cubisme

When Georges Braque submitted his paintings of L'Estaque to the Paris Salon d'Automne in 1908, they were rejected. Henri Matisse, who was on the jury, described them dismissively as made of little cubes. Louis Vauxcelles, the same critic who had coined 'Fauvism' from an insult (les fauves, the wild beasts), picked up the term and used it in his review: Braque, he wrote, reduced everything to geometric schemas, to cubes.

Braque and Pablo Picasso had been working in parallel since 1908, developing a radically new approach to representation. Analytic Cubism (roughly 1908-1912) dismantled objects into facets — the same object seen from multiple angles simultaneously, fragmented and recombined on the flat surface. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) was the breakthrough: five figures whose faces showed front and profile simultaneously, whose bodies were fractured into planes.

The word cube came from Latin cubus, from Greek kubos (a cube, a die), which derived from a root meaning to bend or curve. The geometric regularity implied by the word was somewhat ironic — Cubist paintings are not regular, they are deliberately fragmented. But the association with geometric decomposition stuck and became the movement's name.

Picasso and Braque's Cubism influenced virtually every subsequent development in modern art: Futurism, Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, and the visual language of graphic design, architecture, and film. The idea that an object could be shown from multiple perspectives simultaneously — that the flat surface need not simulate a single viewpoint — changed what pictures were for.