by Juan Leer

Created on: March 31, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

Cubism is a form of art that developed sometime in the early 20th century, probably between 1907 and 1914. It was a movement that revolutionized painting and sculpting in Europe.

In a nutshell, cubism is painting a normal scene but doing it in a way so that it is viewed from many different views while the positions of some of the parts are rotated or moved so that it is scrambled and a little odd looking. Instead of looking at the objects from one viewpoint, objects are broken up and looked at in abstract form, so that the objects is looked at in multiple contexts from multiple viewpoints in the same painting.

The surfaces might seem to interact in random places at random angles, which at first seems to create no sense of depth. The background of the painting and object planes converge on one another to create the shallow space characteristic of cubism, and to give it its unique look.

The main innovators of Cubism were artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They really began the development of cubism in around 1908, and continued to develop it for many year, at least until 1914, at which time they had it more fully developed.

Today, the basic ideals and thoughts of Cubism have had impacts in many things even outside of art. It inspired similar movements in music and literature, and the ideas have helped to create the look of many buildings. It has certainly had a large impact on the art world.

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