6 Artists Who Made Cubism Popular

The movement opened up new possibilities for the treatment of visual reality in art and was the starting point for many later abstract styles, including constructivism and neo-plasticism.

Here we explore the artists who inspired the Cubist style and were the main champions of the movement.

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new artistic movement, Cubism.

Through his paintings, Cézanne appeared to be capturing things from slightly different points of view, as well as distilling objects and landscapes into flat planes of color.

Even though Cézanne was mainly trying to create volume through color planes, the future Cubists saw a tendency to represent nature with geometric shapes in his work, which is central to the early development of Cubism.

Pablo Picasso

As well as being inspired by Cézanne, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso was also influenced by African tribal masks, which are often highly stylized and non-naturalistic, but still present a vivid human image.

Famous for seemingly rearranging the facial features of his subjects, Picasso once said: “A head is a matter of eyes, nose, mouth, which can be distributed in any way you like”.

Picasso’s work moved through many periods during his lifetime, and his Cubist works took shape in two forms. The first was his Analytic Cubism era (1909–1912), which is a style of painting Picasso developed with Georges Braque, and saw them using monochrome brownish and neutral colors. Both artists took apart objects and "analyzed" them in terms of their shapes.

The second was Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919), a further development of the genre of Cubism, in which cut paper fragments – often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages – were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.

Braque conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, seeming to question the most standard of artistic conventions.

In his village scenes, for example, Braque frequently reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading to fragment the image so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional. In 1908, a French critic once described his work as “reducing everything, places and figures and houses, to geometric schemas, to cubes".

Fernand Léger

In 1911, Fernand Léger was one of a handful of artists who were responsible for revealing Cubism to the general public for the first time in an organized show. Léger’s style of Cubism was personal to him and was called by his critics, “Tubism”, which referenced his penchant to emphasize cylindrical forms.

Up until 1914, Léger’s paintings became increasingly abstract. Their tubular, conical, and cubed forms are rendered in rough patches of primary colors augmented with green, black and white. After the war, the artist’s works became more mechanical in style and elements of this work remained present until he stopped painting in the 1950s.

While Picasso and Braque created portraits of still lifes, Mondrian was drawn to nature and interpreted that through a network of angles and grids. This use of space and regimented approach eventually led Mondrian down a path toward abstract art and he aimed to “articulate a mystic conception of cosmic harmony that lay behind the surfaces of reality”.

Back in Holland, Mondrian worked to distill his painting style, which saw the development of the artist’s well-known aesthetic of horizontal and vertical axes with pops of color, which would later become known as neo-plasticism.