Cubism

An artistic style invented in Paris during the first decade of the 20th century, Cubism was soon adopted by an international network of artists who sought to create a new art for a new century. Cubists developed an innovative visual vocabulary that included angular lines, geometric planes, compressed space, and non-naturalistic colors. While traditional Western artists had typically used a single, stable perspective in their works, Cubists often incorporated multiple perspectives into individual compositions. They broke with artistic tradition in other ways, too: they drew inspiration from African and Oceanic sculpture, and they introduced everyday materials such as newspapers into their art.Cubism originated with the artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, whose close artistic exchange propelled the style from 1907 to 1914. After the critic Louis Vauxcelles dismissed landscapes that Braque had painted in 1908 as consisting of “cubes,” the term was embraced by a diverse array of artists and writers in the French capital and beyond. Although Cubists differed in terms of their approaches, they shared a commitment to producing art that was, as the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in The Cubist Painters (1913), “entirely new.”