Describe and Compare the Two Forms of Cubism

According to the Tate Gallery’s exposition (1979) Cubism has remained the most important and influential movement of the 20th century, notwithstanding the movement’s short duration. According to Read (1994) the major period for Cubism was from 1907 to 1914, with Picasso and Braque as the main originators of the movement. The rationale for the Tate’s statement is given as “the artists associated with [Cubism] took some of the most decisive steps towards abstraction”, and this extreme development “has become the archetype of later revolutionary movements” (p. 84). The movement, according to Read, was the first abstract style of the 20th century, and named by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles, who took up a remark by Matisse about “Braque’s little cubes” (p. 100). One source (artlex.com) cites Vauxcelles as saying: “M. Braque scorns form and reduces everything, sites, figures and houses, to geometric schemas and cubes.”

One of the most innovative developments is that the creators of Cubism sought to replace a single viewpoint and light source, normal within the western art world since the Renaissance, with a much more complete representation of any object, combining many ‘aspects’. Initially colours were temporarily abandoned and shapes were simplified and flattened. Space was furthermore rendered by means of oblique lines and overlapping forms (The Tate Gallery, 1979). According to Belton (2002, p. 109) Picasso and Braque both struggled with the problem of representing three dimensional objects and figures in the two dimensional medium of painting; “their solution was to create an abstract form that could display two or more sides of an object simultaneously”.

Whilst Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon is generally viewed as the first Cubist painting, Read (1994) argues that the painting might be more usefully viewed as ‘pre-Cubist’, or ‘proto-Cubist’, as it was so heavily influenced by Iberian or African art. Cézanne’s later work is often viewed as the catalyst