It is hard to define precise boundaries in art history. Perhaps the most dramatic case in point is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which the British art historian John Golding once described as the major turning point in Picasso’s career and the most important single pictorial document of the twentieth century. But the 1907 oil painting was not cubist. Georges Braque was first horrified by it until he realized what the cubist co-founder had incorporated: El Greco’s angular, elongated forms; Cézanne’s reduction of objects to their simplest forms (cones, cylinders, spheres); flattened perspectives from Greek vase paintings and Egyptian art; and emotionally charged elements of African sculpture.
Mainly through the triumvirate of Picasso, Braque, and Juan Gris, cubism was the forerunner of purism (Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, Amédée Ozenfant), orphism (Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia), futurism (Filippo Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni)...
Keith Garebian has published thirty books and five chapbooks, including the poetry collections Three-Way Renegade and, most recently, Stay. He is featured in the third volume of Laurence Hutchman’s In the Writers’ Words.
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