Cubist Art Analysis

During the early 20th century a new art style emerged. Being the first abstract style of modern art, and which term “Cubism” now describes the revolutionary style of painting. Pablo Picassso and Georges Braques developed Cubism in Paris during the period of 1907 and 1914. This new style was initially influenced by the geometric motifs in the landscape compositions of the Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne. This revolutionary style marked the end of the Renaissance dominated era, and the beginning of the modern art. The Cubist art movement broke from centuries of tradition in their painting by rejecting the single viewpoint. Instead they used an analytical system in which three-dimensional subjects were fragmented and redefined from several

Perfective had been used since the Early Renaissance, was basically a geometric formula that solved the problem of how to draw three-dimensional objects in a two dimensional surface. Cezanne was not interested on creating depth in his paintings. He felt that the illusion of perspective denied the fact that a painting is a flat two-dimensional object. He preferred to flatten the space in his paintings to place more emphasis on their surface that way he could stress the difference between a painting and reality. He saw painting in a more abstract terms as the construction and arrangement of colors on a two dimensional surface. The flat abstract approached by the Cubists in their early paintings, such as Picasso’s “Factory at Horta de Ebbo” (1909) and Braques’s “Viaduct at

They draw on the expressive energy of other cultures, such as African art. Although their interest was not on religious or social symbolism they had to value them superficially for their expressive style. The French post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin was the first to use this inspiration to cross-reference art from different cultures. Gauguin paintings were influenced by native culture of Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands where he spent his final years.

Cubism was classified in two phases. The fist phase is known as the “Analytical Cubism” started 1907 and lasted until 1912. It was the most intellectual and uncompromising stage of the Cubism movement. During this stage the artist turned away from realistic modeling of figures and moved towards a system of representing bodies in space that employed small, tilted planes, set in a shallow space. Over time Cubism changed towards a more open form. Piercing the bodies of the figures, letting space flow trough them, blending the background into the foreground, and using a limited palette of