AVANTGARDE

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avantgarde, pioneered by Picasso and Braque that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature.

In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism’s distinct characteristics.