Cubism: many views at once

1Breaking the single viewpoint

For 500 years, most European painters had shown the world as one person sees it from one spot, like a photograph. Even the Impressionists kept that rule. In Paris, from 1907, two young painters broke it. Why not show an object from the front, the side and the top at the same time, since we know all those sides exist? The result, Cubism, changed art for good. Much of modern painting, sculpture, architecture and graphic design, from posters to logos, owes something to it.

2Key vocabulary

• Viewpoint: the position from which something is seen.
• Plane (facet): a flat surface with straight edges, like one face of a cut stone.
• Analytic Cubism: the early phase (about 1909 to 1912), in which objects are taken apart into many small facets.
• Synthetic Cubism: the later phase (from about 1912), in which pictures are built up from fewer, larger, flatter shapes.
• Collage: a picture made partly by gluing real materials, such as newspaper or printed paper, onto the surface.

3Where it came from

• Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) built his landscapes and still lifes from blocks of colour and showed objects from slightly different angles in one picture. In a letter of 1904 he advised treating nature through the cylinder, the sphere and the cone. A large show of his work in Paris in 1907 impressed the young painters.
• African sculpture: artists in Paris saw masks and figures from West and Central Africa in museums and shops; Picasso visited the ethnographic museum at the Trocadéro in 1907. The African sculptors had simplified the face and body into bold, geometric forms. Remember that many of these objects reached Europe through colonial conquest and trade. They were made by skilled artists, for religious and social purposes of their own, which the Paris painters rarely understood.
• Photography had taken over the job of recording exactly how things look, leaving painters free to try something else.

4Picasso and Braque

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), from Spain, and Georges Braque (1882–1963), from France, worked side by side in Paris from 1908 to 1914, so closely that Braque said they were like two mountaineers roped together. In 1908 a critic, Louis Vauxcelles, wrote that Braque reduced everything to “cubes”, and the name Cubism followed.

Picasso's and Braque's works are still protected by copyright, so this lesson describes them in words only. You can find them in library books and on the websites of the museums named below.

• Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Picasso, 1907, The Museum of Modern Art, New York): five large female figures made of sharp, angular planes. The faces of the two on the right look like masks. The space is squashed flat and the bodies seem seen from several sides at once. It is often called the starting point of Cubism.
• Houses at L'Estaque (Braque, 1908, Kunstmuseum Bern): houses and trees reduced to simple blocks in ochre and green, piled up the canvas, with no single direction of light.
• Violin and Palette (Braque, 1909, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York): a violin and sheet music broken into facets in browns and greys, with one surprising detail at the top: a nail with its shadow, painted to look completely real.
• Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Picasso, 1910, Art Institute of Chicago): a portrait of their art dealer, dissolved into small grey and brown facets; his face and hands can just be made out.
• Still Life with Chair Caning (Picasso, 1912, Musée national Picasso-Paris): an oval still life with a real piece of printed oilcloth glued on and a real rope as its frame, one of the first Cubist collages. The same year Braque began gluing strips of printed wood-grain paper onto his drawings.
• Guernica (Picasso, 1937, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid): a huge black, white and grey painting of the bombing of a Spanish town, which uses broken Cubist forms to show terror and grief.

5Features of Cubism

• Several viewpoints at once: front, side and top combined in one image.
• Geometric planes and facets instead of smooth, rounded forms.
• Flattened, shallow space; no single vanishing point and no single light source.
• Colour: muted browns, greys and greens in Analytic Cubism, so attention stays on form; brighter, flatter colour and patterns in Synthetic Cubism.
• Everyday subjects: still lifes of guitars, bottles, glasses and newspapers; portraits; café tables.
• Lettering and collage: words, numbers and real pasted materials.

Worked example: a Cubist cup

1. Draw a cup seen from the side: straight sides, a flat base, a handle.
2. Draw the same cup seen from above: the rim is a full circle.
3. Combine them: keep the side view, but show the rim as a full circle on top, as if tipped towards you.
4. Flatten the handle into a straight-edged shape.
5. Cut the whole object with a few straight lines and shade each piece a different value, so it becomes a set of flat planes.

The drawing no longer copies what one eye sees; it shows what we know about the cup.

6Other Cubists

Juan Gris (1887–1927), from Spain, worked in Paris near Picasso. His Cubism is crisper and more colourful, with carefully planned geometry. Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) and Jean Metzinger wrote the first book about Cubism, Du “Cubisme”, in 1912.

7Look closely

Juan Gris painted this portrait of Picasso in 1912 and wrote “Hommage à Pablo Picasso” on it: a tribute to the painter he learned from. Picasso holds a palette. His face is split into planes of light and shadow, and a grid of diagonal lines runs across the whole picture, so the figure and the background seem cut from the same material. The colours are cool blues, greys and browns.

Three years later Gris had moved into Synthetic Cubism. In this still life the objects are built from large, flat, clearly coloured pieces: a red and green checked tablecloth, a fruit bowl with grapes, a bottle, glasses and a newspaper whose title, Le Journal, is spelled out in letters. Compare it with the portrait: the colours are brighter and the shapes bigger and simpler.

8Africa and modern art

The story did not stop in Paris. In the middle of the 1900s, African artists built their own modern art, using what they wanted from Europe without copying it. The Nigerian painter and sculptor Ben Enwonwu (1917–1994) joined Igbo and Benin traditions with his training in London. Students of the Zaria Art Society in Nigeria, from 1958, followed Uche Okeke's idea of “natural synthesis”: blending local traditions, such as uli line drawing, with modern methods. In Sudan, Ibrahim El-Salahi (born 1930) combined Arabic calligraphy with African forms. In Rwanda today, contemporary artists exhibit at art centres in Kigali such as the Inema Arts Center, and many draw on traditions such as imigongo geometry.

Practice