At first, Picasso and Braque’s explorations were figurative - it was still possible to discern the person or object that was being exploded into geometry. Like many new ideas, cubism evolved very quickly at first. Braque and Picasso were officially ‘Cubists.’ It was Braque’s landscapes that caught the eye of the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles - who describes the work as reducing the world to ‘geometric outlines, to cubes’ coining the now famous term. Braque countered with landscapes where pyramids and cubes replaced the trees. As usual, Picasso kicked things off with a bang, shocking his friends and compatriots with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a portrait of five prostitutes in aggressive postures with bodies distorted to near abstraction.
#CUBISM ART PICASSO SERIES#
Cézanne’s simple and intense forms made a powerful impression on Picasso and Braque, and over the next three years they began a series of experiments to push their artwork even further. In 1907, a year after Cézanne’s death, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque visited a posthumous retrospective of the impressionist giant at the Salon d'Automne. And true to his word, Cézanne’s paintings often vibrate with color - a simple still life with apples look like they might shake themselves off the canvas. Paul Cézanne said that painting was painful to him - that the intensity of the real world beat on his senses. Neither the good nor the true neither the useful nor the useless.” - Pablo Picasso The goal I proposed myself in making cubism? To paint and nothing more. We only wanted to express what was in us. “When we discovered Cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering Cubism.