Analytical Cubism
Analytical Cubism is the first phase of Cubism, developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between about 1908 and 1912. Objects and figures were analyzed into overlapping facets and shallow planes, viewed from several sides at once and rebuilt on the canvas as a scaffolding of fine lines and hatched brushwork. Color was deliberately drained to ochres, grays, and browns so that structure - not local color - would hold the image together, and passages of facets bleed across contours to merge figure with ground. Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Jean Metzinger extended the language. By 1912 the style tipped into collage (papier collé), and its premise - that a picture is a constructed object, not a window - became the hinge of 20th-century art.
Defining characteristics
- Forms broken into small, overlapping facets and shallow planes
- Multiple viewpoints fused into a single image
- Near-monochrome palette of ochres, grays, and browns
- Passage: facets bleed across contours, merging figure and ground
- Fine, hatched brushwork and scaffolding-like grid structures
- Cropped, flattened space with no single vanishing point
Key figures
- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) — Co-inventor of Cubism, who pushed faceting to the edge of abstraction
- Georges Braque (1882-1963) — Co-inventor; master of the near-monochrome analytic canvas and papier collé
- Juan Gris (1887-1927) — Gave analytical structure a crystalline clarity before moving to Synthetic Cubism
- Fernand Léger (1881-1955) — Tubular, contrast-color variant of the analytic idiom
- Jean Metzinger (1883-1956) — Painter and theorist who codified Cubist practice (Du Cubisme, 1912)
Example works
- Violin and Palette — Georges Braque (1909)
- Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler — Pablo Picasso (1910)
Sources
- Analytical Cubism - WikiArt institution