Collection: Cubism & Abstract Art

Cubism and the abstract movements that followed it constitute one of the central inventions of twentieth century art. Between 1907 and the First World War, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, working in close dialogue in Paris, dismantled the single fixed viewpoint that had governed Western painting since the Renaissance. They replaced it with multiple simultaneous angles fused into a single pictorial surface, an idea that proved capable of generating decades of further work.

The two phases of the movement, Analytic and Synthetic Cubism, differ in temperature. The earlier paintings reduce subjects to a near monochrome architecture of facets, requiring sustained looking before figure or still life resolves. The later phase reintroduces colour, papier collé, and printed fragments, opening the language outward toward design, typography, and the modernist book.

Cubism became the gateway to non-representational art. In Russia, Suprematism and Constructivism extended the lesson into pure geometric abstraction with a social and political programme attached. Kazimir Malevich reduced the painted surface to a black square and then to a white field; El Lissitzky applied the same vocabulary to typography, exhibition design, and the propaganda poster. In the Netherlands, De Stijl and Neoplasticism built a parallel grammar of horizontal, vertical, and primary colour, which entered architecture and product design through the Bauhaus.

Mid-century New York carried the impulse into Abstract Expressionism, very different in scale and gesture but continuous in its commitment to the autonomy of the painted surface. The prints here document each of these branches. The collection sits between the gallery's Expressionism & Fauvism holdings and the Futurism & Constructivism selection, the parallel European avant gardes that crossed Cubism's path repeatedly during the same decade.