modern art: Cubism

About 1909 the implications of Cézanne's highly organized yet revolutionary spatial structures were expanded by Picasso and Braque, who invented an abstract art of still lifes converted into shifting volumes and planes. Cubism, developed by the artists of the school of Paris, went through several stages and had an enormous influence on European and American painting and sculpture. In sculpture its notable exponents included Picasso, Duchamp-Villon, Lipchitz, González, and Archipenko, who began to realize the possibilities of convex and concave volumes. Cubism was absorbed in Italy by the exponents of futurism (c.1909–c.1915) and in Germany by the Blaue Reiter group (1911–14); both these movements were cut short by the advent of World War I. Fauvism and cubism were introduced by members of the Eight to a generally shocked American audience in the Armory Show of 1913, and from then on Americans began to participate significantly in the development of modern art (see American art).

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Modern Sculpture
• Postwar Modern Art and the Rejection of Modernism
• Other Modes of Modern Art
• Geometric Abstraction
• Cubism
• The Isms of Early Twentieth-Century Art
• Nineteenth-Century Painting after Impressionism
• Impressionism
• Origins of Modern Art
• Bibliography

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