Matisse’s jab at Braque’s cubes named an art revolution
Cubism began in early-twentieth-century Paris, analysing subjects into abstract facets seen from many angles at once. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque led; Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Gris, Léger and others joined. Louis Vauxcelles, repeating Matisse’s remark about little cubes, fixed the nickname after Braque’s 1908 L’Estaque work.
Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is often called proto-Cubist; the movement surged about 1907–1911. Juan Gris later labelled Analytic Cubism for a radical 1910–1912 phase, followed by Synthetic Cubism’s collage-friendly constructions. Offshoots included Orphism and Purism; influence spilled into music, ballet, literature, and architecture. Dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler backed Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger with exclusive contracts before 1914.
Salon Cubists such as Metzinger and Gleizes built reputations at the Salon d’Automne and Indépendants, facing public scrutiny Kahnweiler’s private stable avoided. Vauxcelles sneered at them in 1910 as clueless geometers turning bodies into pale cubes. The spring 1911 Indépendants, where Delaunay hung his Eiffel Tower, gave Cubism its first public row, and in 1912 the hanging committee, including his own brothers, turned away Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, a snub he never forgave.
By 1911 Picasso was widely hailed as inventor, though Braque’s spatial experiments reclaim priority in some accounts. Gertrude Stein pointed to Picasso’s 1909 Reservoir at Horta as early Cubist landscape. Kahnweiler argued Cubist space affirmed canvas flatness—a claim Greenberg later contested. At that 1912 Salon, newcomer Gris showed his Portrait of Picasso, alongside Delaunay’s huge La Ville de Paris and Léger’s The Wedding.
John Berger likened Cubism’s model to a diagram of invisible forces. Picasso was still working the idiom in 1915 with Man with a Pipe. Whether gallery Cubism and Salon Cubism share one method remains debated, but together they taught modern eyes that a single viewpoint was optional.
Source: Cubism
