the surface of the painting all the planes of the object appear, coming together and superimposing each other. Thus, the figure disappears and the viewer is unable to recognize what he is looking at. However, it is not an abstract painting: it is representing a motif, but in a different way than what we are used to.

Some examples of this analytical cubism are the Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910), by Picasso, or the woman with mandolin (1910) by Georges Braque.

At this stage, color loses its privileged position and the tones focus on ocher and gray.

synthetic cubism

At the end of 1910, analytical cubism began to wear out and the second type of cubism, synthetic, gained strength. This second stage is characterized by the absence of analysis and, therefore, of the "breaking" of the object., which are replaced by a summary of it through the representation of various planes, in the manner of Cézanne. In addition, the color returns to the canvases with unusual force. Some examples from this period are mandolin and guitar (1924), by Pablo Picasso, or the open window (1921), by Juan Gris (1887-1927), one of the most outstanding painters of this period.

Synthetic Cubism is famous for having introduced into art elements that, in principle, were foreign to it. In the first place, we have the collage, that is to say, the introduction of real elements of daily life in painting, of which the Still Life with Mesh Chair, by Picasso, which is considered the first artistic collage. Second, the calls papiers collés, papers glued to the canvas on which they painted; and, finally, the addition of fonts in the paintings, like the letters cut out of a magazine.

cubism for posterity

It was during the Synthetic Cubism stage that the foundations of Cubist aesthetics were laid. In 1912, Jean Metzinger (1883-1956) and Albert León Gleizes (1881-1953) published of cubism, an essay that tried to lay the foundations on which the movement was based. However, is aesthetic meditations. cubist painters (1913) by Guillaume Apollinaire, the text that is considered a kind of manifesto of cubism.

Finally, these artists would receive the name from the same character who baptized the movement fauve: Louis Vauxcelles, art critic who, when contemplating Braque's work, stated that the painter “mistreated” forms and reduced everything to “cubes”. A great character, this Vauxcelles: he carries the nomenclature of two avant-garde behind him.