CUBISM

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as “Analytic Cubism”, was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1907 and 1911 in France [Please click on No. PA008 “Architect” by Diego Rivera.]

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, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism’s distinct characteristics.

Also, please examine No. PA012 Picasso’s “Girl Looking at Self in Mirror” 1932. Each cubist work attempts to view the image simultaneously, rather than sequentially in time. This may sound confusing, but one look will show you how the artists approach the visual problem of time. [Source Wikipedia]