Cubism

Cubism, famously associated with the artist Picasso, was also created by Georges Braque. Braque and Picasso became friends after Braque's move to Paris in order to study with the Fauves. Cubist theory revolves around the complete flattening of space. Cubist art is very scientific and the artists used very little color in their work.

Georges Braque, Violin and Candlestick, 1910

Analytic Cubism

The term Analytic Cubism was adopted because the subject matter in these paintings was broken down into smaller parts and then rearranged in different orders, at different angles and so forth, as if to be scientifically analyzed.

Braque admired form and stability. His large compositions incorporated the Cubist aim of representing the world as seen from a number of different viewpoints. He wanted to convey a feeling of being able to move around within the painting. In Violin and Candlestick Braque fragments sheets of music and a violin and rearranges the pieces at different angles. He attempts to knit the various elements together into a single shifting surface of forms and colors. Some formal elements lose their spatial relations and their identities as well.

Synthetic Cubism

This form of Cubism was the more influential of the two Cubist subcategories. So influential in fact, that traces of Synthetic Cubist concepts are evident throughout the art of the 20th Century. Synthetic Cubist paintings were made up of different

Pablo Picasso, Glass and Bottle of Suze, 1912

parts using products of consumer society. Artists incorporated pieces of the manufactured surrounding world into their artwork. In many of the works there is play between art and reality. The viewer bounces back and forth between what is illusion and what is real - that which is painted and that which is a product glued onto the canvas.

In 1912, Picasso took the conceptual representation of Cubism to its logical conclusion by pasting an actual piece of oilcloth onto the canvas. This was a watershed moment in Modern Art. By incorporating the real world into the canvas, Picasso and Braque opened up a century's worth of exploration into the meaning of Art.

This is apparent in Picasso's Glass and Bottle of Suze. Here, the work is a collage of separate elements glued into one complete composition. Picasso uses newspaper clippings, wallpaper and labels to create this work.