Cubism is an art movement that emerged in 1907-1908, that profoundly impacted modern art through the 20th century. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were the joint inventors this new style of art, in which subjects were broken down into their various components and portrayed from multiple perspectives simultaneously. Art critic, Louis Vauxcelles branded Braque's paintings as reduced to "geometric outlines, to cubes," thus giving a name to the new art movement. Cubism's first legs are thought to be offshoots of the later work of Paul Cézanne, and the first piece to be stamped as cubist is Picass … (read more)

Cubism is an art movement that emerged in 1907-1908, that profoundly impacted modern art through the 20th century. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were the joint inventors this new style of art, in which subjects were broken down into their various components and portrayed from multiple perspectives simultaneously. Art critic, Louis Vauxcelles branded Braque's paintings as reduced to "geometric outlines, to cubes," thus giving a name to the new art movement. Cubism's first legs are thought to be offshoots of the later work of Paul Cézanne, and the first piece to be stamped as cubist is Picasso's 1907 painting, Demoiselles D'Avignon, angularly portraying five nude female prostitutes in Barcelon'as Avinyó street.

In the early movement, Picasso's and Braque's works used a new way of deconstructing the parts of the subject and reconstructing the parts in an abstracted format. As Picasso said, "A head is a matter of eyes, nose, mouth, which can be distributed in any way you like. The head remains a head." The cubists thus pursued this realm of exploration and development, fragmenting and analyzing their subjects, and rebuilding them to achieve increasingly abstracted forms. This developmental period, from approximately 1909-1912, is often referred to as analytical cubism, in which the movement was characterized by muted, often monochrome color palette, to maintain the viewer's focus on the structure.

The cubist phase after 1912, often referred to as synthetic cubism, was defined by a greater emphasis on the combination, or composite synthesis, of the portrayed forms. The artist, Juan Gris, played a key role in synthetic cubism. During this period, in reaction to the increasing abstraction, the cubists began to incorporate words, real objects, and foreign textures into their work, eventually moving toward three-dimensional construction. This marked the introduction of collage as an element in fine art. Cubism was the jumping-off point for subsequent abstract art movements as Constructivism and Neo-Plasticism. The Cubist aesthetic can even be seen in the buildings of architect, Le Corbusier, through the 1920's.

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