Cubism

Bryleigh Pierce
Jan 6
3 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

Rather than depicting the world as it appears from a fixed viewpoint, as had been the way since the Renaissance some 500 years earlier, Cubists challenged the traditional models of illusionistic depth, linear perspective and chiaroscuro, all of which gave way to fractured planes and shallow spatial fields. Objects were analysed by being broken apart and reassembled in a manner that they could be viewed simultaneously from different angles, providing greater context to its subjects and asserting that vision is not passive or instantaneous, but cumulative and interpretive.

Marie Laurencin, Les Jeunes Filles (Jeune Femmes, Young Girls) (1910). Oil on canvas, 115 x 146 cm. Moderna Museet, Sweden.

Early Cubist works are often described as “analytic”, characterised by restrained palettes and densely interwoven planes that press forms toward the picture surface, and this phase of the movement privileged investigation over legibility, inviting viewers to participate in the act of reconstruction. Soon after, however, artists began to explore a more synthetic mode, reintroducing colour, pattern and recognisable motifs while incorporating new materials and signs drawn from everyday life which enabled the movement to maintain a continuous dialogue with contemporary culture and discourse.

While rooted in questions of structure and perception, Cubism’s capabilities of accommodating expressive nuance allowed artists working across different media, geographies and sensibilities to reinterpret its principles, providing breadth for the movement to intersect with portraiture, still life, landscape and, later, with design and performance-based works, extending its influence far beyond painting alone.

Grace Crowley, Sailors and Models (1928). Oil on canvas, 54.6 x 81.6 cm. National Gallery of Australia.

Within this expansive framework, artists such as Marie Laurencin, Olga Sacharoff and Alexandra Exter demonstrate how Cubism functioned as a methodological foundation rather than a rigid formula and their practices reveal the movement’s internal diversity and its capacity to support markedly different artistic aims. Laurencin’s work illustrates how Cubist simplification and spatial compression could be harnessed for lyrical and introspective ends, softening geometry into a poetic language of mood and identity. Sacharoff’s paintings, by contrast, emphasise balance and clarity, paving the way for Cubist organisation to coexist with legible figuration and narrative suggestion seen as the movement developed. Exter’s work extends Cubist principles into dynamic compositions that foreground colour, motion and the interaction between art and space, pointing toward broader modernist experiments in theatre and design.

These varied approaches underscore a central fact about Cubism: it was as much about rethinking artistic process as it was about producing a particular look. The movement invited artists to interrogate how images are constructed, how meaning is generated through these images and how art might reflect the complexities of contemporary life. As such, Cubism readily absorbed influences from non-Western art, popular imagery and technological change, situating itself within a global and forward-looking discourse.

Olga Sacharoff, A Wedding (1919-23). Oil on canvas, 152 x 160 cm. Museum Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Spain.

The legacy of Cubism not only lies in its immediate visual innovations, but also in its enduring impact on how art conceives of reality. By dismantling the assumption that painting must mirror the visible world, Cubism opened the door to Abstraction, Surrealism, conceptual approaches and new relationships between art and viewer. It encouraged artists to think structurally, to privilege ideas alongside appearances and to treat the artwork as an autonomous object with its own internal logic. Seen through this broader lens, Cubism emerges as a flexible and inquisitive but still foundational language of Modern art that has been continually reinterpreted throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Cubist women