Cubism by Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, the initiator of cubism, portrayed by Juan Gris, 1912, oil on canvas, 93.3 x 74.4 cm, Art Institute of Chicago. Cubism was an artistic movement developed in 1907, created by the Spanish Pablo Picasso, followed by French Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Juan Gris, María Blanchard and Guillaume Apollinaire.1 It is an essential trend , because it gives rise to the rest of the European avant-gardes of the 20th century. It is not just another ism, but the definitive break with traditional painting. The term cubism was coined by the French critic Louis Vauxcelles, the same one who had baptized the Fauves by calling them fauves (beasts); In the case of Braque and his paintings of L'Estaque, Vauxcelles said, contemptuously, that it was a painting composed of "little cubes" and geometric figures. Thus the concept of "cubism" originated. Literary Cubism is another branch that expresses itself with poems whose structure forms figures or images that exemplify the theme, rhyme is optional and do not have a specific metric nor are they organized in verses. Juan Gris: Guitar and mandolin, 1919, Galerie Beyeler, Basel. Cubism is considered the first vanguard, since it breaks with the last Renaissance statute in force at the beginning of the 20th century, the perspective. In cubist pictures, traditional perspective disappears. It treats the forms of nature by means of geometric figures, fragmenting lines and surfaces. Thus the so-called "multiple perspective" is adopted: all the parts of an object are represented in the same plane. The representation of the world where it happened to have no commitment to the appearance of things from a particular point of view, but with what is known about them. That is why different views of the object appeared at the same time and on the same plane: for example, it is represented in front and in profile; in a human face, the nose is in profile and the eye in front; A bottle appears in its vertical cut and its horizontal cut. There is no longer a single point of view. There is no sense of depth. The details are suppressed, and sometimes ends up representing the object by a single aspect, as it happens with the violins, insinuated only by the presence of the tail of the same. Despite being avant-garde painting the genres that are painted are not new, and among them are mostly still lifes, landscapes and portraits. The suggestive colors that were so typical of impressionism or fovism are eliminated. Instead, it uses gray, green and brown as muted pictorial tones. The monochromatism prevailed in the first period of Cubism, later the palette was opened more. With all these innovations, art accepts its condition of art, and allows this condition to be seen in the work, that is, it is an intrinsic part of it. The painting acquires autonomy as an object regardless of what it represents, which is why it is possible to stick or stick to the canvas all kinds of objects to form collages. The resulting work is difficult to understand because it does not have an immediate naturalistic reference, and this explains why it was the first of the artistic movements that needed an exegesis on the part of the "critique", even considering the written discourse as important as the same practice artistic. From then on, all avant-garde artistic movements were accompanied by critical texts that explained them.