Cubism

Cubism

Cubism began a different artistic tradition seeing things from different angles; Pablo Picasso applied elements of ancient Iberian and African art to human figures. Figures were abstracted into geometric planes and the human figure completely dispatched. The illusions of perspective give away an unclear shifting of two-dimensional planes.  Figures were seen from more than one view point. Picasso and his colleague Georges Braque had developed cubism as an art movement that replaced the interpretation of appearances and endless possibilities of form. They analysed the planes of subject matter from several points of view, they used these perceptions to construct a painting composed of rhythmic geometric planes characters. They used shapes, colours, textures and values in spatial relationship.

Picasso and Braque also introduced paper collage into their work in 1912. The texture of collage element signifies objects. Picasso glued oilcloth printed with a pattern of a chair cane into one of his paintings.

Cubism has a strong relationship with the process of human vision; our eyes scan a subject whilst our minds combine fragments into something whole. Often letter forms and words from newspaper were used to incorporate as visual form and for meaning.

Cubists invented forms that were signs rather that representations of the subject matter. Among the artist who groupedaround Picasso and Braque and joined the movements, Fernand Leger had moved cubism away from the initial characteristics of its founders. Leger moved closer to visual experience in paintings; perceptions of the colours, shapes, posters and architecture of the urban environment. His almost pictographic simplifications of the human figure and objects were a major inspiration to the modernist pictorial graphics. Legers flat planes of colour, urban motifs and hard edge precision of his machine forms aided in defining the modern design sensibility after the First World War.

Cubism had changed the course of painting and graphic design, its visual inventions became a motivational for experiments that pushed art and design towards geometric abstraction and a new approach towards pictorial space.   

Reference:

ThatStudent 2012, Cubism [Online] available at: http://havingalookathistoryofgraphicdesign.blogspot.com/2012/11/cubism_7.html, [accessed 29^th of November]

Meggs P. B. and Purvis A. W. 1998. 5th Edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons , Inc.