Universal Principles of Art

24 CUBISM

THE LANGUAGE OF MULTIPLE VIEWPOINTS

Cubism was a movement that emerged in Paris around 1907 and profoundly altered the way artists thought about the nature of painting and its ability to represent the world. Inspired in part by the paintings of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), whose work incorporated shifting points of view, the Cubists constructed images that combined multiple viewpoints in a shallow picture space. By abandoning traditional perspectival space and continuous description of form, they asserted a new autonomy for painting, freeing it from the task of conventional representation. In sculpture, the recombination of fractured forms introduced similar possibilities in three dimensions.

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) is generally credited ...