Cubism

• 1. Introduction

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  Cubism arrived in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century and changed the way humans look at objects forever. Before it, painters showed you a chair from one angle at one moment in time. After it, the chair could show you all its sides at once, past and present fused into a single image on a flat surface. The questions this raises are not merely technical. They cut to the heart of perception itself: what does it mean to truly see something? And how did a movement born in the studios of Montmartre become, in the words of critic John Berger, a revolution as great as that of the early Renaissance? The answers reach from a retrospective exhibition of Paul Cézanne's paintings at the Salon d'Automne in 1904, to a fully furnished model house displayed at a Paris salon in 1912, to hexagonal windows on buildings in Prague, to ballet costumes, poetry, and fashion on two continents.

• 2. Breaking the Single View

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  Paul Cézanne pointed the way before the Cubists had a name. His late paintings broke painted surfaces into small multifaceted areas, emphasizing the plural viewpoint that human binocular vision naturally produces. He also simplified natural forms into cylinders, spheres, and cones. A retrospective of his work was held at the Salon d'Automne in 1904, and further paintings were shown at the 1905 and 1906 editions of the same salon. When Cézanne died in 1907, two commemorative retrospectives followed. The Cubists absorbed all of it.

  Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse met through Gertrude Stein around 1906, when both were drawn to primitivism, Iberian sculpture, and African tribal masks. Their encounter sparked a rivalry that pushed each man harder. By 1907 Picasso's paintings carried unmistakable marks of Greek, Iberian, and African influence, and he produced Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Art historian Douglas Cooper described it as a major first step toward Cubism but not yet Cubist in itself, because its expressionist energy ran contrary to the detached, realistic spirit that Cubism would develop. He still called it the logical starting point, because in it Picasso violently overturned established conventions.

  In 1908, the critic Louis Vauxcelles reviewed Georges Braque's show at Kahnweiler's gallery and described Braque as a daring man who despised form, reducing everything, places and figures and houses, to geometric schemas, to cubes. Vauxcelles also recounted how Matisse told him that Braque had submitted a painting made of little cubes to the 1908 Salon d'Automne. Braque had been painting the viaduct at l'Estaque and produced three canvases marked by simplified form and deconstructed perspective. In a Gil Blas review dated the 25th of March 1909, Vauxcelles called them bizarreries cubiques, cubic oddities. The label stuck.

• 3. Two Camps, One Name

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  By 1911, a fault line had opened inside the movement. On one side stood Picasso and Braque, working in relative privacy with the backing of a single art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. He guaranteed them an annual income in exchange for the exclusive right to buy their works, selling only to a small circle of collectors. Picasso worked in Montmartre until 1912; Braque and Gris remained there through the First World War.

  On the other side stood what historians would call the Salon Cubists: Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Fernand Léger. They met regularly at Le Fauconnier's studio near the boulevard du Montparnasse. Writers including Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon joined their evening gatherings. These artists built their reputations by exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, both major non-academic venues in Paris, where public response mattered and communication with a broad audience was unavoidable.

  The first organized group exhibition by Cubists took place at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1911, in a room designated Salle 41. It showed work by Metzinger, Gleizes, Léger, Delaunay, and Le Fauconnier. Picasso and Braque exhibited nothing. Among the works on view was Robert Delaunay's Eiffel Tower, now held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The show brought Cubism before the general public for the first time and triggered the first major public controversy around the movement.

• 4. Scandal and Theory

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  The Cubist contribution to the 1912 Salon d'Automne produced a political crisis. The politician Jean Pierre Philippe Lampué's indignation made the front page of Le Journal on the 5th of October 1912. The row spread to the Municipal Council of Paris and triggered a debate in the Chambre des Députés about using public funds to host such art in government-owned buildings such as the Grand Palais. The Socialist deputy Marcel Sembat defended the Cubists.

  It was against this background of public anger that Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote Du "Cubisme", published by Eugène Figuière in 1912 and translated into English and Russian in 1913. The book was the first theoretical treatise on Cubism. Its central idea was that an artist could observe a subject from different points in space and time simultaneously, moving around an object to seize it from several successive angles and fusing those angles into a single image. Metzinger and Gleizes explicitly linked this multiple perspective to the philosopher Henri Bergson's concept of duration: the idea that life is subjectively experienced as a continuum in which past flows into present and present merges into future. The Salon Cubists used faceted planes and multiple viewpoints to paint that flow directly.

  In 1912 the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona mounted what it declared to be the first group exhibition of Cubism worldwide, running from the 20th of April to the 10th of May. It comprised 83 works by 26 artists, including Metzinger, Gleizes, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, and Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was shown there for the first time. Newspapers including Esquella de La Torratxa and El Noticiero Universal attacked the Cubists with caricatures and derogatory text. Art historian Jaime Brihuega wrote that the exhibition produced a strong commotion, welcomed by the public with a lot of suspicion.

• 5. Collage and the Ready-Made

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  Collage as a modern art form entered the world through Cubism. In May 1912, Picasso created Still Life With Chair Caning, combining freely brushed oil paint and commercially printed oilcloth on canvas. Braque preceded him in creating Cubist cardboard sculptures and papiers collés, constructions from everyday paper artifacts such as newspaper, tablecloth, wallpaper, and sheet music. The two artists introduced these techniques together in 1912.

  Marcel Duchamp drew the idea one step further. If collage treated an object as an element in art, and if Cubist construction assembled a work from separate physical pieces, then the next step was to present an ordinary object as a self-sufficient work of art representing only itself. In 1913 Duchamp attached a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool. In 1914 he selected a bottle-drying rack as a sculpture in its own right. The ready-made was born.

  At the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, held in Paris from the 20th of March to the 16th of May, Duchamp submitted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. The hanging committee rejected it. That committee included his own brothers and other Cubist colleagues. The work was eventually shown at the Salon de la Section d'Or in October 1912 and at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Duchamp never forgave those who censored him. That rupture widened the gap between Duchamp's increasingly radical path and the movement he helped found.

• 6. Architecture and Decoration

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  At the 1912 Salon d'Automne, visitors could walk through a fully furnished model house. Raymond Duchamp-Villon designed the plaster facade and André Mare handled the interior decoration, with collaborators contributing furniture and furnishings. Inside was a living room Mare called the Salon Bourgeois, where paintings by Marcel Duchamp, Metzinger, Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, and Léger were hung alongside a bedroom. The wallpaper, upholstery, and carpets featured brightly colored roses and floral patterns in stylized geometric forms. Léger wrote to Mare before the exhibition: your idea is absolutely splendid for us, really splendid. People will see Cubism in its domestic setting, which is very important.

  This Maison Cubiste traveled to the 1913 Armory Show in New York, Chicago, and Boston, listed in the New York catalogue as Raymond Duchamp-Villon, number 609, Facade architectural, plaster. Its furnishings were early examples of what would become Art Deco. Le Corbusier, born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, absorbed Cubist principles through Purism and in 1922 opened a studio with his cousin Jeanneret at 35 rue de Sèvres in Paris, from which his architectural projects grew.

  The most concentrated architectural application of Cubism took root in Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. Czech architects were the first and only ones to design original Cubist buildings. Pavel Janák, Josef Gočár, Vlastislav Hofman, Emil Králíček, and Josef Chochol worked mainly in Prague. The House of the Black Madonna, built in 1912 by Gočár in the Old Town of Prague, is the best-known example and contains the only Cubist café in the world, the Grand Café Orient. Králíček designed a Cubist streetlamp near Wenceslas Square in 1912 and built the Diamond House in the New Town around 1913. In 1927, Cubists including Joseph Csaky, Jacques Lipchitz, Louis Marcoussis, and Henri Laurens collaborated on the decoration of a Studio House at rue Saint-James in Neuilly-sur-Seine, designed by architect Paul Ruaud for the fashion designer and collector Jacques Doucet, who had purchased Les Demoiselles d'Avignon directly from Picasso's studio.

• 7. Beyond Painting

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  Ballet's first Cubist sets and costumes were designed by Picasso in 1917 for Sergei Diaghilev's Parade. That production preceded six more ballets in which Picasso, in the words recorded in the source, left a mark on the ballet world, influencing generations of designers and choreographers. Braque followed with four ballets beginning in 1924 with Diaghilev's Les Fâcheux. Juan Gris also designed sets and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

  In literature, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were not only the first important patrons of Cubism but also significant influences on it. Stein's own writing used repetition and repetitive phrases as building blocks across passages and entire chapters. Her novel The Making of Americans was written between 1906 and 1908. American poet Kenneth Rexroth described Cubism in poetry as the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. Louis Aragon, a founding member of Surrealism, said that for himself, Breton, Soupault, and Éluard, the poet Pierre Reverdy was the exemplary poet and their immediate elder. American poets John Ashbery and Ron Padgett produced new translations of Reverdy's work.

  Cubism also shaped commercial design. Poster designers A.M. Cassandre and Edward McKnight Kauffer popularized its visual logic in graphic design and typography. In fashion, Paul Poiret and Callot Soeurs brought Cubist elements, overlapping layers and flat planes that obscure the body's volumes, into clothing. Japan and China were among the first Asian countries to encounter Cubism, initially through European texts translated in Japanese art journals in the 1910s. Notable early works include Tetsugorō Yorozu's Self Portrait with Red Eyes from 1912 and Fang Ganmin's Melody in Autumn from 1934.