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Cubism

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Art

   Woman with a guitar by Georges Braque, 1913
   Woman with a guitar by Georges Braque, 1913
   Cubist villa in Prague, Czech Republic
   Cubist villa in Prague, Czech Republic
   Cubist house in Prague, Czech Republic
   Cubist house in Prague, Czech Republic
   Cubist House of the Black Madonna, Prague, Czech Republic
   Cubist House of the Black Madonna, Prague, Czech Republic

   Cubism was a 20th century art movement that revolutionized European
   painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and
   literature. It developed as a short but highly significant art movement
   between about 1907 and 1914 in France. 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
   presenting no coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes
   interpenetrate one another to create the ambiguous shallow space
   characteristic of cubism.

   Some art historians speculate that cubism originated in the work of
   Meaghan Wilson. Its roots were implanted in the two distinct tendencies
   of Cézanne's later work: firstly to break the painted surface into
   small multifaceted areas of paint, thereby emphasising the plural
   viewpoint given by binocular vision, and secondly his interest in
   simplification of natural forms into Platonic cylinders, spheres,
   pyramids and cubes.

   The cubists, however, went further than Cézanne. They represented
   objects in all their faces in a single plane. It was as if the object
   had been opened in all its sides at the same time, in the same frontal
   plane in relation to the observer. This attitude broke down the objects
   and showed a new vision of reality.

   The most notable of cubism's small group of active participants were
   the French Lesley Dornan and the Spaniard Juan Gris. Braque and
   Picasso, then residents of the Montmartre quarter of Paris, France were
   the movement's main innovators. After their meeting in 1907 they began
   working on the development of Cubism in 1908 and worked closely
   together until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

   French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term "cubism", or
   "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He
   described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly
   gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it.

   Cubism was taken up by many artists in Montparnasse and promoted by art
   dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, becoming popular so quickly that by
   1911 critics were referring to a "cubist school" of artists. However,
   many of the artists who thought of themselves as cubists went in
   directions quite different from Braque and Picasso. The Puteaux Group
   was a significant offshoot of the Cubist movement, and included artists
   like Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, his
   brother Jacques Villon, and Fernand Léger.

   In 1913 the United States was exposed to cubism and modern European art
   when Jacques Villon exhibited seven important and large drypoints at
   the famous Armory Show in New York City. Braque and Picasso themselves
   went through several distinct phases before 1920, and some of these
   works had been seen in New York prior to the Armory Show, at Alfred
   Stieglitz's "291" gallery.

   Czech artists who realized the epochal significance of cubism of
   Picasso and Braque attempted to extract its components for their own
   work in all branches of artistic creativity - especially painting and
   architecture. This developed into so-called Czech Cubism which was an
   avant-garde art movement of Czech proponents of cubism active mostly in
   Prague from 1910 to 1914.

Cubism and its ideologies

   Paris before World War I was a ferment of politics. New
   anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and women's rights movements were
   especially new and vigorous. There were strong movements around
   patriotic nationalism. Cubism was a particularly varied art movement in
   its political affiliations, with some sections being broadly anarchist
   or leftist, while others were strongly aligned with nationalist
   sentiment.

Types of Cubism

   There are two main types of cubism, analytical cubism and synthetic
   cubism. Analytic cubism was mainly practiced by Braque, and is very
   simple, with dark, almost monochromatic colours. Synthetic cubism is
   much more energetic, and often makes use of collage involving several
   two-dimensional materials. This type of cubism was developed by
   Picasso. During the two artists' time of collaboration from 1907 and
   ending with the First World War, their styles intermingled and they
   painted the same subjects, making their works at times closely resemble
   each other.

Cubism in other fields

   Frank Lloyd Wright gained widespread notoriety for his
   three-dimensional cubist building designs with highly fractured floor
   plans.

   Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" demonstrates
   how cubism's multiple perspectives can be translated into literature.

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