Published: June 4, 2024 | Last Updated: June 11, 2025
What is Cubism? Definition & Meaning
Cubism is a 20th-century art movement that broke images into geometric forms and showed multiple viewpoints at once. Developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1907 and 1914, Cubism rejected traditional depth and perspective. Instead of painting what they saw, Cubists painted how they thought. They fractured space and rebuilt reality through shape, surface, and concept.
How Cubism Started
It began with a rupture. In 1907, Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Five nude figures. Distorted angles. Flattened space. The faces were modeled after African masks. The body parts fractured into planes.
Picasso was reacting to Cézanne’s late works, which reduced forms to cylinders, spheres, and cones. This painting marked the start of something new. It would become Cubism.
By 1908, Georges Braque joined him. A critic mocked his angular landscapes as “bizarre cubes,” and the label stuck. Braque and Picasso began working side by side. Braque later described it as being “like two mountain climbers roped together.” They stripped painting down to shape, line, and surface. Together, they developed Cubism in two distinct phases.
Analytical vs. Synthetic vs. Crystal Cubism
Analytical Cubism (1909–1912) breaks objects into overlapping fragments. It uses muted browns, greys, and ochres. Perspective disappears. Shadows vanish. You’re left with geometry and suggestion, parts of a violin, a bottle, a face, shattered and reassembled from multiple angles.
Synthetic Cubism (1912–1914) flips that method inside out. Instead of analyzing form, it builds it from parts. Artists pasted in newsprint, wallpaper, wood grain, or labels. They used real textures to represent flatness. This is when Cubism became collage. Painting and sculpture became part of the same process.
Crystal Cubism (1914–1918) came after the chaos of early Cubism. It cleaned up the surface. It brought order, balance, and structure. Instead of broken planes and shifting angles, forms became more stable. Lines were clear. Shapes were hard-edged. Artists reduced objects into clean, geometric forms, almost like architectural diagrams.
World War I was happening outside, which might explain why artists sought solitude. Inside the studio, Cubists made calm, rational images. Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinger led this shift. Their paintings used symmetry, clarity, and bold color. You could still see the Cubist logic (multiple viewpoints, flat space), but the noise was gone. Crystal Cubism gave the movement a sense of precision. It became less radical but more refined.
Cubism After 1918 (the end of WWI) split into two directions. Some artists remained true to their style: clean, ordered, and modern. Others moved on, using Cubist ideas in new ways. The original movement had already peaked. But its methods stuck around. You can see them in Art Deco. You can see them in Bauhaus design. You can see them in the way modern architecture reduces form to shape and line.
Picasso kept using Cubist elements for decades. He mixed them with neoclassical figures, surrealist symbols, and personal styles. Braque did the same. Cubism wasn’t dead, but it stopped being a movement and became part of the visual language of modern art.
Painters, sculptors, and designers continued to borrow from it, breaking down form, simplifying shape, and layering space. The sharp edge of early Cubism faded, but its bones stayed in place.
How Cubism Shaped Film
Cubism has influenced everything from motion graphics, editing, design, and abstract animation. Ballet Mécanique (1924) by Fernand Léger uses mechanical rhythm and visual repetition to echo Cubist fragmentation. You’ll see faces, gears, and objects repeat and dissolve in rhythmic loops.
The influence of Cubism returns in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). Art directors Dean Gordon and Patrick O’Keefe cited Cubist art as the reference for how dimensional quakes and visual shifts appear.
The dimensional quakes blend multiple moments into one visual structure. Time folds across a single image. The film applies Cubist structure through color, texture, and fractured space, but also through the multiple viewpoints of the various dimensional Spider-Men. Movement becomes design. Each element supports the geometry of the frame.
Legacy and Cultural Impact
Cubism changed how we see. It shattered the idea that paintings must show one scene from one angle. It opened the door to abstraction, collage, montage, and motion. It shaped Surrealism, Futurism, and Abstract Expressionism. It influenced sculpture and even architecture, where planes and volumes became dominant over ornament.
Writers and poets used the same methods: fragmentation, simultaneity, and layered meaning. Graphic designers and filmmakers followed, applying Cubism’s geometry to layout, montage, and spatial rhythm.
Summing Up
Cubism broke down the image and rebuilt it from fragments. What began with two artists cutting through tradition evolved into a global movement that reshaped art, design, and cinema. Its legacy is visible in every visual medium that bends space, flattens depth, or layers meaning. Cubism shifted the focus from observation to construction. Artists broke images apart and rebuilt them from sharp, deliberate pieces.
Read Next: Curious how art movements shaped film?
Explore our full Visual Art Timeline to see how styles like Surrealism, Cubism, and Suprematism influenced cinema’s most experimental moments.
Or keep browsing our Film Movements & World Cinema section for more on the histories that shaped screen culture around the globe.
