c. 1907–1920

Cubism

In 1907, in his studio in Montmartre, Pablo Picasso completed a painting that disturbed even his friends. Soon afterwards, together with Georges Braque, he began an experiment that suspended rules of painting centuries old. Cubism took objects apart, showed them from several sides at once and became the starting point for almost every avant-garde of the twentieth century.

A picture no one was meant to see

The studio was in the Bateau-Lavoir, a ramshackle wooden building in Montmartre. There, in 1907, Pablo Picasso worked for months on a large canvas: five naked women, angular, built from sharp planes, two of the faces like masks. The title Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was given later by the critic André Salmon; Picasso himself referred to it as his “brothel”, an allusion to a street in Barcelona.

Friends who saw it reacted with bafflement or dismay. It was not shown publicly until 1916. In 1939 it entered the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it is still regarded as one of the founding documents of modern art. It is not yet a Cubist picture in the strict sense, but it breaks the rule that a picture must show a unified space from a single viewpoint.

Cézanne and the masks

Two impulses came together in 1907. One was Paul Cézanne, who had died the year before and was now honoured with a major memorial exhibition at the Salon d’Automne. In 1904 he had written to the painter Émile Bernard that one should treat nature “by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone”. His landscapes built pictorial space from planes of colour rather than perspective.

The other came from the ethnographic collections of Paris. Picasso, Matisse and Derain saw masks and sculptures from Africa and Oceania that had reached Europe through colonial channels. For the avant-garde they became a counter-image to the academic tradition, “primitive” art, as it was then called. Scholarship today views this relationship more critically: the artists were interested in forms, hardly at all in origins, meanings or the people who had made the objects.

Two mountaineers roped together

Georges Braque, originally a Fauve, was at first unsettled by the Demoiselles. In the summer of 1908 he painted at L’Estaque near Marseille, where Cézanne had also worked, rendering houses and trees as simple, block-like volumes. The jury of the Salon d’Automne rejected the pictures. In November 1908 the young German dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler showed them in his gallery. The critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote of “cubes”, and the name stuck.

Over the following years, Picasso and Braque worked together more closely than perhaps any two artists before them. They saw each other almost daily, spent summers together at Céret and Sorgues, and for a time signed their pictures only on the back. Braque is said to have later compared their partnership to two mountaineers roped together.

Analytic: taking things apart

From around 1909, the two dissolved their subjects further and further. A guitar, a glass or a face appears as many small facets, seen from different sides and merging into one another. Colour is reduced to browns, ochres and greys so that nothing distracts from form. This is known as Analytic Cubism.

The result is no longer a likeness but an investigation: how much information does a picture need for us to recognise an object? To keep the pictures legible, Picasso and Braque planted clues, a moustache, the bowl of a pipe, and from 1911 also stencilled letters. Picasso’s Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler of 1910 shows the principle: his dealer’s face dissolves into a crystalline lattice yet remains recognisable.

Synthetic: paper, newspaper, oilcloth

In 1912 came a second step, equally momentous. In the spring, Picasso glued a piece of oilcloth printed with chair caning onto an oval still life and framed it with real rope: Still Life with Chair Caning is regarded as the first collage in the history of art. In September, in Sorgues, Braque pasted strips of wood-grain wallpaper into a drawing, the first papier collé.

This reversed the direction. Instead of taking an object apart, the artists assembled pictures from ready-made elements: newspaper cuttings, sheet music, labels, sand mixed into the paint. Colours became stronger again, forms larger and flatter. Synthetic Cubism brought reality itself into the picture while asking what a picture actually is.

The Salon Cubists and the market

Picasso and Braque avoided the large Salons and showed almost exclusively with Kahnweiler, who gave them exclusive contracts in 1912. The wider public therefore came to know Cubism through others. In 1911 Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, Henri Le Fauconnier and Robert Delaunay exhibited in Room 41 of the Salon des Indépendants and caused a scandal. In 1912 Gleizes and Metzinger published the movement’s first theory, Du Cubisme. That same year the Section d’Or exhibition displayed the movement’s variety, and in 1913 Guillaume Apollinaire’s book Les Peintres cubistes appeared.

Juan Gris developed a lucid, almost mathematical Cubism. Léger linked its formal language to machines and the modern city. Robert and Sonia Delaunay brought back luminous colour, which Apollinaire called Orphism.

The war tears the group apart

The First World War ended the partnership abruptly. Braque was called up and severely wounded in the head in 1915. Kahnweiler was German, and the French state seized his entire stock, auctioning it between 1921 and 1923 at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, hundreds of works by Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger. From around 1917, Picasso also turned to a classicising manner, without abandoning Cubism altogether.

Worldwide impact

Hardly any movement spread so quickly or so far. In New York, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) caused a scandal at the 1913 Armory Show. The Italian Futurists adopted the fragmentation of form to depict movement and speed. In Russia the path led via Cubo-Futurism to Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square of 1915, in the Netherlands to De Stijl. In 1918 Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant responded with their manifesto Après le cubisme. Prague even developed a Cubist architecture, such as Josef Gočár’s House of the Black Madonna of 1912.

Why it still matters

Cubism freed painting from the obligation to show the world as a single eye sees it from a fixed point. With collage, it also invented a method without which Dada, Pop Art and much of contemporary art would be unthinkable. Every picture made of found objects, quotations and fragments stands in its tradition.