Erik's Graphic Art History: Cubism

Cubism has had a major role in my interest in art starting from a very young age. I come from a family of engineers and have a mother who studied art history herself so the combination of geometric patterns and shapes mixed into artwork has always fascinated me. Next to Monet and Van Gough, Picasso is one of my favorite artists. It was his work that started the cubist movement which challenged the organic design style of the Renaissance that had been prevalent for the last four hundred years. What influenced Picasso to begin to paint in this style was the geometry that was seen in African and Iberian sculpture, and fabrics. Cubism allowed designers challenged space and human emotion thru a whole new lens, by separating figures into geometrical frames the cubist artwork had multiple shapes that were visible from different angles.

In 1910 Picasso took cubism to a new level with fellow artist Georges Braque, the two created analytical cubism. Picasso and Braque made it an intention to look at the artwork from multiple viewpoints and manipulate the artwork so that the shapes would appear from multiple viewpoints. The differences between cubism and analytical cubism are subtle but prominent; analytical cubism makes manipulating multiple viewpoints deliberate while it is simply a byproduct in cubism. Analytical cubism lasted until 1912 when Picasso and Braque introduced collage work into their design. Texture became a huge part of cubism with the influence of collage work as the pieces of collage work could signify certain objects while the painting itself could provide the color and background shapes as needed. Typography and letterforms often came into play in the new evolved Cubism, they were used to emphasize meaning more often than not.

In 1913 the art movement took a much simpler turn with synthetic cubism. This style focused more around characteristics and visuals of artwork rather than putting meaning to paper. Artwork such as Juan Gris’s Fruit Bowl 1916 is such an example of this. Gris became a very important figure in synthetic cubism; his work acting as a middle ground to geometric patterns and perception. Around this time cubism was taken away from the sharpness of past cubist’s and centered around shapes with curvature such as cones and spheres. Fernand Legar and Paul Cezanne attested to this style by advising artists to “treat nature in terms of the cylindrical, and the sphere and the cone” (Cezanne).

Cubism was the first of many new art styles to crop up around the twentieth century due to new rises in technology. It was because of this movement that artists started connecting geometric patterns to art that paved the way for other greatly impactful styles such as futurism, dada, surrealism, and expressionism.