CUBISM

CUBISM

Cubism was the single most important departure in the twentieth-century new art of the West. A contemporary critic first coined the term to describe the paintings of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963). Cubism emerged in the heady turn-of-the-century cultural climate that also fostered new physics, philosophies that questioned the adequacy of rationality, psychoanalysis, atonality in music, and growing sensitivities to non-Western culture. Each of this developments in a very real sense led to a refocusing of perspective in painting, as Picasso and Braque rejected the five hundred old idea of painting as constituting a window looking onto the depiction of the real world and rather saw painting as an autonomous realm of art itself with no purpose beyond itself. Echoing the art of Egypt, medieval primitives and Africa, Picasso and Braque represented only two dimensions in painting. The two artists made little or no effort to go beyond the flatness of the surface itself. They, attempted to include on a single surface as many angles, shapes or views of the painted object as possible and transformed “reality” in an experience constructed from multiple perceptions (...) .