Cubism vs Purism
キュビスム / ピュリスム
Cubism comes from Avant-garde and Purism from Modern Design Movements. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Cubism
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A pictorial revolution that freed the subject from a single viewpoint, reassembling facets seen from multiple angles on one flat plane. The fractured planes and muted palette of the Analytic phase, then the newspaper collage and lettering of the Synthetic phase, gave twentieth-century graphic design its founding premise: the picture is not a window onto reality but a field of construction.
Purism
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A movement that attacked Cubism's drift into decoration and called for a return to forms fit for the machine age. Standardized objets-types such as bottles, glasses and guitars are painted within a horizontal-vertical order and a restrained palette. Through the journal L'Esprit Nouveau it became a norm for modern architecture and graphics.
| Cubism | Purism | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1907–1925 | 1918–1925 |
| Family | Avant-garde | Modern Design Movements |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Multiple viewpoints presented at once / Subjects broken down into facets / Muted earth tones and grey gradations / Collage of newsprint and lettering | Silhouettes of standardised everyday objects / Compositions built on horizontals and verticals / A restrained number of colours / Contour lines of overlapping forms |
| Best used for | Diagrams and covers that must show several faces or stages at once · Subjects a photograph cannot hold, shown taken apart and rebuilt as construction | Catalogues and technical magazines that present industrial products quietly as standardized types · Pages introducing buildings and equipment, read for dimension on a horizontal-vertical grid with a restrained palette |
| Type | Echo the Synthetic phase, cutting compact grotesques and stencil capitals as pasted paper | A light geometric sans aligned to the horizontals, held to two sizes |
| Composition | Break the subject into planes and set fragments from different viewpoints on one surface | Set the horizontal and vertical armature first, then overlap silhouettes for shallow depth |
| Material | A narrow range of ochre, umber and grey with newsprint and woodgrain paper | Greys and ochres with a little blue, surfaces painted evenly and matte |
| Caution | Avoid fragmenting for decoration alone—if the planes no longer describe the subject from real viewpoints, the result reads as random shattering, not Cubism. | Bringing anecdote or ornament back turns the objects from standardized types into picturesque still lifes, and the clarity of the machine age is lost. |