How Cubism got its name and what gave rise to it?

How Cubist art got its name? and where?

In 1907, Pablo Picasso showed off to Georges Braque what would become known as the first Cubist artwork: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Young Ladies of Avignon). Picasso and Braque, who lived in Paris, are the founders of Cubism. A famous French critic, Louis Vauxcelles, in 1908, saw the paintings and rejected the style as “bizarre cubiques,” thus giving it its name. That’s the same guy who also criticized Fauvism and inadvertently gave it its name!

What gave rise to Cubism?

One of the challenging questions to ask about the evolution of art is to wonder why a particular style appeared at a certain point in history. Why Picasso and other Cubist artists went into that direction? Artists by nature attempt to find new ways of viewing art. Perhaps the reason is the generations that preceded them had already covered so much ground: experiments with light (Impressionism), color (Fauvism) and texture (Expressionism). So much had already been done! And certainly artists were not willing to go back to perfectly representational art of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. So continuing on the route of modern semi-abstraction started by the earliest Impressionists led them to deconstruct compositions. The end result is a painting broken up into cubes, squares, spheres and cones. They eliminated depth and made the image fragments transparent and overlapping. Then they rearranged the bits and pieces to make the paintings intentionally hard to interpret.

The father of Cubism, Picasso, went on to invent a new style by 1912, that is Synthetic Cubism. For the first time, artists used more than paint, they integrated everyday materials into their paintings. Never in the history of art did it evolve so much in such a short period of time!