- What is Cubism?
- Characteristics of cubism
- Cubism artists
- Analytical Cubism (1909-1912)
- Synthetic Cubism (1912-1914)
- Cubism works
- Literary cubism
- Pablo Picasso
We explain what cubism is, the characteristics and artists of this movement. In addition, analytical and synthetic cubism and some works.
What is Cubism?
It is known by the name of cubism to an artistic movement of the twentieth century that burst onto the European art scene in 1907, marking a strong distancing from the painting traditional and setting a vital precedent for the emergence of the artistic avant-gardes.
His signature style explores a new geometric perspective on the reality, looking at the objects from all possible points of view, which was a break with current pictorial models from the Renaissance.
However, the term “cubism” was not proposed by the painters themselves, but by the critic Louis Vauxcelles, the same one who at the time gave the name to Fauvism, who after attending an exhibition by Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963) stated that his works “reduced the scenery and the human body to insipid cubes ”, and then he proceeded to speak of cubism. In this regard, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, considered the greatest exponent of the movement, would later affirm that "When we made cubism, we had no intention of doing cubism, but only to express what we had inside."
Characteristics of cubism
Despite what its name might suggest, cubism is not about painting through cubes. On the contrary, Cubism recognizes and embraces the two-dimensional nature of the canvas and renounces three-dimensionality, trying rather to represent in its paintings all possible points of view of an object, simultaneously. In 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-gardes.
Cubist paintings thus lack depth, offer multiple points of view (rather than a single one), and suppress most of the details of the objects they represent, often reducing them to a single feature: violins, for example, they are recognized only by their tails.
At the same time, the genre of Cubism paintings could not be more conventional: still lifes, landscapes, portraits. But unlike the impressionism and Fauvism, they are painted with colors muted: grays, greens and browns, especially in their early days.
The difficulty of interpreting certain cubist paintings, given their rupture with all forms of naturalness, made it necessary to accompany the work with a text explanatory or critical in nature, a gesture that would later become common in artworks of the avant-garde.
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 point of view and not 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 that the new style received much rejection of the traditionalist sectors of the painting, at the same time that the enthusiasm of avant-garde artists and personalities of the culture like Guillaume Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein, who wrote critical pieces on the importance of nascent Cubism.
Around 1911, however, the Madrid painter Juan Gris began to take an interest in light, incorporating it into his cubist works in a naturalistic way. But the following year he had joined the trend toward collage by Picasso and Braque, incorporating various materials such as wood and upholstery into his paintings.
Synthetic Cubism (1912-1914)
The second period of Cubism was born as a result of Braque's tendency to incorporate, as of 1912, numbers and words in his paintings, as well as the use of wood, discolored paper and other materials.
That same year Picasso made his first collage, and this incorporation of other elements adds color to the previously 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 superimposed volumes and planes.
This is considered the most imaginative stage of Cubism, especially in the work of Juan Gris, who was awarded higher quotas of Liberty Y color. However, the First World War put an end to the movement, as many painters were called to the fore, and in the postwar period only Juan Gris remained faithful to cubism, albeit in a much simpler and more austere style.
Cubism works
Some of the most representative paintings of cubism are:
- Guernica by Pablo Picasso.
- The Avignon ladies by Pablo Picasso.
- Violin and paddle by Georges Braque when we have the information.
- The bottle of anise by Juan Gris.
- Woman reading on the beach by Pablo Picasso.
Literary cubism
Literary Cubism is an adaptation fruit of the ingenuity of the French Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), renowned poet and essayist. In this trend, he tried to mix images and concepts in a more or less haphazard way, thus venturing into calligrams: poems that formed a certain image on the page, due to its distribution on the blank paper.
This trend is maximized by Apollinaire in his Calligrams. Poems by peace and of the war , where the structure syntactic and logic of the poem, foreshadowing 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 art movements, as well as a cultivator of other forms of art. art As the He drew, the engraving, the illustration of books, the design of scenographies and costumes for theatrical productions, and even had a very brief literary work.
Picasso was also a pacifist and communist militant, a member of both the Communist Party of Spain and the French, until the day his death in 1973. The indisputable nature of his work also contrasts with his personal and love life, of a notorious promiscuity and misogyny, to the point of coming to consider women as "machines of suffering."