Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Picasso kicks off Cubism

Cubism, one of the most influential movements of the twentieth century and inspired by Cézanne’s use of basic geometric shapes, is born with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The painting preceded Picasso’s partnership with Georges Braque, who saw it later in 1907. Les Demoiselles is proto-Cubist. The first phase proper, Analytical Cubism, ran from 1908 to 1912, when Picasso and Braque broke objects down into their basic geometrical shapes, extending the ideas of Cézanne nearly to their logical conclusions. Cubism “brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.” This marked a revolutionary departure from the Renaissance tradition of the illusion of space created from linear perspective. Cubism was not only a monumental step in modern art’s abstraction, it was crucial to digital generative art’s development as well. For instance, beyond its embrace of geometric forms, Cubism introduced a temporal, fourth dimension to visual art by presenting multiple perspectives of an object in a single composition. This shattered the notion of a fixed viewpoint and suggested the passage of time and movement within the artwork, anticipating Op and Kinetic art, two key predecessors of digital generative art.