CUBISM 1907-1914
Cubism abandoned conventional perspective in favor of showing multiple viewpoints simultaneously, as a way of suggesting three-dimensional form. It opened up nearly infinite possibilities for the treatment of visual reality, and was the influence for many later abstract styles including Constructivism and Futurism.
Japan was among the first Asian countries in to be influenced by Cubism. First contact occurred through European texts published in Japanese art journals in the 1910s. In the 1920s, Japanese artists studying in Paris brought back with them an understanding of modern art movements, hence in Japan, all modern art movements were subsequently called “Cubism.”
Silk Haori, Meisen technique, pre-1950, probably Taisho Era
Beginning in 1907, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque forged a relationship that invented Cubism through their collaboration on collages.
At the beginning, they created mainly still lifes, often using the subject matter of Paris cafe life: table tops holding newspapers, musical instrument, wine glasses, fruit, etc. Those objects became popular motifs in many artists’ work of the period and beyond, as in Ruth Reeves’ design for the carpet at Radio CIty Music Hall (below) in New York.
Georges Braque
Cafe Bar 1919, 1919
France
Ruth Reeves
Radio City Music Hall carpet design, 1932
New York, New York
Silk Kimono, Taisho Era
This Taisho kimono captures the style of brushwork and the colors used in Cubist art, if not its use of multiple perspectives.
Cubism was partly influenced by the late work of artist Paul Cézanne in which he can be seen to be painting things from slightly different points of view.
Paul Cezanne
Mont Sainte-VIctoire, 1904
France
Silk Kimono, Meisen technique, Taisho Era
Private Collection
Cubism deconstructed planes, each plane having its own perspective, breaking up the subject into many different shapes and then repainting it from different angles. The designer of this kimono seems to have understood those concepts and incorporated them.
Pablo Picasso
Girl with a Mandolin, 1910
France
Silk Kimono, Meisen technique, Taisho Era
The designer of this kimono has used their interpretation of the Western alphabet decoratively, but their incorporation of it may have been prompted by the influence of Cubism.
To quote Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New,
“…explicit signage in art started with Cubism, whose pictorial surface was a patchwork of varying degrees of reality. Previous to this, signs rarely appeared in art, as two different systems of image were competing for the same space: one verbal and conceptual, and the other purely pictorial.
The Cubist surface was a reflection of the new surface of Paris, plastered with ads and posters, a hive of mass-produced imperatives. Artists could not fail to notice that print was all around them, and that it made up a visual field which art, up to then, had scarcely even scratched. Paris, with its posters everywhere, became a torrent of signs.
Advertising stood for the commercialism that serious art felt bound to repudiate. Signage as art runs away from Nature altogether and looks only to culture.”
Pablo Picasso
Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper, 1913
France