Pioneered by Picasso and Braque, Cubism has been described as
the first avant-garde art movement of the 20th century
. With inspiration from African and Native American art and sculpture, its practitioners deconstructed European conventions of viewpoint, form, perspective to create
flattened, fragmented, and revolutionary images
.
Picasso’s celebrated painting
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
is typically regarded as the original cubist work, with its radical fracturing of objects and figures into distinct areas, corresponding to
multiple different viewpoints
. Cubism thereafter developed two distinct trends:
Analytical Cubism
, which continued to interweave perspectival planes in muted blacks, greys and ochre, and later
Synthetic Cubism
, characterised by simpler shapes, brighter colors, and collage elements such as newspaper.
This book presents the prime protagonists of Cubism, with work from artists including
Pablo Picasso
,
Georges Braque
Fernand Léger
Juan Gris
Albert Gleizes
, and
Robert Delaunay