Cubism

Georges Braque - Mandora

Cubism was a revolutionary approach to representing reality which was invented around 1907 by the artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The combined different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, much like David Hockney does with his photo collages, and this results in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.

The name ‘cubism’ seems to have derived from a comment made by the critic Louis Vauxcelles who, on seeing some of Georges Braque's paintings exhibited in Paris in 1908, described them as reducing everything to ‘geometric outlines, to cubes’.

By breaking objects and figures down into distinct areas, the artists aimed to show different viewpoints at the same time and within the same space and so suggest their three dimensional form. In doing so they also emphasised the two-dimensional flatness of the canvas instead of creating the illusion of depth. 

Cubism has been described literally as breaking something down into cubes, which I have been doing with my experiments on my photographs, therefore my work could be seen as part of cubism. I have been taking photographs and cutting them up into lots of cubes and shapes, then sticking them back down in an unusual distorted order much like Braque's painting above 'Mandora' which shows an instrument which has been distorted and broken apart into small shapes as a painting.

I felt it necessary to research more on cubism as I feel it relates a lot to the style I have been working in for my paper cutting.