Painting

Cubism

Picasso showed a face from three angles at once — and destroyed 500 years of perspective.

FR  —  Radical fragmentation of form showing multiple viewpoints simultaneously

Cubism, developed by Picasso and Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914, is arguably the most radical transformation of Western pictorial convention since the Renaissance. Rather than depicting a single, unified viewpoint, Cubism fragments objects and figures into geometric planes that show multiple angles simultaneously — as if you were walking around the subject and seeing all sides at once, then collapsing them onto a flat surface. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is the proto-Cubist breakthrough; the Analytical Cubism of 1909–12 reduced the world to shattered, interlocking facets in monochrome; Synthetic Cubism (from 1912) introduced collage, introducing real materials — newspaper, wallpaper, sand — into the painted surface. Cubism's influence was vast: it directly generated Futurism, Constructivism, De Stijl, and abstraction itself.

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