Cubism

File:Braque.woman.400pix.jpg

Woman with a guitar by Georges Braque, 1913

Cubist house in Prague

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form — instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles presenting no coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the ambiguous shallow space characteristic of cubism.Bold textItalic textRACHEL AND CASS ARE THE S**T=] I LOVE CASS. IM GUNNA MARRY HER.

Leading artists of the movement include Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque and Juan Gris.

With its roots in the two distinct tendencies of Cézanne's later work firstly to break the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of paint thereby emphasising the plural viewpoint given by binocular vision, and secondly his interest in simplification of natural forms into Platonic cylinders, spheres, pyramids and cubes, Cubism developed as a short but highly significant artistic movement between about 1907 and 1914, in France. The most notable of its small group of active participants were the French Georges Braque, and the Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. Braque and Picasso, then residents of the Montmartre quarter of Paris, France were perhaps the movement's main innovators. After their meeting in 1907 they began working on the development of Cubism in 1908, and worked closely together until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It is believed by many that the work of Cézanne may have sparked the movement. French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term "cubism", or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it.

Cubism taken up by many artists in Montparnasse and promoted by art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, becoming popular so quickly that by 1911 critics were referring to a "cubist school" of artists. However, many of the artists who thought of themselves as cubists went in directions quite different from Braque and Picasso. The Puteaux Group was a significant offshoot of the Cubist movement, and included artists like Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, his brother Jacques Villon, and Fernand Léger.

In 1913 the United States was exposed to Cubism and modern European art when Jacques Villon exhibited seven important and large drypoints at the famous Armory Show in New York City. Braque and Picasso themselves went through several distinct phases before 1920, and some of these works had been seen in New York prior to the Armory Show, at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery.

Cubism and its ideologies

Paris before World War II was a ferment of politics and movements. New anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and women's rights movements were especially new and vigorous. There were strong movements around patriotic nationalism. Cubism was a particularly varied art movement in its political affiliations, with some sections being broadly anarchist or leftist, while others were strongly aligned with nationalist sentiment. rachel is effing awesome. so is cass. and she knowsit.

Cubism in literature

Cubism also was adapted into literature, especially poetry, by the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Gertrude Stein and Pierre Reverdy. Such poets adopted a number of techniques which could be classed as close to Analytic Cubism (destruction of grammar, strange or absent punctuation, free verse, etc.) and also some others close to Synthetic Cubism, especially in the case of Guillaume Apollinaire (fusion of poetry and drawing in caligrammes; collages involving postcards, letters and the like; use of musical notation, etc.) It should be noted that Cubist poetry frequently overlaps with Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism or even more diverse movements such as Vicente Huidobro's Creacionismo.

Cubism in other fields

Bugatti Type 37 engine showing cubist influences

While mostly associated with art and literature, cubism also found its way into the automobile industry, reflected in the engine designs of at least one famous automaker. Ettore Bugatti, founder of the Bugatti marque of automobiles was regarded as a cubist, having himself attended cubist gatherings. Cubism can clearly be seen in the form of Bugatti engines. The American architect Paul Rudolph gained widespread notoriety for his three-dimensional cubist building designs with highly fractured floor plans.

Further reading

• John Cauman (2001). Inheriting Cubism: The Impact of Cubism on American Art, 1909-1936. New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries. ISBN 0-9705723-4-4.

External links

• On-Line Picasso Project
• Cubism and the Cubist Movement 1907 onwards
• The Cubist Rupture Artistic comments in MundoArta