Understanding a Movement You Might Not Like at First – But May Come to Love

Walk into a gallery and stand before a Cubist painting, and chances are you’ll hear someone mutter, “I don’t get it.” Angular faces, fractured guitars, bottles broken into shards of geometry; Cubism can feel bewildering at first glance. Yet this very bewilderment is what makes Cubism so vital. It asks us not to accept art as a mirror of reality, but to embrace it as a new way of seeing.

Understanding a Movement You Might Not Like at First – But May Come to Love

When Picasso and Braque started experimenting in Paris in the early 1900s, they weren’t just painting in a new style; they were changing the very rules of how art could represent the world. For hundreds of years, artists had followed the traditions of perspective, depth, and proportion, aiming to copy reality as the eye sees it. Cubism broke away from that tradition.

“Cubism is not painting things as they look, but as they are.”

Attributed to Pablo Picasso.

Instead of showing one single view, Cubist paintings combined many angles at once, capturing the deeper sense of an object across time and space. A violin or a café table became more than an image - it became a visible idea.

What Inspired Cubism?

The influences behind this change in art were wide and varied. Paul Cézanne’s late paintings, with their idea that nature could be broken down into cones, spheres, and cylinders, gave Cubism its foundation. African and Iberian art, with bold shapes and stylised forms, showed Picasso and Braque how to move beyond realism. Even Fauvism, a movement full of bright colour and expressive brushwork, played a part, though Cubism reacted against it by choosing structure and order instead of spontaneity.

The Lasting Impact of Cubism

The impact of Cubism spread far beyond painting. It paved the way to abstract art, leading to artists like Piet Mondrian, whose De Stijl works reduced images to grids and primary colours, and Wassily Kandinsky, who used abstraction to explore pure form and emotion. Futurism, an Italian movement that celebrated speed, machines, and modern life, borrowed Cubism’s fractured planes to show energy and motion. Surrealism, which explored dreams and the subconscious, drew on Cubism’s ability to show more than one reality at once.

Architecture and design also absorbed Cubist ideas, inspiring the clean lines of modernist buildings and furniture. Film used montage and broken perspectives in ways that echoed Cubism, while fashion designers like Coco Chanel brought geometric clarity into clothing.

So why should we be interested in the Cubist movement? Because Cubism isn’t about confusion - it’s about freedom. It breaks art away from simple imitation, asks us to rethink how we see, and invites us to view the world in a richer, more complex way.

Next time you face a Cubist painting, don’t ask “What is it?” - ask “What new way of seeing is this?” More than a hundred years after it began, it reminds us that art is not just what we see, but how we think.

Traditional art used perspective to create the illusion of depth, guiding the eye into the picture. Cubism broke that rule. Instead of showing a realistic three‑dimensional space, Cubist paintings exist on a flat surface, where objects are shown from multiple angles at once. This flattening makes the canvas feel like a collage of viewpoints, challenging the idea that art must mirror reality. The result is a dynamic surface where foreground and background merge into one plane.

Quick Guide to the Movements Mentioned

Fauvism: Early 20th-century French movement known for bold, non-naturalistic colour and expressive brushwork.

Abstract Expressionism: Mid-20th-century style, especially in America, where artists like Kandinsky and later Jackson Pollock used abstraction to convey emotion and energy.

Futurism: Italian avant-garde movement celebrating speed, machines, and modern life, often using fractured forms to suggest motion.

Surrealism: Begun in the 1920s, focused on dreams, the subconscious, and unexpected juxtapositions to challenge rational thought.

De Stijl: Dutch movement led by Piet Mondrian, reducing art to geometric grids and primary colours to express universal harmony.