Collection: Cubism & Vorticism

Cubism was an early twentieth century avant-garde movement that originated in Paris between 1907 and 1909, principally through the close collaboration of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The movement dismantled the single fixed viewpoint that had governed Western painting since the Renaissance and replaced it with multiple simultaneous angles fused into a single pictorial surface. Paul Cézanne's late landscapes provided the immediate technical precedent.

The movement developed in two distinct phases. Analytic Cubism, between 1909 and 1912, fragmented still life and figure subjects into a near monochrome architecture of overlapping planes, with the painter's task being to display the object from several positions at once. Synthetic Cubism, from 1912 onward, reintroduced colour and incorporated collage, with Picasso producing the first papier collé later that year and Braque extending the technique into wallpaper, newspaper, and sheet music fragments glued onto the painted surface.

The movement extended quickly to a wider Paris circle, including Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, and Robert Delaunay, who developed the colour-driven offshoot known as Orphism. The Salon Cubists exhibited together at the Section d'Or in 1912 and brought Cubism to a wider public. The 1913 Armory Show in New York introduced the movement to American audiences.

The British branch, Vorticism, was founded by Wyndham Lewis in 1914 with the journal Blast. It combined Cubist faceting with Italian Futurist concerns for energy, and produced its principal output in the year before the First World War. Cubism's influence shaped Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, and De Stijl, and its principal sub-movements include Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, Orphism, and Vorticism.