Cubism

Cézanne had built pictures from simple forms and combined several viewpoints. From about 1907 two young painters in Paris, the Spaniard Pablo Picasso (1881 to 1973) and the Frenchman Georges Braque (1882 to 1963), pushed those ideas so far that they broke with the single viewpoint that had ruled European painting since the Renaissance (see Linear Perspective). Working side by side, they created Cubism.

In 1908 Braque showed landscapes painted at L'Estaque in southern France, with houses reduced to blocky shapes. The critic Louis Vauxcelles (who had named the Fauves) mocked their "cubical oddities," and the name Cubism followed. In the first phase, Analytic Cubism (about 1909 to 1912), objects were broken into many small, overlapping facets in browns and grays, seen from several sides at once. In Synthetic Cubism (from about 1912), the artists built pictures from larger, flatter shapes, brighter color and pasted papers: in 1912 Picasso made the first collage and Braque the first papier collé (pasted paper).

Looking closely: Juan Gris, Portrait of Pablo Picasso

Describe. A man holding a palette, his head, neck and body built of flat, angled planes in cool blue, gray and brown. An inscription at the lower right reads "Hommage à Pablo Picasso." Analyze. Juan Gris (1887 to 1927), who had moved to Paris from Madrid in 1906, organized the figure on a grid of diagonals. Each facet is lit from its own direction; we see the face partly from the front and partly from the side. Compared with the shattered, crowded facets of early Cubism, Gris's planes are crisp, large and orderly. Interpret. It is a tribute to the leader of the movement, painted in the movement's language, and it shows a younger artist making that language clearer and more structured.