Cubisim

Cubism is an art movement started around the beginning of the 20th century. I decided to do my own painting mimicking that of Pablo Picasso’s ‘The Weeping Woman’ Picasso’s main inspiration laid within the angular designs of african masks, with their linear strokes and block like shapes. Additionally he uses very bold and brash colour schemes where colours will clash immensely with each other to make the art stand out.

Cubism is split into analytic cubism and synthetic cubism. Analytic the first form of cubism was dull coloured and detailed where the subject matter would be fragmented and distorted because cubism is looking at a subject matter and painting it at different angles. Synthetic cubism consists of much simplier geometric shapes and it is much more difficult to define the edges in the artwork. For example Picasso’s weeping woman (Image to the left) you can see the strong and bold shapes, the angular outlines which can be harder to define. It is a portrait but an abstract portrait. As you can see there are some influences of african tribal masks in there too with the bold colours.

Cubism is summarized as an art style where there is a distortion of view and multiple viewpoints. During Picasso’s art career, there was the Spanish Restoration, where Spain were recovering from war and such, this could mean the lack of supplies and such for Picasso and explain the choice of colour, however there is still the hint of impressionism in the cubist style as it still continues not to blend colours and keeps them bolder and brash.