Pioneered by Picasso and Braque,
Cubism has been described as
the first avant-garde art movement of the 20th century. With inspiration from African and Native American art and sculpture, its practitioners deconstructed European conventions of viewpoint, form, perspective to create
flattened, fragmented, and revolutionary images.
Picasso’s celebrated painting
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is typically regarded as the original cubist work, with its radical fracturing of objects and figures into distinct areas, corresponding to
multiple different viewpoints. Cubism thereafter developed two distinct trends:
Analytical Cubism, which continued to interweave perspectival planes in muted blacks, greys and ochre, and later
Synthetic Cubism, characterised by simpler shapes, brighter colors, and collage elements such as newspaper.
This book presents the prime protagonists of Cubism, with work from artists including
Pablo Picasso,
Georges Braque,
Fernand Léger,
Juan Gris,
Albert Gleizes, and
Robert Delaunay.
