Cubist Period

Between 1907 and 1917, Pablo Picasso reshaped art history with the dawn of his Cubist period. A revolutionary approach to representation, Picasso’s Cubism flattened reality into a single plane of geometric shapes, rendering his subjects into fragmented and abstract compositions that suggested their three-dimensional shape. Developed in response to a rapidly changing world, Cubism was Picasso’s way of depicting the modern age, and a direct challenge to the notion that art should mimic nature. The artist believed that an object is not seen from just one static angle, but rather in countless perspectives influenced by motion, memory, light, and vision. Picasso’s Cubist works have fetched historic auction prices—in June 2016, Picasso’s Femme Assise (1909) sold for $63.7 Million at Sotheby’s, shattering the auction record for the Cubism art movement.