Eiffel Tower
Still Life
Two Women |
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Cubism
Many schools of painting have been influential,
but perhaps none more so than that of Cubism.
Cubism is movement in art that was created by
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1907, in
which the subject matter was portrayed by geometric
forms without realistic detail, stressing abstract
at the expense of other pictorial elements.
Picasso and Braque were inspired by African
sculpture, French painters Paul Cezanne and
Georges Seurat, and Fauvism. They initiated
the movement after following the advice of Cezanne
who, in 1904, said artists should treat nature
“in terms of the cylinder, the sphere,
and the cone.”
The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional
surface of the picture, rejecting the traditional
techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling,
and chiaroscuro. They refuted time-honored theories
of art as the imitation of nature. Cubist painters
were not bound to copying form, texture, color,
and space; instead, they presented a new reality
in paintings that depicted radically fragmented
objects, whose several sides were seen simultaneously.
Between 1913 and 1918, Diego Rivera devoted
himself almost entirely to the Cubist style
of painting. He painted many works during his
time among the French elite which included:
- Two Women on a Balcony, 1914
- Landscape Majorca, 1914
- Portrait of Ramon Gomez, 1915
- Eiffel Tower, 1916
- Still Life, 1917
- The Telegraph Pole, 1917
The key concept of Cubism is that the essence
of an object can only be captured by showing
it from multiple points of view simultaneously.
Cubism had run its course by the end of World
War I, but among the movements directly influenced
by it were:
- Orphism
- Purism
- Precisionism
- Futurism
- Constructivism
- Expressionism (to some degree)
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