by Christa Nwokedi

Created on: October 26, 2009   Last Updated: November 06, 2009

Understanding Cubism

The end of the 19th Century denoted the end of the Historicism. The self-conscious revival of or reliance upon historical styles in art and architecture was challenged by Italian futuristic movements. In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proclaimed drastic changes in his manifesto: "We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind."; "We want to free this land," -"from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians...".

In 1910, the Technical Manifesto of Futuristic Painting was launched in Turin (Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini).It was a violent and cynical cry displaying deep-rooted disgust against haughty contempt for vulgarity, academic and pedantic mediocrity, the fanatical worship of all that is old and worm-eaten. Painter and sculptures began expressing movement, the dynamics of natural and man-made forms, and used modern materials and technique. Some of these early ideas were taken up later by French painter Marcel Duchamp and other cubists, and the constructivist.

Art became liberated from the demands to only depict scenes from religion, mythology, portraiture, or history. The inspiration "art for art's sake" found expression in the work of painters like Francisco de Goya, John Constable, and J.M.W. Turner.

French Painter Camille Corot (Barbizon School) painted in romantic and realistic style, and his works forecast the Impressionism of Edoard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzales, Marie Braquemond, and Edgar Degas.

Post-Impressionists, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, prepared the way to modernism. Paul Gauguin's Impressionism opened the way to a personal symbolism; Georges Seurat transformed the impressionistic broken color into a scientific optical study, and structured frieze-like compositions. Van Gogh's turbulent method of paint application, enhanced by his sonorous use of color, and predicted Expressionism and Fauvism; Cezanne's desire to unite classical composition with a revolutionary abstraction of natural forms, would come to be seen as a precursor of 20th century art.

At the beginning of the 20th century Henry Matisse and several other young artists revolutionized the art scene of Paris with multi-colored, landscapes, and figure paintings that critic called Fauvism.

Pablo Picasso created his first cubist paintings based on Cezanne's idea that all portrayal

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