Cubism – Surface, Space, Perspective and Simultaneity
Cubism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, above all in the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Its starting point was a rejection of the idea, dominant since the Renaissance, that a picture should represent the visible world from one fixed viewpoint.
Cubism fundamentally questioned this order. An object does not possess only one view. We can see it from the front, from the side and from above; we move around it and combine these different impressions into a whole within our perception.
This is where Cubism begins: it breaks forms and spaces down into planes, angles and partial views, and then recombines them on the surface of the picture.
In early, so-called Analytical Cubism, objects are almost dissected and unfolded. Volumes break apart into facets, foreground and background interpenetrate, and different viewpoints appear simultaneously. The pictorial space becomes less unambiguous, but at the same time more complex.
With Synthetic Cubism, the visual language later became clearer and flatter. Larger colour fields, signs, fragments of writing and collage elements replaced the extreme fragmentation of the analytical phase. A picture no longer had to depict an object in full. A few characteristic forms or signs could be enough to make it recognisable.
Here too, simplification does not mean impoverishment, but concentration. An object is reduced to what is essential for its perception and pictorial meaning.
One of Cubism’s decisive achievements lies in its new relationship between surface and space. The picture plane is no longer understood merely as a window through which we look into an illusionistic space. It remains visibly a surface and can nevertheless generate spatial ideas.
Space is no longer created exclusively through perspective and the illusion of depth, but through overlapping, displacement, changes of scale, shifts of direction and the interaction of forms.
Cubism therefore also changes the representation of time. When several views of an object appear at once, a single image contains, in a sense, several successive moments of perception. Sequence is transformed into simultaneity on the surface.
Cubism does not simply show what something looks like at one particular moment. It attempts to bring together different experiences of an object or a space within a single image.
Its particular strength therefore lies in its ability to relate multiple perspectives, spaces and moments of perception to one another. It can make connections visible even when they could never be seen simultaneously from a single viewpoint.
Cubism does not break reality apart in order to dissolve it.
It breaks it apart in order to make its relationships visible in a new way.
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