TL;DR
Cubism taught us to see not just with our eyes, but with our minds. It replaced a passive, window-like view of the world with an active, analytical and multifaceted one that reflected the complexity of the modern age. However, it was not really successful in it's own terms. It succeeded more in terms of inspiring following movements.
The Bad
Contemporary Criticisms (The Public and Critical Outrage)
When Cubism emerged (c. 1907-1914), it was met with bewilderment, mockery and hostility.
Deliberate Ugliness and Destruction of Beauty:
The traditional goal of art, for the public, was to create something beautiful, or portray the ideal. Cubism seemed to do the opposite.
- Fragmentation: Breaking down objects and figures into geometric shards was seen as an act of violence against form itself. It was perceived as nihilistic, destroying the recognizable, beautiful world and replacing it with a confusing, shattered one.
- "Unfinished" and "Incompetent": To the untrained eye, Cubist paintings looked like incomplete puzzles or the work of an artist who simply could not draw. The rejection of perspective, realistic shading and smooth modeling was interpreted as a lack of skill, not an intellectual choice.
Extreme Intellectualism and Inaccessibility:
Cubism was not a art of the heart, but of the mind. This made it deeply alienating.
- An "Art for Artists": The general public felt it was an inside joke they weren't in on. The concepts of depicting multiple viewpoints simultaneously or analyzing form were intellectual exercises that required explanation. This created a rift between the avant-garde and the public.
- Requires a Manual: Unlike a landscape or a portrait, a Cubist work often couldn't be understood on a purely visual or emotional level. You needed to understand the theory behind it, which defeated the purpose of visual art.
Alienation and Dehumanization:
The analytical approach to form often stripped subjects of their humanity and emotional resonance.
- Treating People like Objects: In Analytic Cubism, a human figure was broken down and analyzed with the same cold detachment as a violin or a bottle. This was unsettling to viewers who sought empathy and narrative in art.
- Loss of the Subject: The subject matter became nearly impossible to identify, buried under a web of faceted planes. The focus shifted so completely to the structure of the subject that the subject's inherent meaning or beauty was lost.
Modern Critiques
A Potential Dead End for Representation:
Cubism pushed the analysis of figurative form to its absolute logical extreme.
- Nowhere Left to Go: After breaking an object into a near-abstract field of overlapping planes (Analytic Cubism) and then reassembling it with foreign elements like newspaper clippings (Synthetic Cubism), what was the next step? The movement's own rigor and intellectual framework made it difficult to evolve beyond itself. It ultimately led directly to pure abstraction, a path that not all art was meant to follow.
Cold and Emotionally Sterile:
Compared to the raw emotion of Expressionism or the dream-like fantasies of Surrealism, Analytic Cubism feels clinical and detached.
- The Triumph of Intellect Over Emotion: Its focus on formal problem-solving (how to depict 3D form on a 2D surface from multiple angles) can make it feel like a brilliant but cold scientific diagram. It lacks the warmth, passion and psychological depth that many viewers crave in art.
A "Boy's Club" and Exclusionary:
The narrative of Cubism is overwhelmingly centered on two men: Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
- Marginalizing Others: While other important artists like Juan Gris and Fernand Léger were involved, the movement is famously defined by the partnership of Picasso and Braque, who worked so closely they referred to themselves as "two mountaineers roped together." This sidelined other contributors.
- Limited Scope: The subjects of classic Cubism are almost exclusively still lifes — musical instruments, bottles, glasses, pipes. This is a narrow, domestic and arguably bourgeois world. It avoided the big social, political and historical themes that other movements engaged with.
It Created a Template for "Difficulty" in Modern Art:
Cubism can be seen as the point where art embraced obscurity.
- The "My Kid Could Do That" Precedent: By deliberately rejecting conventional skill and beauty, Cubism laid the groundwork for a century of art that prioritizes concept over craft. While this was liberating for artists, it also created a permanent chasm of understanding between the art world and the general public, a divide that can be blamed on Cubism's legacy.
It failed in it's own terms
- Analytic Cubism (1909-1912) The goal of showing 2D slices of 3D objects was never really achieved. The "slices" do not look like a 3D decomposition. They look contrived and thrown together. Additionally, the lack of color was unnecessary to the goal and when combined with the mess of overlapping slices it made for ugly compositions.
- Synthetic Cubism (1912-onward) was more colorful, but it gave up on multiple slices.
The Good
It Revolutionized the Representation of Reality
Cubism didn't try to destroy reality; it tried to represent it more completely.
- Multiple Viewpoints: Before Cubism, painting was like a photograph from a single, fixed point of view. Cubism shattered that limitation. It showed the top, front and side of an object simultaneously on a flat canvas. This was a more holistic way of representing form, acknowledging that we understand objects by moving around them and combining multiple glimpses in our mind.
- A New Kind of Truth: Cubist artists argued that a Picasso painting of a violin was truer than a photorealistic one because it showed more of the violin's essential form and structure than a single snapshot could.
It Emphasized the Flatness of the Canvas
For centuries, artists had tried to create the illusion of depth on a flat surface. Cubists did the opposite:
- Celebrating the 2D Surface: They acknowledged that a painting is first and foremost a flat object. By breaking the subject into planes and rearranging them, they created a dynamic tension between the three-dimensional subject and the two-dimensional picture plane. This was an honest and revolutionary approach to the nature of painting.
It Laid the Foundation for Abstract Art
Cubism was the bridge between representational art and pure abstraction.
- Analytic Cubism (1909-1912) took reality apart, breaking it down into a grid of geometric fragments and muted colors. The subject was still there, but barely discernible.
- Synthetic Cubism (1912-onward) built paintings up from simpler forms, introducing one of the most important innovations in modern art: collage.
- By gluing real-world materials like newspaper, wallpaper and fabric onto the canvas (a technique known as papier collé), they blurred the line between art and life. This asked a serious question: If a piece of newspaper can be part of a painting, what can't be art?
It Was an Intellectual and Democratic Movement
- An Art of Ideas: Cubism was a cerebral, problem-solving art. It was about how we see and how we illustrate what we know, not just what we feel. This shifted the artist's role from a skilled hand to a powerful, analytical mind.
- Democratizing the Mundane: Its subject matter was deliberately ordinary — still lifes with bottles, glasses, musical instruments and pipes. By applying this radical new style to humble objects, it elevated the everyday and declared that profound artistic innovation could come from the world around us, not just from grand historical or mythological themes.
Its Immense and Enduring Influence
The impact of Cubism is almost impossible to overstate. It provided a new visual vocabulary that spread across the globe.
- Directly Inspired: Futurism (in Italy), Constructivism (in Russia), De Stijl (in the Netherlands) and Vorticism (in Britain) all directly borrowed Cubism's fragmented, simultaneous forms.
- The Blueprint for Modern Design: The geometric, fragmented aesthetic of Cubism became the underlying grammar for 20th-century architecture, graphic design and typography. The modern urban landscape, with its layered and intersecting forms, is a Cubist landscape.