by Alex Storey

Created on: September 21, 2011

Pablo Picasso pioneered Cubism in the twentieth-century which became an avant-garde art movement meaning innovation in painting.

Objects were broken up, analysed and re-assembled in abstract form so they can be seen from different viewpoints; this helps represent the subject in a greater context, thus the background, subject and object often interrelate, thus being one of cubism distinct characteristics.  

Picasso, when in France, revolutionized European painting and sculpture, thus inspiring music, literature and architecture as well.

Analytic Cubism was followed by Synthetic Cubism, leading up to the Surrealist movement made famous partly by Salvador Dali. 

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was painted by Picasso in 1907, it is oil on canvass and housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Demoiselles is considered to have been a major step towards the founding of the Cubist movement and portrays five nude prostitutes all depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionally feminine. The angular shapes and mask-like faces are a departure from traditional European art.  

Les Demoiselles was seminal in both cubism and modern art. It was revolutionary and controversial because the artist denied researching African and Tribal art and insisted that Iberian sculpture was his main inspiration.  

As with much of Picasso’s work, Demoiselles resembles some paintings by El Greco as well as Gauguin and Cezanne all being instrumental in this creation and the formation of Cubism as a whole, however even though it has been said that Demoiselles is generally referred to as the first Cubist picture as Picasso violently overturned established conventions, it does have a disruptive, expressionist element contrary to the spirit of Cubism.

Each of the figures in Les Demoiselles is drawn differently. The far right woman pulling the curtain embodies cubism with her sharp, geometric shape the others incorporate a multiplicity of styles.  

It was shortly after Cezanne died that Picasso gathered some ideas for Cubism from a posthumous exhibition at the Salon d’Automne and it was observation of nature as if it were composed of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders and cones explored in a geometric simplification of form which inspired the Cubism movement.  

Cubism lives on even today with a legacy informed by many. Cubist imagery has moved into advertising, becoming a commercial success and Cubist sculpture again with Picasso’s “Bronze Head of a Woman” influenced a whole movement in architecture in Prague with Czech Cubism such as “The House of the Black Madonna” becoming a Cubist museum.

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