The cubist canvas was the locus where the painter simultaneously presented several aspects gathered successively with the purpose of suggesting a higher reality. —Marta Braun

The solitaire

Occurring during 1909–11 and claiming to be a realist movement, Cubism came as the mother of all the radical art movements which coincided with the transformation taking place on the world stage at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in the fields of science and technology.

The paintings of its main protagonists—Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque— came to counterpoint the arrival of new and revolutionary theories of matter and the challenging concepts of space, time and energy embedded in Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905).

Georges Braque Bottle and Fishes c.1910–12

By allowing their paintings and collages to respond to a binocular (two-eyed) vision rather than a monocular (one-eyed) perception, Cubism came to shatter the single vanishing point of a Renaissance linear perspective into a multiplicity of viewpoints.

By compressing and flattening several views of an object into a single composite, and by expressing the idea of the object rather thanany one exclusive view of it, their experiments dramatically expanded the shifted viewpoints found in Paul Cézanne’s later paintings.

This also caused the two-dimensional image to fracture into tiny facets, and thereby release form from its hitherto naturalistic representation and move it towards its abstract conclusion. In parallel with the upsurge of a Modernist thinking, this shift toward fragmentation, which depended upon the relative position of the viewer, involved a temporal dimension.

In its recording of the lapse of time, the dynamic of the artist’s eye reflected that of shifting camera angles in movie-making—the ultimate image involving the ‘simultaneity’ of compressed time. This aspect of Cubism was profoundly influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson who saw time as an essentially intuitive experience and reality as resulting from a simultaneous flow of past and present into the future.

Le Corbusier was well aware of the Cubistic mode of juxtaposing a multitude of meaning into the simultaneity of a single statement. Indeed, some of his buildings reflect this ‘collage’ approach in their elevations and in the layering of contrasting cultural and historical references.