Cubist Style

Cubism began as a 20th century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, inspiring related movements in music, literature and architecture. In cubist artworks objects are broken up, analyzed and re-assembled in an abstracted form. Instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint the artist shows the subject from different angles to represent it in a greater context. Often surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. Background and object planes interpenetrate to create shallow ambiguous spaces which are one of cubism’s distinct characteristics. Cubism and its legacy continue to inform the work of contemporary artists. Cubism attempts to take representational imagery beyond the mechanically photographic and move beyond the bounds of traditional single-point perspective perceived as if by a totally immobile viewer.

Cubist Painters