cubism

Revolutionary style of painting created by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in Paris between 1907 and 1914. It was the most radical of the developments that revolutionized art in the years of unprecedented experimentation leading up to World War I, and it changed the course of painting by introducing a new way of seeing and depicting the world. To the cubists, a painting was first and foremost a flat object that existed in its own right, rather than a kind of window through which a representation of the world is seen. Cubism also had a marked, though less fundamental, effect on sculpture, and even influenced architecture and the decorative arts.

Cubism was a complex, gradually evolving phenomenon, but in essence it involved abandoning the single fixed viewpoint that had been the norm in European painting since the Renaissance and instead depicting several different aspects of an object simultaneously. Objects were therefore shown as they are known to be, rather than as they happen to look at a particular moment. In the early days of cubism, this way of representation involved fragmenting objects into facets. Only a handful of Braque's and Picasso's paintings actually use cubelike forms, so cubism is not really an appropriate name. However, the name stuck after being coined facetiously by the critic Louis Vauxcelles in 1908, and it was accepted by the two inventors of the style and their followers.