Cubism

Cubism is a revolutionary avant-garde movement that emerged around 1907–1908 and radically changed ideas about the depiction of space and form. Its founding idea is that an object appears not from a single fixed viewpoint but is broken down into geometric planes and shown simultaneously from several angles, reduced to basic volumes — the cube, the cylinder, the cone. In this way the artist abandons classical linear perspective and the illusion of depth in favor of an analysis of the very structure of things on the flat surface of the canvas. Two phases are distinguished: Analytic Cubism, with the fragmentation of form into small facets and a muted ochre-gray range, and Synthetic Cubism, which restored brighter color and introduced collage, pasted papers and fragments of real materials. The style's founders were Pablo Picasso, whose "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" became its manifesto, and Georges Braque, with Juan Gris and Fernand Léger among its leading masters; its first theoretical treatise, Du "Cubisme" (1912), was written by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger. In Ukrainian art cubist inquiry was vividly developed by Oleksandr Bohomazov, who fused Cubism with dynamism in his Kyiv compositions (such as 'Lvivska Street in Kyiv', 1914), and by Alexandra Exter, whose Cubo-Futurist works merged the analysis of form with saturated color. Cubism opened the way to non-objective art, influenced Futurism, Constructivism and Suprematism, and the introduction of collage permanently expanded the technical arsenal of twentieth-century painting.