Cubism
キュビスム / 1907–1925 / Style / Avant-garde
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.
Multiple viewpoints presented at once / Subjects broken down into facets / Muted earth tones and grey gradations / Collage of newsprint and lettering
%2C%20oil%20on%20canvas%2C%20225.4%20x%20183%20cm%2C%20National%20Gallery%20of%20Art.jpg)
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Editorial layouts that fragment a subject into overlapping planes · Brand imagery that signals intellectual, constructed modernism
- Type
- Compact grotesques and stencil-like capitals echoing Synthetic-phase lettering
- Composition
- Overlapping angular planes that fracture the subject; multiple viewpoints collapsed into one shallow picture space
- Material
- Muted ochres, umbers and greys; newsprint textures and pasted-paper edges
- 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.
- Further study
- The difference between Analytic and Synthetic Cubism / Papier collé and the introduction of type / The branching into Purism and Orphism