Cubism is a style of painting invented in Paris around 1907 and 1908 by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. A Cubist painter breaks an object into flat, angular facets and shows several sides of it at once.
On such a canvas, the round rim of a glass sits next to its straight side, and a face can show both eyes from the front while the nose is seen in profile.
For centuries, a painting was built like a view through a window. The artist chose one spot, and everything on the canvas was arranged as it would look from there. The habit went back to the Renaissance, when Italian painters worked out the rules of perspective, and Cubism broke it.
A Cubist painter behaves instead as if he had walked all around the table. His picture records what he knows about a guitar or a face, which is more than a single glance can take in.
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The public discovered this new way of painting without its two inventors. In the spring of 1911, the Salon des Indépendants, a large open exhibition held every year in Paris, gave a room to Cubist paintings. It was Room 41, and not a single work by Picasso or Braque hung on its walls.
The label itself was not theirs either. A hostile critic had coined it three years earlier, and visitors now saw it attached to five other artists, among them Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger. For most of the public, those five were Cubism.
Cézanne's cylinders and an African mask
Picasso and Braque had not started from nothing…
What You'll Discover
What the critic saw in Braque's landscapes.
How a Cubist painter takes a violin apart.
What Braque brought from his family's trade.
What the painters of Room 41 made of it.
What the war did to the partnership.