by Sarah Zecchini

Created on: November 25, 2008

To better understand Cubism, you must, as with all art, take into account what was going on in the world at the time the movement was taking place. Cubism was a movement that held some pretty radical influence with politics. At the time, anarcho-syndicalism was rising in popularity, sparked by the industrial revolution. Factories needed workers and while the economy rose, the guys at the top of the ladder thought they could rip off their employees. The people, the workers, wanted their rights! They wanted the fruits of their labor! It was stated,

"...the ultimate aim of the General Strike as regards wages is to give to each producer the full product of his labor. The demand for better wages becomes revolutionary only when it is coupled with the demand that the exploitation of labor must cease."

So, how did this relate to Cubism? The movement was an Avant-garde for "pre-war Paris"as these factories sprouted everywhere and manual labor was needed for production, this boom in the economy created an even deeper gap in the class system. The lower classes were becoming the middle class yet they were all still the lower class. This working class was the majority. When Cubism was first introduced in France, the upper class disregarded it and for some reason there was a resistance of the art style and nationalists felt that it was disgusting and
didn't want their cultural lineage' tainted. Let's call them socialists. Jules-Louis Bretonsocialist!referred to the inclusion of cubist paintings in the Grand Palace as jokes in very bad taste' in the name of the artistic patrimony of France.

Blah blah, right? Well! It seemed the working class had a taste for cubism, and since their numbers were so much larger than that of the socialists the artistic movement flourished throughout France. Ironically, those hoity
toity upper classes against the movement were now anti-nationalists, and it was the ones protesting against them that were the true patriots.

"The conflicts between artists and intellectuals over the definition of culture are only one aspect of the interminable struggles among the different fractions of the dominate class to impose the definition of the legitimate stakes and weapons of social struggles."

Just as the Romantics veered away from the real and the hardships in life, the Cubists veered away from the acceptable. As time changes radically, the art becomes as radical as it. The Cubists, pioneered by the infamous Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, stepped away from the natural world. They didn't look at the world from a designated point of view...but several at the same time. They distorted perspective and broke apart life. Organic forms were transfigured and dissected into geometric shapes. These men manipulated the planes and all that was unconsumed with figures. Shapes were impossibly overlapped and space became absorbent. As time went on, many subjects from this movement held no recognition what so ever. The style branched off, as they tend to do: Dada sprung from one side and Surrealism blossomed from another. Today, Cubism stands as one of the most influential artistic movements of the twentieth century which can be seen through paintings, sculptures, and architecture all around the world.

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