These collected objects were to act as inspiration for Picasso’s paintings and sculptures.
Cubists also emulated the way African and Oceanic sculpture played with perspective and dimension. They were at once abstract and figurative, elongating or contracting limbs and torsos, shrinking or exaggerating heads. Where the Cubists emphasized the two-dimensional nature of canvas, Tribal sculpture often gave its figures a two-dimensional appearance, compressing perspective into one field of vision.
This ancient artistic inspiration offered the avant-garde an escape from the cultural standards of classical Western sculpture. Western art, from classicism to the renaissance, favored smooth, soft, and precise representation. The avant-garde hoped to challenge the standards that this art set, Cubism partly doing so through the appropriation of African and Oceanic artistic figuration. Not only did African and Oceanic art explore dimension and perspective, but it also incorporated a series of natural materials like wood, metals, and ivory. Synthetic Cubists also sought to use raw materials in their artistic works. Through this appropriation, Cubism challenged the dominant Western aesthetic and ushered in a new function of Western art, one not based around pleasing traditional and elite artistic tastes but rather exploring beyond what the eye can see from a single limited perspective.
Examples of Cubist works
Picasso is one of the most famous avant-garde artists, and his works are certainly amongst the most recognizable of the Cubist movement. His painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is often referred to as the “first Cubist picture” and is exemplary of what became the aesthetic of Cubism (Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 2019).
It shows five naked women whose angular bodies crowd an exaggeratedly two-dimensional space. In comparison to the nude motif of classical painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon proved striking in its disregard of the soft shapes and colors that previously constituted aesthetic beauty. The faces of the women are thought to resemble the African masks that Picasso was so inspired by. Exaggerated features and colors as well as the angular and multi-dimensional aspects of the women’s faces challenged the naturalist beauty standards of Western art.
Guernica (1937) is another of Picasso’s most famous works. The huge canvas shows a greyscale scene of violence in response to the German bombing of the Basque town that the painting was named after. Picasso was not particularly political, atypical for an avant-garde artist at the time, but Guernica was certainly an anti-war symbol, condemning the violence of the Nazis and bringing attention to the horrors of the Spanish civil war. Guernica shows the power that Cubism’s strange shapes, angles, and semi-abstract forms had to horrify, move, and inform viewers.
In the early (analytic) stages of Cubism, Braque tended to paint more abstract-leaning works than Picasso. Man with a Guitar (1911–1912) is one such example. If it weren’t for the descriptive title, what the painting depicts would not be easily decipherable. Man with a Guitar shows fragments and suggestions of vaguely human and instrument features amongst cylindrical and spherical shapes. The lines that fragment and slice the brown-grey shapes come together to create the outline of the man and his guitar. In typical Cubist fashion, Braque subverted the illusion of perspective that painting had previously depicted, instead oscillating between unnatural angular depth and two-dimensional space.
These works that partly constitute the Cubist canon exemplify the way that the movement revolutionized the art world. With the unconventional influence of what was considered “primitive” art, the denaturalization of objects and figures, and the reinstatement of two-dimensional canvas space, Cubism challenged the standards and purpose of Western art.
The lasting influence of Cubism
Cubism evolved to use many different mediums to produce art of varying degrees of abstraction, influencing not only the trajectory of the avant-garde but of art in general. Cubism’s later incorporation of everyday materials is often thought to have inspired the Dadaist readymades while elements of the Cubist tendency to denaturalize objects can be observed in Surrealism. As Willard Bohn asserts in The Early Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art, Cubism’s aesthetic approach was so radical that it “exerted a disproportional influence on modern art” (2018).
Not only did Cubism set the scene for the incredibly influential movements of the avant-garde that proceeded, but it is widely accepted to have changed the way that works of art interact with their subjects and to have confronted the limiting expectations of aesthetic beauty. This aesthetic revolution was one that subverted the naturalism and objectivity of previously existing art and challenged the eye of the viewer to observe distorted and fragmented images from a seemingly illogical and manifold point of view.
R. Bruce Elder describes this new artistic order in Cubism and Futurism, asserting that,
