
Cubism and early abstraction: c. 1907 – 1935

Rodchenko depicted the rapidly changing world of newspapers, cameras, and telephones in new and unexpected ways.

Learn how to paint in the Cubist style of artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
How to paint like Pablo Picasso (Cubism)

Must art be beautiful?
The Old Guitarist, and the question of ...

Cubist sculpture challenged the European sculptural tradition in terms of form, media, and often subject matter.
Cubist Sculpture II

Severini and Boccioni use brilliant colors, abstraction, fragmentation and repetition of forms to create a vibrant whirling energy.
Gino Severini, Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal ...

The Futurists called for the destruction of museums, libraries, and cultural monuments and glorified modern technology and the speed of automobiles, trains, and airplanes.
Umberto Boccioni and the Futurist City

Words, sounds, images, shapes, and colors were all used to convey the intensity of experience and bring the viewer into the heart of the action.
Futurist Free Word Painting

Which one is “true,” the one that tricks the viewer into thinking it is really there, or the one that announces itself as what it is, lines drawn on paper?
Juan Gris, The Table

Delaunay and Léger used Cubism’s abstract language of fractured forms and spatial dislocations to express the modern urban experience.
The Cubist City – Robert Delaunay and ...

Cubism claimed to represent the modern world in new, specifically modern ways.
Salon Cubism

Despite its often baffling innovations, one of the defining features of Cubism is its engagement with the Western painting tradition.
Georges Braque, Violin and Palette

Three Musicians looks like a collage made from cut out pieces of colored paper — but it is an oil painting.
Pablo Picasso, The Three Musicians

When we consider what a Cubist painting represents we engage in an intellectual or conceptual activity rather than a merely perceptual or visual one.
Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso: Two Cubist ...

This use of multiple perspectives was a hallmark of the Cubist style, but Braque and Picasso never explained why they employed this technique.
Cubism and multiple perspectives

Picasso’s portrait of Kahnweiler presents the essential innovations of Analytic Cubism.
Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

Guitar demonstrates the breakdown between art and life that becomes a key theme of twentieth-century sculpture.
Cubist Sculpture I

The traditional naturalistic style can't elucidate the deep underlying mysteries of the universe—there are truths inaccessible to the scientific method, and a meta-reality beyond the reach of human perception.
Abstract art and Theosophy

The Constructivists worked to establish a new social role for art and the artist in the communist society of 1920s Soviet Russia.
Constructivism, Part I

Constructivist Kiosks, rubber overshoes, textile designs and posters — all aligned with the ideology of communism and contributing to the creation of a new society.
Constructivism, Part II

The Russian avant-garde adapted European modernist techniques to depict specifically Russian subjects.