Cubism
DEFINITION
An early 1900s modern art movement, Cubism focused on exploring relationships between images, perspectives and materials, and opened the door to Abstraction. Cubism began in Paris with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The term 'Cubist' was a derisive description by a critic of a geometric landscape painting done by Braque in 1908. Juan Gris, the originator of Collage, joined Picasso and Braque in 1910. Originating influences on Cubism included geometric-shaped paintings of Paul Cezanne, Post-Impressionisms??? emphasis on flat picture surfaces, and Picasso's fascination with the abstraction he perceived in African tribal masks. Aspects of Cubism were Analytical Cubism and Synthetic Cubism (see Glossary). By 1914, the Cubist movement as an organizing force officially terminated with the beginning of World War I. But its effects remain today. "Almost all later art, figurative and abstract, two and three-dimensional, random or hieratic, was conditioned in some way by these new dimensions of reality." (Phaidon) Other French artists associated with Cubism concepts were Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp and Nicholas Delauney. In America, leading Cubist painters and sculptors include Max Weber, Man Ray, Karl Knaths, Patrick Henry Bruce, Stuart Davis, Jan Matulka, Lyonel Feininger, Jacques Lipchitz, Alexander Archipenko, Louise Nevelson, Ilya Bolotowsky and Marguerite Zorach. Sources: "Phaidon Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art"; AskART database. <br><br> A revolutionary movement begun by Picasso and Braque in the early twentieth century. It employs an analytic vision based on fragmentation and multiple viewpoints.