Cubism

About

Around 1907–08 Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, working in Paris, began to dismantle the single fixed viewpoint that European painting had relied on since the Renaissance. Taking cues from Paul Cézanne's late landscapes and from African and Iberian sculpture, they built pictures from overlapping planes, so that a guitar, a bottle or a face could be shown from several angles together. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) prepared the ground.

In the Analytic phase, roughly 1909–12, colour shrank to browns, greys and ochres and forms splintered almost past reading. Then came collage: Picasso glued printed oilcloth into Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), and Braque pasted imitation wood-grain paper into drawings that autumn. This Synthetic phase used brighter, flatter shapes and stencilled letters. Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger and the sculptor Alexander Archipenko extended the language, which went on to feed Futurism, Constructivism and much early abstraction.