46 Fun Facts About Cubism

In which bohemian quarter of Paris were Picasso and Braque both living when they invented Cubism?

Montmartre. The two lived close enough to compare canvases constantly, and for a time their pictures grew so alike that even experts struggle to tell one man's from the other's.

Which design style took its sharp, faceted geometry from Cubism?

Art Deco. Designers of the 1920s folded the Cubists' angles and fragments into furniture, fashion and buildings, so an avant-garde experiment ended up as the look of luxury.

Whose late works, especially their handling of three-dimensional form, chiefly influenced Cubism?

Paul Cézanne's late landscapes and bathers, shown in a Salon d'Automne retrospective the year after his death, taught the young Cubists to build form from shifting planes.

Picasso was questioned by police in 1911 over the theft of which painting from a Paris museum?

Mona Lisa. Picasso and a poet friend were both cleared, and the real thief, an Italian handyman who had once worked at the museum, was caught two years later trying to sell the picture in Florence.

Two faces in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon are widely traced to which art?

African masks. Picasso saw them at a Paris ethnographic museum midway through his work on the picture, yet later denied the debt and pointed to ancient Iberian sculpture instead.

The "Avignon" of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon refers to a street in which city?

Barcelona. Picasso spent his teens in the city, and the title points to one of its streets, Carrer d'Avinyó, and not to the French town of Avignon at all.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon shows women in what setting?

A brothel. Picasso simply called the picture 'my brothel'; a friend gave it the politer title for its first public showing, and the painter never liked it.

Where does Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon hang today?

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. When Picasso first showed the canvas to his closest friends in 1907 they were appalled, and he did not exhibit it in public until 1916.

Which critic wrote in 1908 that Braque reduced everything "to cubes", helping name the movement?

Louis Vauxcelles meant it as a sneer, as he had three years earlier when he called another group of painters 'fauves', or wild beasts. Both insults stuck as the movements' names.

Which artist reportedly described Braque's 1908 paintings to a critic as made of 'little cubes'?

Henri Matisse reportedly dismissed the landscapes Braque sent to the 1908 Salon d'Automne as 'little cubes', and that autumn a critic's review put 'cubes' in print, the seed of the movement's name.

Braque's 1908 Cubist landscapes were painted at which village near Marseille?

L'Estaque, a fishing village on the Bay of Marseille, gave Braque the simplified houses and viaduct of his 1908 landscapes, the works a critic mocked as cubes.

Which writer called Picasso's 1909 Horta de Ebro landscapes the first Cubist paintings?

Gertrude Stein, in her memoir, tells of hanging the landscapes in her Paris home and answering visitors who found them too strange by producing Picasso's own photographs of the village.

What is the usual name for the austere, near-monochrome first phase of Picasso and Braque's Cubism?

Analytic Cubism is so called because the painters seemed to analyse each object, taking it apart into small facets. Colour was cut back to browns and greys so that nothing distracted from the structure.

Which phase of Cubism, from about 1912 to 1914, featured simpler shapes, brighter colours and newspaper print?

Synthetic Cubism takes its name from synthesis: the painters now built a picture up from flat coloured shapes and pasted scraps, where before they had taken objects apart into facets.

Which art dealer guaranteed Braque and Picasso an annual income for exclusive rights to their work?

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler bought whatever his painters produced and sold it only to a small circle of collectors, which let them experiment in private without a thought for the critics.

Whose cylinder-filled version of Cubism did critics nickname 'Tubism'?

Fernand Léger built his early figures out of cylinders and cones, hence the jibe. After serving in the First World War he made the machine his great subject.

Which Paris landmark did Robert Delaunay depict in a famous Cubist series shown in 1911?

The Eiffel Tower obsessed Robert Delaunay, who painted it again and again as a tilting red structure breaking apart among the rooftops. One version hung at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants.

Which 1912 work by Picasso is credited as the first Cubist collage?

Still Life with Chair Caning pastes a piece of oilcloth printed with a chair-caning pattern onto an oval canvas framed with rope, the first Cubist collage.

Braque's first papier collé, made in 1912, used shop-bought paper printed to imitate what?

Wood grain. Braque spotted the printed wallpaper in a shop in Avignon, but he waited until Picasso had left for Paris before buying a roll, so that he could try the idea out alone.

Cubist works at the 1912 Salon d'Automne caused a political scandal by being shown in which government building?

The Grand Palais, a state-owned hall, hosted the 1912 Salon d'Automne; councillor Jean Pierre Philippe Lampué's protest at public money housing Cubists reached the Chamber of Deputies.

Which Duchamp painting was censored from the 1912 Salon des Indépendants by his own brothers?

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 upset the Cubists who ran the exhibition, and they sent his two brothers to ask him to alter it. He withdrew the picture instead, and within a year it had made his name in America.

Which 1913 New York exhibition introduced astonished Americans to the European avant-garde?

The Armory Show took its name from the National Guard drill hall in Manhattan that housed it. Its newest paintings from Paris were mocked in the press as a hoax, which only made them famous.

Braque said that inventing Cubism alongside Picasso had been like being what?

Roped together on a mountain. He added that what the two of them said in those years would never be said again; the partnership ended when Braque went off to war in 1914.

Which two painters wrote Du "Cubisme", the first major treatise on the movement, in 1912?

Metzinger and Gleizes argued that a painter should be free to move round the subject and fuse several views into a single image, which is why Cubist pictures show an object from many sides at once.

Which poet wrote Les Peintres Cubistes (1913)?

Guillaume Apollinaire was the Cubists' friend and their most passionate defender in print. He had a knack for labels too: in 1917 he coined the word 'surrealist'.

By what other name is the Cubist collective the Section d'Or known?

The Puteaux Group met on Sunday afternoons at the home of the three Duchamp brothers in the suburb of Puteaux. Its other name means 'golden section', a sign of the members' faith in mathematical proportion.

Which Section d'Or exhibitor later became a leading figure of New York Dada?

Francis Picabia showed with the Section d'Or in 1912, then from 1913 in New York worked with Alfred Stieglitz's 291 circle and later edited the Dada review 391.

Which instrument did Picasso fold and glue together from cardboard, paper and string in 1912, carrying Cubism into sculpture?

A guitar. Sculptors had always carved or modelled a solid mass; Picasso's flimsy construction is often called the first sculpture to be assembled from separate parts, with empty space doing half the work.

Which colourful abstract offshoot of Cubism was pioneered by Kupka and the Delaunays?

Orphism, a term a poet-critic coined after the mythical singer Orpheus, brought colour back during Cubism's monochrome phase and led Kupka and the Delaunays towards pure abstraction.

Which Spanish Cubist, born José Victoriano González-Pérez in Madrid, took his adopted name in 1905?

Juan Gris left Madrid for Paris the following year and settled in the same studio building as Picasso, the hero he honoured in 1912 with a Cubist portrait.

Georges Braque grew up in which port at the mouth of the Seine?

Le Havre. Braque was apprenticed there as a house painter and decorator, his father's and grandfather's trade, and the craftsman's tricks he learned resurfaced years later in his Cubist pictures.

What happened to Braque at the Battle of Carency in May 1915?

A head wound left him temporarily blind, and surgeons had to open his skull. He could not paint again until late 1916, and from then on he worked alone: the partnership with Picasso was over.

For which museum did Braque paint the ceiling work The Birds in 1952–53?

The Louvre commissioned Braque to paint The Birds on the ceiling of its Salle Henri II in 1952–53; a decade later André Malraux delivered his funeral oration in the museum's Cour Carrée.

Which movement, launched by Ozenfant and Le Corbusier's 1918 Après le cubisme, followed Cubism?

Purism, set out in Après le cubisme, rejected what Ozenfant and Le Corbusier saw as Cubism's decorative drift in favour of clean, machine-like forms and everyday objects.

Which 1912 Prague building by Josef Gočár houses a Cubist café, the Grand Café Orient?

The House of the Black Madonna was built as a department store and takes its name from a Baroque statue saved from the house that stood there before. Its café was recreated from photographs taken in 1912.

Which wartime sight did Picasso, on first seeing it in a Paris street, claim the Cubists had created?

Camouflage. A friend walking with him later recorded his cry, 'It is we that have created that', and judged him right: the painted guns, the friend wrote, used a principle first seen in his Cubist pictures.

Which of these movements developed in response to Cubism?

Futurism's painters, led by Umberto Boccioni, adopted Cubist fragmentation after seeing the movement first-hand in late 1911 and turned it to depicting speed and motion.

Which photographer, Picasso's companion at the time, recorded him painting Guernica and sat for The Weeping Woman?

Dora Maar photographed the mural stage by stage as it grew. Picasso went on to paint her in tears again and again that year, and the best-known version now hangs in Tate Modern.

What are the only colours in Picasso's Guernica?

Grey, black and white are the only tones on the vast canvas. Picasso refused to let it enter Spain while Franco ruled, so it spent decades in New York and reached Madrid only in 1981.

For which event was Guernica commissioned by the Spanish Republican government?

The 1937 Paris International Exposition's Spanish Pavilion commissioned the mural in January; Picasso settled on his subject after the bombing of the Basque town on 26 April 1937.

Which commedia dell'arte character, often read as Picasso himself, plays in his 1921 Three Musicians?

Harlequin, in his chequered suit, had been Picasso's stand-in since the circus pictures of his Rose Period. The Pierrot and the monk who play with him are often read as two poet friends from his early years in Paris.

Which Russian movement grew out of Vladimir Tatlin's visit to Picasso's Paris studio?

Constructivism began with the abstract reliefs that Tatlin built from industrial materials once he was back in Russia. By 1921 his followers had taken the name and wanted art to reflect the modern world of industry.

Picasso lettered the words 'Ma Jolie' across a Cubist canvas of 1911-12; where did he take the phrase from?

A popular song. Its refrain was a hit of the day, and 'Ma Jolie' was also Picasso's pet name for his new love, Eva Gouel, so the austere grey canvas hides a love letter.

Which Nobel Prize-winning physicist hung a Cubist painting, Woman with a Horse, in his office?

Niels Bohr bought the canvas in 1932. Some historians argue that its way of showing a subject from many sides at once helped him accept that an electron can be both a particle and a wave.

For which 1917 Diaghilev ballet did Picasso design Cubist sets and costumes?

Parade had a story by Jean Cocteau and music by Erik Satie. While working on it Picasso fell for one of Diaghilev's dancers, Olga Khokhlova, and he married her the following year.

Which gritty material did Braque begin mixing into his paint in 1912 to give Cubist pictures a rough surface?

Sand. A roughened canvas is something to touch as well as look at, which pressed home the Cubist idea that a painting is an object in its own right and not a window onto a scene.