Cubism[5] dismantled five centuries of fixed-point perspective in under a decade. Between 1907 and 1920, Pablo Picasso[15] and Georges Braque developed a way of painting that fractured objects into overlapping geometric planes, presenting multiple viewpoints within a single composition. The movement unfolded in two distinct phases. Analytic Cubism (1909-1912[5]) reduced the visible world to monochrome facets of near-abstract geometry. Synthetic Cubism (1912-1920) reversed direction, building images back up through collage, papier colle, brighter colour, and fragments of the everyday. Cubism did more than change how pictures looked. It changed what a picture could be. By incorporating real materials into the canvas, the Cubists collapsed the old barrier between art and life. Every subsequent movement of the twentieth century worked in territory that Cubism opened.
Cubism rejected the convention that a picture should reproduce how a scene looks from one fixed position. A face might show both eyes from the front while the nose juts sideways. This was an attempt to represent the full experience of seeing, which never happens from one frozen position. The result was a picture that contained time as well as space.
Renaissance painting created the illusion of depth. Cubism deliberately destroyed it. Braque and Picasso compressed foreground and background into a shallow spatial field. Light falls from contradictory directions or disappears altogether. The Cubists wanted the viewer to recognise the painting as a flat object first and a representation second.
In 1912, both Picasso and Braque began gluing real materials onto their canvases: newspaper, wallpaper, oilcloth, rope. Painting no longer had to represent the world through pigment alone. A piece of printed woodgrain wallpaper could stand in for a tabletop. Collage broke the boundary between fine art and commercial material.
Cubist paintings often depict the same modest subjects: guitars, wine glasses, newspapers, cafe tables. Picasso and Braque chose familiar objects precisely because they wanted attention directed at how the painting was constructed, not what it depicted. The still life became a laboratory for how far an object could be fragmented before it became unreadable.
Cubism generated distinct sub-movements by 1912. Orphism, led by Robert and Sonia Delaunay, pushed toward pure colour abstraction. The Section d'Or group systematised Cubist principles. Leger developed a cylindrical, machine-age variant. Each offshoot took Cubism's structural logic and applied it to different ends.
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Landmark works that shaped the movement.
Five nude women whose bodies are fractured into angular, flattened planes. The two figures on the right wear mask-like faces drawn from African and Iberian sculpture. The painting abandons consistent lighting, coherent spatial depth, and the unified viewpoint. When Braque saw it, he reportedly said it made him feel as though someone were drinking petrol and spitting fire.
The sitter dissolves into a dense lattice of semi-transparent facets in ochres and greys. Vollard's broad forehead and heavy brow are just legible. The painting surrenders nearly every conventional tool of portraiture. Yet it never becomes fully abstract. Small readable cues anchor the viewer just enough to sustain the tension between recognition and dissolution.
The point where Analytic Cubism reached its hermetic phase. A musician is barely distinguishable from surrounding space. What makes it a turning point is the introduction of stencilled letters and numerals. These typographic elements sit flatly on the surface, refusing to recede into illusionistic depth.
Generally recognised as the first true collage. A piece of mass-produced oilcloth printed with chair-caning pattern, pasted onto the canvas. A length of rope serves as the frame. Three different systems of representation coexist: painted illusion, printed imitation, and physical object.
The first papier colle. Braque cut strips from commercially printed faux-bois wallpaper and pasted them onto paper. Over and around the strips he drew with charcoal. By proving a picture could be assembled from pre-existing flat elements, Braque defined Synthetic Cubism.
Gris's approach was more systematic. He broke Picasso's head and torso into large, clearly delineated geometric planes in cool blues and greys. Where Picasso and Braque worked intuitively, Gris worked architectonically. Exhibited at the 1912 Salon des Independants.
Where Cubist structure met pure colour theory. Delaunay dispensed with recognisable objects, building the canvas from interlocking arcs of saturated colour. Apollinaire gave this branch of Cubism the name Orphism. The painting pushed Cubism toward total abstraction.
Leger built compositions from cylindrical volumes that bulge and catch light as if machined from metal. Primary colours sit alongside bare canvas and thick black outlines. The effect is muscular and mechanical, closer to the factory floor than the cafe still life. Among the first non-representational works to emerge from Cubism.
The culmination of Synthetic Cubism. Three figures assembled from flat, brightly coloured, interlocking shapes that mimic cut paper. The palette is bold: deep blues, warm oranges, blacks and whites. The painting demonstrated that Cubism could be monumental, decorative, and legible all at once.
Cezanne's late landscapes treated natural forms as underlying geometric structures. The large retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne made these late paintings widely available. Both Picasso and Braque studied the exhibition closely. Cezanne's instruction to treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone became the starting grammar of a new pictorial language.
While Cezanne provided a structural lesson, non-Western art gave Picasso permission to abandon anatomical naturalism. Visits to the Trocadero ethnographic museum introduced him to African carvings, which confirmed that powerful figurative art could operate by formal logic rather than optical imitation. This gave Cubism its willingness to distort, flatten, and reassemble the figure.
Between 1908 and 1914, Picasso and Braque worked so closely that their paintings became almost indistinguishable. They visited each other's studios daily, adopted the same restricted palette, and refused to sign the front of their canvases, suppressing individual authorship in favour of shared investigation.
By 1911 the private laboratory had generated a public phenomenon. Gleizes and Metzinger published Du Cubisme in 1912. The Section d'Or exhibition displayed over two hundred Cubist works. Cubism spread across Europe: Futurism in Italy, Suprematism in Russia, Vorticism in England all absorbed Cubist principles.
“Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music and whatnot have been related to Cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense.”
“The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress.”
“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”
“The painter thinks in terms of form and colour. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact.”
22 artists.
The foundational scholarly study with close formal readings of individual works.
Places the movement within its broader social and intellectual context.
Written by the dealer who represented Picasso and Braque. An insider's account.
The first published defence of Cubism, by the poet who named Orphism.
Cubism editorial draws on the following published scholarship.
Editorial overseen by Solis Prints. Sources verified 2026-05-30. Click a source for details, or hover over [N] in the page above to preview.
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