FUTURISM AS THE AVANT-GARDE Futurism was the first movement to aim directly and deliberately at a mass audience, principally an urban audience. In its concern with equating art with life, Futurism aimed at no less than transforming the political mentality of...
COLLAGES, CONSTRUCTIONS, AND COLOR Synthetic Cubism eliminated mimetic representation in favor of using direct materials directly. The parts of a Cubist collage are large and visible, distinct and separate. The design is stressed nakedly and subject matter is...
ANALYTIC CUBISM One could ask the question, when did “Cubism” begin? Some art historians consider a single painting of 1907, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as the beginning. But that would be assuming that Picasso was the most important Cubist artist. The problem...
THE CUBISTS AND THEIR CIRCLE Today Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) are considered to be the “True Cubists,” to borrow a phrase from art historian, Edward Fry. But at the time Cubism was famous or infamous with the Parisian public,...
CUBISM AND ITS CONTEXT Perhaps more than any other major art movement of the first half of the Twentieth Century, Cubism is both transitional and Janus-faced in its response to the decades of changes of the Nineteenth Century. On one hand, the Cubist artists shared...