nPostimpressionism Postimpressionism was a movement in late-19th-century French painting that emphasized the artist’s personal response to a subject. Postimpressionism takes its name from an art movement that immediately preceded it: Impressionism.
But whereas impressionist painters concentrated on the depiction of a subject’s immediate appearance, postimpressionists focused on emotional or spiritual meanings that the subject might convey. Although impressionist artists interpreted what they saw, their approach nevertheless remained rooted in observation of the natural world. Postimpressionists conveyed their personal responses to the world around them through the use of strong, unnatural colors and exaggeration or slight distortion of forms. Postimpressionism can be said to have begun in 1886, the year that French painter Georges Seurat exhibited Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886), and to have ended in 1906, the year French painter Paul Czanne died.
British art critic Roger Fry, however, coined the term postimpressionism, in 1910 when he organized an exhibition of French paintings at the Grafton Galleries in London. Fry is said to have been dissuaded from using the word expressionist to describe the work of Czanne, Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh, and others, and to have finally declared: “Oh, let’s just call them post-impressionists; at any rate, they came after the impressionists. ” The term was firmly established when Fry held a second show of postimpressionist art at the Grafton Galleries in 1912. The PostimpressionistsThe painters most closely associated with postimpressionism all took part in Fry’s first exhibition: Czanne, Seurat, Gauguin, Matisse, and van Gogh.
Although their styles differed greatly from one another, these artists shared an ability to communicate concepts, emotions, or personal sensation through their art. Unlike other postimpressionists, Paul Czanne did not create symbolic equivalents between elements of his paintings and particular emotions or concepts. Instead, Czanne, who began his career as an impressionist, felt that he could communicate the intensity of his personal sensation through his painted observations of nature. He repeatedly turned to traditional artistic subjects, such as landscapes, still lifes, and nude bathers. However, his rendition of these subjects was far from conventional. The first of Czanne’s three Large Bathers paintings (1894-1905) reveal the artist’s typical distortions of shape and color.
The unnaturally blocky forms of the bathers’ bodies conform to the angularity of the trees that frame them. To unify different parts of the composition, he used shades of green, brown, and blue interchangeably in the depiction of sky, earth, flesh, and foliage. The unfinished quality of Czanne’s paintings and his choppy, unblended brushstrokes convey the immediacy of his personal experience. His technique appealed strongly to other postimpressionists seeking ways to evoke emotional responses in viewers. Seurat and van Gogh also drew their subjects from the world around them; Seurat concentrated primarily on the urban life of Paris, while van Gogh focused on rural scenes. The symbolist movement, a literary movement that stressed the expression of the artists inner vision as the purpose of art, influenced both artists, along with Van Goghs friend Paul Gauguin.
While in Paris in 1886, Vincent van Gogh experimented briefly with neoimpressionism, but found its techniques too restrictive. Instead, he used broader brush strokes and incorporated large zones of single colors into his compositions. A former preacher, van Gogh gave his paintings a spiritual charge through technique, subject matter, and color. The thick, energetic brushstrokes in Crows in the Wheatfields (1890), which he painted just two and a half weeks before his suicide, suggest turbulence.
Dark birds hover in a brilliant blue sky over golden fields. The infusion of black darkens the blue of the sky and evokes a mood of pessimism that seems to reflect the artist’s self-doubt and loneliness, which he described in letters to his brother. Impact of PostimpressionismAlthough the public initially derided exhibitions of postimpressionist paintings, postimpressionism had a major impact on later art. Soon after originating in France, postimpressionism attracted followers elsewhere in Europe, including James Ensor in Belgium and Edvard Munch in Norway. German expressionist painters, especially members of a group called Die Brcke, drew strongly on postimpressionism in their use of unnatural colors and distorted forms to convey emotion.
Czanne’s blocky figures and his use of color to build and unify a composition inspired Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and French artist Georges Braque in their development of cubism. Postimpressionism’s most significant legacy is a change in attitude toward art making. By placing more value on the artist’s response to nature than on efforts to represent nature’s appearance, postimpressionists created the basis for many of the major art movements of the 20th century. Postimpressionism’s emphasis on the subjective rather than objective qualities of an artwork continues to shape our understanding of modern art today. Paul Czanne(1839-1906)The French painter Paul Czanne, who exhibited little in his lifetime and pursued his interests increasingly in artistic isolation, is regarded today as one of the great forerunners of modern painting.
Both for the way that he evolved of putting down on canvas exactly what his eye saw in nature and for the qualities of pictorial form that he achieved through a unique treatment of space, mass, and color. Czanne was a contemporary of the impressionists, but he went beyond their interests in the individual brushstroke and the fall of light onto objects, to create, in his words, something more solid and durable, like the art of the museums. ” Czanne was born at Aix-en-Provence in the south of France on Jan. 19, 1839. He went to school in Aix, forming a close friendship with the novelist Emile Zola. He also studied law there from 1859 to 1861, but at the same time he continued attending drawing classes.
Against the implacable resistance of his father, he made up his mind that he wanted to paint and in 1861 joined Zola in Paris. His father’s reluctant consent at that time brought him financial support and, later, a large inheritance on which he could live without difficulty. In Paris he met Camille Pissarro and came to know others of the impressionist group, with whom he would exhibit in 1874 and 1877. Czanne, however, remained an outsider to their circle; from 1864 to 1869 he submitted his work to the official SALON and saw it consistently rejected.
His paintings of 1865-70 form what is usually called his early “romantic” period. Extremely personal in character, it deals with bizarre subjects of violence and fantasy in harsh, somber colors and extremely heavy paintwork. Thereafter, as Czanne rejected that kind of approach and worked his way out of the obsessions underlying it, his art is conveniently divided into three phases. In the early 1870s, through a mutually helpful association with Pissarro, with whom he painted outside Paris at Auvers, he assimilated the principles of color and lighting of Impressionism and loosened up his brushwork. Yet he retained his own sense of mass and the interaction of planes, as in House of the Hanged Man. In the late 1870s Czanne entered the phase known as “constructive,” characterized by the grouping of parallel, hatched brushstrokes in formations that build up a sense of mass in themselves.
He continued in this style until the early 1890s, when, in his series of paintings titled Card Players (1890-92), the upward curvature of the players’ backs creates a sense of architectural solidity and thrust. The intervals between figures and objects have the appearance of live cells of space and atmosphere. Finally, living as a solitary in Aix rather than alternating between the south and Paris, Czanne moved into his late phase. Now he concentrated on a few basic subjects: still lifes of studio objects built around such recurring elements as apples, statuary, and tablecloths; studies of bathers, based upon the male model and drawing upon a combination of memory, earlier studies, and sources in the art of the past; and successive views of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, a nearby landmark, painted from his studio looking across the intervening valley. The landscapes of the final years, much affected by Czanne’s contemporaneous practice in watercolor, have a more transparent and unfinished look, while the last figure paintings are at once more somber and spiritual in mood. By the time of his death on Oct.
22, 1906, Czanne’s art had begun to be shown and seen across Europe, and it became a fundamental influence on the Fauvists, the cubists, and virtually all advanced art of the early 20th century. Czanne is not an easy man to love, but professors and painters adore him. Art critics lavish him with superlatives, including “a prophet of the 20th century,” “the most sensitive painter of his time,” “the greatest artist of the 19th century,” and “the father of modern art. ” But he’s not quite a household name, and his posters have never been best sellers at museum shops around the world. In fact, most non-professionals wouldn’t stand a chance of recognizing a Czanne unless it was clearly labelled.
Even then, there’s no guarantee of appeal. Not that poster sales determine an artist’s stature, but they do reveal something about the accessibility of his work. Czanne’s pictures are restrained, impersonal and remote — they don’t have the gut-wrenching appeal of van Gogh’s portraits, even before he cut off part of his ear. They can’t compete with Monet’s lush expanses of waterlilies or Renoir’s sensuous women with their come-hither looks.
And let’s face it, bowls of fruit and the hills and trees of Provence, where Czanne spent most of his life, are a hard sell against the Tahitian backdrops of Gauguin, with or without the naked women. Czanne is an artist’s artist. He was obsessed with form rather than content, so subject matter was always secondary to the act of painting itself. He wanted the methods and skills of the painter to be more important than the image.
That meant the subject of the painting couldn’t be so dynamic as to overshadow the artist’s act of creation. The more he concentrated on this, the less viewer-friendly his works became. But that suited his personality just fine. His goal was not to have a mass audience or sales appeal, it was to satisfy himself. Czanne was a brooding, complex man, given to rages, grudges and depressions. He had few friends, and those he had he alienated.
Even when success finally caught up with him, he was dogged by feelings of inadequacy. The most famous of his friends was his schoolmate and writer Emile Zola, who was everything Czanne wasn’t — charming, eloquent, sociable and successful at an early age. Zola was art critic, novelist and Czanne’s mentor. The artist looked at him for strength but gave nothing in return. Zola got tired of placating Czanne’s ego, and in later years, when Zola wrote The Masterpiece of an unfulfilled artist who eventually killed himself, Czanne was convinced that the author had him in mind.
He was so egocentric and so paranoid, he assumed everyone would know Zola was writing about him. The reality was that no one knew about him at all, but the novel still destroyed their friendship. It’s hard to imagine that the man who created such restrained, methodical, time-consuming works had a violent, volatile temper. Painting was his salvation, a way to balance the fires within. Rather than let his personality shine in his art — that scared him too much — he suppressed it.
In spite of his bourgeois background, he was a primitive, with rough edges and no table manners — although he did improve somewhat after he met Hortense. He worked in virtual seclusion and seldom ventured out. He was such a recluse that one critic doubted his existence. When Czanne finally did attend a show of his paintings, he was amazed that the gallery had bothered to frame them. Even when he finally enjoyed both success and sales he remained riddled with self-doubt.
Czanne was versatile; in his pursuit of perfection and a unique style, he experimented a lot. Art students often copy paintings — you still see them in museums with their sketchbooks — and Czanne did just that, but unlike most, he never stopped copying. To him, it was an important form of discipline and inspiration. He felt he could understand art better through copying, and whenever he came to an impasse, he went off to the nearest museum, sketchbook in hand. His earliest works, from his first days in Paris, are expressionistic, with their impasto paint surface, broad use of the palette knife, and brooding intensity.
He took out his frustrations on the canvas. In the early 1870s, he experimented with impressionism. He tried to combine the principles of light and air-based art with a more structured pictorial style. After that, he delved into Classicism, with more balanced and formal compositions.
Toward the end of his life, he was at his most daring, reducing architecture and figures to geometric forms and paving the way for Cubism. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)Vincent (Willem) van Gogh is generally considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt; he powerfully influenced the current of Expressionism in modern art. His work, all of it produced during a period of only 10 years, hauntingly conveys through its striking colour, coarse brushwork, and contoured forms the anguish of a mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide. Among his masterpieces are numerous self-portraits and the well known The Starry Night (1889). A painter and draughtsman, van Gogh was with Czanne and Gauguin the greatest of Post-Impressionist artists. His uncle was a partner in the international firm of picture dealers Goupil and Co.
and in 1869 van Gogh went to work in the branch at The Hague. In 1873 he was sent to the London branch and fell unsuccessfully in love with the daughter of the landlady. This was the first of several disastrous attempts to find happiness with a woman, and his unrequited passion affected him so badly that he was dismissed from his job. He returned to England in 1876 as an unpaid assistant at a school, and his experience of urban squalor awakened a religious zeal and a longing to serve his fellow men. His father was a Protestant pastor, and van Gogh first trained for the ministry, but he abandoned his studies in 1878 and went to work as a lay preacher among the impoverished miners of the grim Borinage district in Belgium.
In his zeal he gave away his own worldly goods to the poor and was dismissed for his literal interpretation of Christ’s teaching. He remained in the Borinage, suffering acute poverty and a spiritual crisis, until 1880, when he found that art was his vocation and the means by which he could bring consolation to humanity. From this time he worked at his new `mission’ with single-minded frenzy, and although he often suffered from extreme poverty and undernourishment, his output in the ten remaining years of his life was prodigious: about 800 paintings and a similar number of drawings. From 1881 to 1885 van Gogh lived in the Netherlands, sometimes in lodgings, supported by his devoted brother Theo, who regularly sent him money from his own small salary.
In keeping with his humanitarian outlook he painted peasants and workers, the most famous picture from this period being The Potato Eaters (1885). Of this he wrote to Theo: `I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food’. In 1885 van Gogh moved to Antwerp on the advice of Antoine Mauve (a cousin by marriage), and studied for some months at the Academy there. Academic instruction had little to offer such an individualist, however, and in February 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec. At this time his painting underwent a violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of Impressionism and Japanese woodcuts, losing its moralistic flavour of social realism. Van Gogh became obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colors and began to use them for this purpose rather than, as did the Impressionists, for the reproduction of visual appearances, atmosphere, and light.
`Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes,’ he wrote, `I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly’. Of his Night Caf (1888), he said: `I have tried to express with red and green the terrible passions of human nature. ‘ For a time he was influenced by Seurat’s delicate pointillist manner, but he abandoned this for broad, vigorous, and swirling brush-strokes. In February 1888 van Gogh settled at Arles, where he painted more than 200 canvases in 15 months.
During this time he sold no pictures, was in poverty, and suffered recurrent nervous crisis with hallucinations and depression. He became enthusiastic for the idea of founding an artists’ co-operative at Arles and towards the end of the year he was joined by Gauguin. But as a result of a quarrel between them van Gogh suffered the crisis in which occurred the famous incident when he cut off his left ear (or part of it), an event commemorated in his Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear In May 1889 he went at his own request into an asylum at St Rmy, near Arles, but continued during the year he spent there a frenzied production of tumultuous pictures such as Starry Night. He did 150 paintings besides drawings in the course of this year.
In 1889 Theo married and in May 1890 van Gogh moved to Auvers-sur-Oise to be near him, lodging with the patron and connoisseur Dr Paul Gachet. There followed another tremendous burst of strenuous activity and during the last 70 days of his life he painted 70 canvases. But his spiritual anguish and depression became more acute and on 29 July 1890 he died from the results of a self-inflicted bullet woundHe sold only one painting during his lifetime (Red Vineyard at Arles), and was little known to the art world at the time of his death, but his fame grew rapidly thereafter. His influence on Expressionism, Fauvism and early abstraction was enormous, and it can be seen in many other aspects of 20th-century art. His stormy and dramatic life and his unswerving devotion to his ideals have made him one of the great cultural heroes of modern times, providing the most auspicious material for the 20th-century vogue in romanticized psychological biography. Expressionism In the north of Europe, the Fauves’ celebration of color was pushed to new emotional and psychological depths.
Expressionism, as it was generally known, developed almost simultaneously in different countries from about 1905. Characterized by heightened, symbolic colors and exaggerated imagery, it was German Expressionism in particular that tended to dwell on the darker, sinister aspects of the human psyche. The term Expressionism” can be used to describe various art forms but, in its broadest sense, it is used to describe any art that raises subjective feelings above objective observations. The paintings aim to reflect the artists state of mind rather than the reality of the external world.
The artists of Die Brcke drew inspiration from van Gogh, Gauguin and primitive art. Munch was also a strong influence, having exhibited his art in Berlin from 1892. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), the leading spirit of Die Brcke, wanted German art to be a bridge to the future. He insisted that the group, which included Erich Heckel (1883-1970) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluf (1884-1976), express inner convictions.
. . with sincerity and spontaneity”. Even at their wildest, the Fauves had retained a sense of harmony and design, but Die Brcke abandoned such restraint.
They used images of the modern city to convey a hostile, alienating world, with distorted figures and colors. Kirchner does just this in Berlin Street Scene (1913), where the shrill colors and jagged hysteria of his own vision flash forth uneasily. There is a powerful sense of violence, contained with difficulty, in much of their art. Emil Nolde (1867-1956), briefly associated with Die Brcke, was a more profound Expressionist who worked in isolation for much of his career.
His interest in primitive art and sensual color led him to paint some remarkable pictures with dynamic energy, simple rhythms, and visual tension. He could even illuminate the marshes of his native Germany with dramatic clashes of stunning color. Yet Early Evening (1916) is not mere drama: light glimmers over the distance with an exhilarating sense of space. Expressionism was a movement in fine arts that emphasized the expression of inner experience rather than solely realistic portrayal, seeking to depict not objective reality but the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in the artist. Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him. He accomplishes his aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements.
In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic and Nordic art from at least the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or spiritual crisis, and in this sense it forms the converse of the rationalist and classicizing tendencies of Italy and later of France. It was an artistic and literary movement born in the early years of the 20th century. Unlike Impressionism, its goals were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist’s own sensibility to the world’s representation.
The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual object reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of harmony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity, both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics. Expressionism assessed itself mostly in Germany, in 1910. As an international movement, expressionism has been thought of as inheriting from certain medieval art forms and, more directly, Czanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the fauvism movement. Gustave Moreau was already saying not to believe to the reality of what he touched or saw, but instead to his own interior perception; expressionism has been holding this theory to its extreme application.
The most famed German expressionists are Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein; the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka, the Czech Alfred Kubin and the Norvegian Edvard Munch are also related to this movement. During his stay in Germany, the Russian Kandinsky was also an expressionism addict. Painters as varied as Georges Rouault, Henry de Waroquier, Marcel Gromaire, Edouard Goerg have also been qualified of “French Expressionists”. Other members were, in Belgium, James Ensor, Permecke, Van der Bergue, Servaes were seen as disciples of Jrme Bosch and Bruegel, the Dutch Leo Gestel, the Danish Srensen, the British Lyall Watson.
Among the members of the Paris school, Soutine, Pascin and Modigliani have been attached to Expressionism. Fauvism Between 1901 and 1906, several comprehensive exhibitions were held in Paris, making the work of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Czanne widely accessible for the first time. For the painters who saw the achievements of these great artists, the effect was one of liberation and they began to experiment with radical new styles. Fauvism was the first movement of this modern period, in which color ruled supreme. The advent of Modernism if often dated by the appearance of the Fauves in Paris at the Salon d’Automne in 1905.
Their style of painting, using non-naturalistic colors, was one of the first avant-garde developments in European art. They greatly admired van Gogh, who said of his own work: “Instead of trying to render what I see before me, I use color in a completely arbitrary way to express myself powerfully”. The Fauvists carried this idea further, translating their feelings into color with a rough, almost clumsy style. Matisse was a dominant figure in the movement; other Fauvists included Vlaminck, Derain, Marquet, and Rouault. However, they did not form a cohesive group and by 1908 a number of painters had seceded to Cubism. Fauvism was a short-lived movement, lasting only as long as its originator, Henri Matisse (1869-1954), fought to find the artistic freedom he needed.
Matisse had to make color serve his art, rather as Gauguin needed to paint the sand pink to express an emotion. The Fauvists believed absolutely in color as an emotional force. With Matisse and his friends, Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958) and Andr Derain (1880-1954), color lost its descriptive qualities and became luminous, creating light rather than imitating it. They astonished viewers at the 1905 Salon d’Automne: the art critic Louis Vauxcelles saw their bold paintings surrounding a conventional sculpture of a young boy, and remarked that it was like a Donatello parmi les fauves” (among the wild beasts). The painterly freedom of the Fauves and their expressive use of color gave splendid proof of their intelligent study of van Gogh’s art. But their art seemed brasher than anything seen before did.
During its brief flourishing, Fauvism had some notable adherents. Vlaminck ignored the wealth of art in the Louvre, preferring to collect the African masks that became so important to early 20th century art. Derain also showed a primitive wildness in his Fauve period. He shared a studio with Vlaminck for a while and their works at the period seem to share a power: both reveal an unselfconscious use of color and shape, a delight in the sheer patterning of things. This may not be profound art but it does give visual pleasure.
Fauvism was a style of painting that flourished in France from 1898 to 1908; it used pure, brilliant colour, applied straight from the paint tubes in an aggressive, direct manner to create a sense of an explosion on the canvas. The Fauves painted directly from nature as the Impressionists had before them, but their works were invested with a strong expressive reaction to the subjects they painted. First formally exhibited in Paris in 1905, Fauvist paintings shocked visitors to the annual Salon d’Automne; it was here that Auxcelles, who, because of the violence of their works, dubbed the painters “Les Fauves” (Wild Beasts). The leader of the group was Henri Matisse, who had arrived at the Fauve style after careful, critical study of the masters of Postimpressionism Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat. Matisse’s methodical studies led him to reject traditional renderings of three-dimensional space and to seek instead a new picture space defined by movement of colour. Matisse exhibited his famous “Woman with the Hat” at the 1905 exhibition; brisk strokes of colour–blues, greens, and reds–form an energetic, expressive view of the woman.
As always in Matisse’s Fauve style, his painting is ruled by his intuitive sense of formal order. Other members of the group included two painters from Chteau, Fr. , Andr Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, who, together with Matisse, formed the nucleus of the Fauves. Derain’s Fauve paintings translate every tone of a landscape into pure colour, applied with short, forceful brushstrokes. The agitated swirls of intense colour in Vlaminck’s works are indebted to the expressive power of van Gogh.
Three young painters from Le Havre were also attracted to Fauvism by the strong personality of Matisse. Othon Friesz found the emotional connotations of the bright Fauve colours a relief from the mediocre Impressionism he practiced. His companion Raoul Dufy developed a rather carefree ornamental version of the bold style that suited his own personal aesthetic nature; and Georges Braque created a definite sense of rhythm and structure out of small spots of colour, foreshadowing his development of Cubism. Albert Marquet, Matisse’s fellow student at the cole des Beaux-Arts in the 1890s, also participated in Fauvism, as did the Dutchman Kees van Dongen, who applied the style to depictions of the fashionable society of Paris. Fauvism was for most of these artists a transitional, learning stage.
By 1908 a revived interest in Paul Czanne’s vision of the order and structure of nature had led them to reject the turbulent emotionalism of Fauvism in favour of the logic of Cubism. Matisse alone pursued the course he had pioneered, achieving a sophisticated balance between his own emotions and the world he painted. Cubism The art of painting original arrangements composed of elements taken from conceived rather than perceived reality. ” Guillaume Apollinaire, The Beginnings of Cubism, 1912.
After Cubism, the world never looked the same again: it was one of the most influential and revolutionary movements in art. The Spaniard Pablo Picasso and the Frenchman Georges Braque splintered the visual world not wantonly, but sensuously and beautifully with their new art. They provided what we could almost call a God’s-eye view of reality: every aspect of the whole subject, seen simultaneously in a single dimension. The main influence for this art form probably came from Czannes style of reducing forms to their essential planes and geometric shapes. The Cubist movement in painting was developed by Picasso and Braque around 1907 and became a major influence on Western art.
The artists chose to break down the subjects they were painting into a number of facets, showing several different aspects of one object simultaneously. The work up to 1912 is known as Analytical Cubism, concentrating on geometrical forms using subdued colors. The second phase, known as Synthetic Cubism, used more decorative shapes, stencilling, collage, and brighter colors. It was then that artists such as Picasso and Braque started to use pieces of cut-up newspaper in their paintings. An early 20th-century school of painting and sculpture in which the subject matter is portrayed by geometric forms without realistic detail, stressing abstract form at the expense of other pictorial elements largely by use of intersecting often transparent cubes and cones.
Czanne influenced cubism, the highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created principally by Picasso and Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories of art as the imitation of nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space; instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects, whose several sides were seen simultaneously. this has been collected from various resources on the net . .
. ibiblio.org, among others
