Cubism

Cubism is a large art movement that stemmed from the post-impressionism movement. Cubism is thought to have been developed mainly in 1907-1908 by Pablo Picasso. Picasso believed that our perspective on any object was just that – one perspective. His theory was to create paintings from every possible perspective. The resulting art meant subjects were formed of different perspective sections, often at jagged geometric shapes. Renowned art critic of the time Louis Vauxcelles described Georges Braque’s exhibition paintings as ‘reducing everything to geometric outlines, to cubes’, coining the name of the movement.

Cubism was influenced by some of Cezanne's works. Cezanne was a popular post-impressionist who in later works had begun to experiment with different points of view, often unorthodox and a rebellion against neo-classical perspective recording.

Cubism saw two different movements within; analytical cubism and later synthetic cubism. Analytical cubism was the original development of the genre, taking apart the subject matter and turning the different perspectives into different geometric shapes merging at angles from each other, this phase of the movement wound down around 1912, where synthetic cubism took over.

Synthetic cubism incorporated the same idea of using alternative perspectives in one piece, however leant more toward the collage layout of simple shapes, brighter colours and drawn or painted marks to connect the mixed media.