Gallery · Room 03 · Paris, 1907–1920s
Cubism
Painters who broke objects into flat, overlapping planes to show several sides at once.
Wall text
Cubism began in Paris with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Most accounts start with Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907. In 1908 Braque painted landscapes at L'Estaque with simplified forms and broken perspective. Reviewing his show that November, the critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote that Braque reduced everything to cubes. The name seems to come from that remark.
Historians divide it into two phases. Analytic Cubism broke objects into overlapping planes in muted greys, blacks and ochres, seen from several viewpoints at once. From about 1912, Synthetic Cubism used simpler shapes and brighter color. That year Picasso made the first Cubist collage, and Braque invented papier collé, drawing on pasted wood-grain paper. Picasso pasted in pages of the newspaper Le Journal, so printed words entered the picture. Juan Gris pasted in a real liqueur label.
Picasso and Braque are still in copyright in Europe, so their work is linked here rather than shown. Futurism, Suprematism and Constructivism developed in response to Cubism, and Orphism grew out of it in France.
