The emergence of Cubism marks a revolution in Western art

For decades, artists had been moving away from trying to make their pictures look as naturalistic and detailed as possible. The Cubists took this a stage further and depicted the world in a completely new way.

Many consider the Cubist movement to be the dawn of Modern Art, overturning the rules that governed painting. It grew out of the work of the Postimpressionists and the Fauves, but its radical departure with artistic conventions came about through a partnership between two remarkable artists, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They met in Paris in 1907 and immediately struck up a friendship. Both men were anxious to experiment with new ideas. Picasso was working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a revolutionary painting in which he abandoned conventional notions about form and space and based his angular figures on Iberian and African carvings. Braque was approaching his work from a different direction, through his interest in Paul Cezanne's technique of building up landscape with blocks of colour. Cezanne's influence was crucial, for he had treated objects as geometric shapes, and showed elements separated by great distance on the same plane, already challenging ideas on the relationship between form and perspective.

Picasso and Braque enjoyed rowdy evenings in Montmartre cafes, and dressed in each other's clothes for fun, but their art was at the heart of their relationship. The two men competed and bounced ideas off each other, aware that they were working in uncharted territory. Picasso gave Braque the nickname of "Vilbure," inspired by the aviator Wilbur Wright, to emphasize his friend's pioneering qualities. Braque described how they created their new style "like mountaineers roped together." During this phase it is difficult to tell their paintings apart.

Picasso and Braque discarded totally the principles that had governed Western art since the Renaissance. They replaced a fixed perspective with

22 Portrait of Ambroise Vollard

Pablo Picasso, 1910

Cubism

multiple viewpoints. There was little modelling or shading, and no real attempt to create a sense of distance, or make the figures appear solid. Colour was restricted and space flattened. Yet neither Picasso nor Braque was seeking to produce non-objective or non-representational art. The idea was to go beyond reproducing what the eye sees and to bring together on one canvas several different aspects of a subject that could not be viewed in a single glance. As Picasso explained, "I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."

When the first results of this collaboration were shown in 1908 the critic Louis Vauxcelles noted how all the elements in the paintings were reduced "to cubes." This comment gave birth to the term Cubism, which rapidly became the accepted name for the style. The art dealer Ambroise Vollard, a tireless advocate of avant-garde painting, showcased the work of Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse in his Paris gallery. This portrait dates from the early phase of the movement, which is generally known as Analytical Cubism. Here, natural forms were broken down, or analyzed, and then rearranged, creating a new vision of the original subject. This approach became increasingly abstract and was superseded from about 1912 by Synthetic Cubism. The new style showed an image created in collage, using familiar, everyday elements, such as stencilled lettering, a torn piece of newspaper, a fake wood-grain pattern, or a wallpaper swatch

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