Cubism Breaks the Window
For five centuries the Western picture had been Alberti's window: one eye, one instant, one place. In 1907 Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon smashed the pane. Faces turn to masks from African sculpture, bodies fracture into planes, and space refuses to recede.
Analytic Cubism (Picasso and Braque, 1909–12) works this through. We walk around objects, remembering a handle while seeing the lip. So show viewpoints simultaneously, fractured into facets on a flat surface.
Then collage (1912) delivers the coup: gluing actual newspaper, oilcloth, or chair caning. Real material enters. The painting admits to being an object on a wall, not a view through one.
The Logic Runs to Zero
| Move | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Cubism (1907–12) | One viewpoint abandoned; surface admits it is flat |
| Futurism (1909) | Speed, machines, and worship of the new |
| Abstraction (1910s) | Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian: no subject at all |
| Dada (1916) | War made sense absurd; art attacks itself |
| Surrealism (1924) | Freud's unconscious as the true source |
Malevich's Black Square (1915) is the endpoint: a picture that is only itself. In 1917 Duchamp submits a factory urinal as Fountain, proving choice is the art. Art history is a record of what people believed was real, and what happened when they stopped believing it.