Seeing All Sides: The World of Cubism

Imagine you are drawing a portrait of a friend. You would show one eye, one ear, and a nose pointing to the side — a classic side-on view, or profile. But what if you wanted to show the front of the face AND the side at exactly the same time? What would that even look like? Artists in the early twentieth century asked themselves this same question — and their answers changed the entire history of art.

Cubism is an artistic movement that began in Paris around 1907–1908. It was pioneered chiefly by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The movement rejected the centuries-old tradition of depicting objects from a single, fixed viewpoint. Instead, Cubist artists broke subjects apart and reassembled them, showing multiple perspectives simultaneously on the same flat surface. The name 'Cubism' was coined partly as a joke. When art critic Louis Vauxcelles saw Braque's 1908 landscapes, he described them dismissively as made of 'little cubes.' The name stuck. **Analytic Cubism (roughly 1908–1912)** In this first phase, artists — primarily Picasso and Braque — reduced objects and figures to overlapping geometric facets. The colour palette was deliberately limited: browns, greys, and ochres dominated, so that form and structure took centre stage over colour. Subjects were often guitars, bottles, newspapers, and human figures. The result was fragmented and abstract, and it could be difficult to recognise the original subject. **Synthetic Cubism (roughly 1912–1919)** In the second phase, artists reintroduced colour and began incorporating collage — sticking real materials such as newspaper clippings, wallpaper, and fabric directly onto the canvas. This technique was called papier collé (meaning 'pasted paper'). Shapes became flatter and bolder, and the subject became slightly easier to read. **Why did Cubism matter?** Before Cubism, Western art had relied on linear perspective — a mathematical system for creating the illusion of three-dimensional depth on a flat surface, developed during the Renaissance. Cubism challenged this completely. It argued that the mind does not experience an object from one frozen angle; it builds understanding from many angles and memories at once. Cubism made that mental process visible.