Most people have heard of Cubism and probably even have a fair idea of what a Cubist painting looks like. And they are certainly familiar with Cubism’s most famous figure, Pablo Picasso—an artist who, despite his misogyny, sexual predation, and generally poor treatment of the women in his life, remains synonymous with the idea of artistic genius.
But while obvious to most that, say, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon looks drastically different from Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the non-artgoing public has a limited understanding of the extent of Cubism’s revolutionary transformation of the Western tradition in art—which is to say, the specific canon that evolved in Europe over a 500-year period starting in the 15th century.
Cubism’s emergence in the early 1900s signaled a seismic break with artistic tenets that had held sway since the revival of Greco-Roman art during the Renaissance. While those conventions had been under assault for much of the 19th century, Cubism delivered the final blow, paving the way for the avant-garde movements that followed.
But Cubism was also a harbinger larger historical developments to come. Its shattering of form, composition, and pictorial space seems in hindsight to have visually foreshadowed the epochal collapse of a political order that had governed the Continent since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Indeed, Cubism’s explosive break with tradition would soon echo through the carnage of World War I and the end of the monarchist regimes that started it. On can make an argument then, that understanding the 20th century begins with understanding Cubism.
