Cubism for beginners: many views at once

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Look at a cup on your table. Now walk around it, look into it from above, pick it up and feel its weight. You know far more about the cup than any single view can show. Between about 1907 and 1914, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque tried to paint that knowledge. They broke objects into planes, showed several sides at once, and finally glued real paper onto their pictures. Cubism changed the grammar of Western art. Nearly every movement after it, from Futurism to abstraction, started by taking its broken planes one step further.

Three layers

Historical What the works and records show. Later tradition The myths. Modern How we see it now.

From Cézanne to the Demoiselles

Historical Cubism started from Cézanne, who had built forms from patches of color and shown objects from more than one angle. A big Cézanne memorial exhibition in Paris in 1907 hit young painters hard. In the same year Picasso visited the ethnographic museum at the Trocadéro and saw African and Oceanic sculpture. His Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), at MoMA, shows five women with angular, fractured bodies, two with faces like masks. I describe it in words, since it is a nude.

Primitivism

Historical The modernists admired African and Oceanic works and borrowed their forms, but they rarely knew their makers, meanings or uses, and they called them “primitive”, a word that implied a lower stage of civilization. In 1984 a MoMA exhibition on “Primitivism” was sharply criticized, notably by Thomas McEvilley, for treating non-Western objects mainly as inspirations for Europeans. That criticism changed how museums talk about these exchanges.

Analytic and Synthetic

Historical In Analytic Cubism, from about 1909 to 1912, Picasso and Braque broke a guitarist, a bottle or a newspaper into small faceted planes in browns and grays, until the subject is barely legible. In Synthetic Cubism, from 1912, they built images from flat shapes and invented papier collé, gluing newspaper, wallpaper and other materials to the surface. Collage became one of the key techniques of the century.

Juan Gris

Juan Gris, Portrait of Pablo Picasso, 1912. Art Institute of Chicago, image via Google Arts and Culture. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Historical The Spanish painter Juan Gris (1887 to 1927) moved to Paris and lived in the same studio building as Picasso, the Bateau-Lavoir. In 1912 he painted this Portrait of Pablo Picasso, now in Chicago, as a homage to his friend: the figure holds a palette, his body cut by a clear diagonal grid. Gris made Cubism cooler and more ordered, with crisp planes and brighter colors. He died at forty.

The esoteric angle

Historical Around 1910 the idea of a fourth dimension of space fascinated artists and occultists alike. The mathematician Maurice Princet talked about it with the Cubists, and Theosophists wrote about higher spaces visible to the spirit. The art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson showed in 1983 how strongly these ideas shaped modern art. In 1912 a group of painters exhibited in Paris as the Section d’Or, the Golden Section, named after the ancient proportion believed to underlie harmony.

Later tradition A saying credited to Picasso, “Good artists copy; great artists steal”, cannot be traced to him. Something similar appears in T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood (1920).

Modern Cubist collage feels very close to the vision boards and collage spells many witches make today.

Try it yourself

Put a cup or a bottle on a table. Draw it from the front, from above and from the side. Then cut the three drawings into pieces and glue them together into one picture. What do you know about the object now that one view could not show?

Before and after

Before this: Expressionism.

After this: Futurism.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.