What art movement did Picasso co-found?
Quick answer
Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism with French artist Georges Braque, starting around 1907–1908. Cubist artists broke objects into geometric shapes and showed them from several viewpoints at once, instead of a single, realistic view. It became one of the most influential movements in modern art.
What is Cubism?
Traditional painting showed a scene as if seen through a window, from one fixed point. Cubists asked: why not show the front, side and top of an object all at once? They flattened space and broke subjects into cubes, cones and planes. The name came from a critic who said Braque’s paintings looked like they were made of “little cubes.”
Two phases of Cubism
| Phase | Years | Style |
|---|---|---|
| Analytic Cubism | ~1909–1912 | Objects broken into many small facets; muted browns and grays |
| Synthetic Cubism | ~1912–1914 | Simpler shapes, brighter colors and collage with paper, newspaper and other materials |
Picasso and Braque worked so closely that their paintings from this time can be hard to tell apart.
Key works
- Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907): a shocking painting of five women with angular bodies and mask-like faces, often seen as the start of Cubism; it’s at MoMA, New York
- Still Life with Chair Caning (1912): one of the first collages in fine art
- Guernica (1937): Picasso’s later, Cubist-influenced protest against the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War; it’s in Madrid’s Reina Sofía museum
Picasso’s many periods
| Period | Years | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Blue Period | 1901–1904 | Sad scenes in blue tones |
| Rose Period | 1904–1906 | Warmer colors, circus performers |
| Cubism | 1907–1919 | With Braque |
| Neoclassical and Surrealist phases | 1920s–1930s |
Picasso (1881–1973), born in Málaga, Spain, created an estimated 50,000 artworks over his long life.
Cubism inspired later movements such as Surrealism; see Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. For an earlier master, see who painted The Starry Night.
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