In the world of art, Cubism is probably the most important art movement in the history of 20th Century Art. Cubism brought in new ways of composing pictures and also showed new ways of representing nature. New movement also brought in new attitudes towards the picture surface and the application of paint.
The ideas of colour theory were all changed. This caused a liberation of these elements from a merely descriptive function have all featured in the development of Cubism. At the beginning of the first decade of this ending century two young artists emerged trying to make a name for themselves in the highly competitive Avant-Garde of Paris. One of them, Pablo Picasso 1881-1973, a young Spaniard who had moved to France had been a deliberate act of encouraging the latest developments of French paintings.
The other artist was Georges Braque 1881-1963 already a vanguard of modern painting as a practising Fauve. He was experimenting with liberating colour in an attempt to be the forefront of a small Avant-Garde community. Both artists met and they developed a solution between them.
Between 1909 and the outbreak of the First World War Cubism was introduced. Cubism evolved from a mixture of influences.
However there were two that were of great importance. The first was a major exhibition o Primitive Art mainly displaying sculptures, totems, juju figures and ancestral figures. The work and end in its self however it was a catalyst for ideas in the future. The second influence was the work of Paul Cezanne. Hs significance for cubists was in attempting to re-establish a sense of 3D-Form in painting, which he believed impressionists had lost.
In doing this he developed a theory that the entire world and everything in it could be reduced to basic forms such as cones, cylinders, spheres, cubes. The end result was a network of small marks, which broke up the surface of the canvas. This was Cezanne’s distinct style, the deconstruction of form, which is the key to the manner in which Cubists were to reshape Western European Art. The “Aficionado” painting by Picasso was an ultimate example of a Cubist picture. The fragments of this picture produce a visual puzzle. The painting is a portrait of a bull fighting fan and in the painting there are suggestions of a mouth, eyes, a wine bottle and a guitar.
The Aficionado is an example of what is known as analytic Cubism, which was developed in 1911/12. 1913 was a period that Braque produced a series of paintings. These included “Still life the table” and “Still life with a bottle of Bass”. He used Cubist devices known as “Tricks of the Trade” in his work. During this period his work was usually refereed to as Synthetic Cubism.
