cubism

American  

[kyoo-biz-uhm] / ˈkyu bɪz əm /

noun

(sometimes initial capital letter)

1. a style of painting and sculpture developed in the early 20th century, characterized chiefly by an emphasis on formal structure, the reduction of natural forms to their geometrical equivalents, and the organization of the planes of a represented object independently of representational requirements.

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cubism British  

/ ˈkjuːbɪzəm /

noun

1. (often capital) a French school of painting, collage, relief, and sculpture initiated in 1907 by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, which amalgamated viewpoints of natural forms into a multifaceted surface of geometrical planes

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cubism Cultural  

1. A movement in modern art that emphasized the geometrical depiction of natural forms (see geometry). Pablo Picasso was one of the leading cubists.

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Other Word Forms

• cubist
  adjective
• cubist
  noun
• cubistic
  adjective
• cubistically
  adverb

Etymology

Origin of cubism

< French cubisme (1908); see cube ¹, -ism

Explanation

Cubism is a style of art that takes landscapes, objects, and people, and transforms them into geometric shapes. Pablo Picasso was one of the most well-known masters of cubism. Cubism began in the early 20th century, when artists started experimenting with abstract works, attempting to show many angles and planes simultaneously. They rejected realistic perspective and tone, not even trying to make their paintings look three-dimensional. Cubism was all about breaking up images and reassembling them into small, flat shapes instead. The term cubism was coined after a French art critic derided what he called "bizarreries cubiques," or "cubic oddities."

Example Sentences

With Cubism and Surrealism “finished” by the late 1930s, what were they to do?

From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 26, 2025

Renaissance artwork depicted the nuances of human anatomy and pathology with remarkable accuracy, while Impressionism, Cubism, and other artistic movements utilized the unique features of human vision and perception to achieve artistic impact.

From Science Daily • Nov. 14, 2024

Futurism was not short on grandiose posturing, and Severini later embraced fascist politics, but the technical brilliance of his reconfiguring of fractured Parisian Cubism cannot be denied.

From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 7, 2023

Prior to the painting, Picasso had become famous as one of the founders of Cubism, a style of art in which the subject or object in the painting appears fragmented into geometric forms.

From BBC • Sep. 22, 2023

Cubism and all those new methods of art which subject facts to the tyranny of a process may be good satire, but they will never, I think, produce an independent beauty of their own.

From Essays on Art by Clutton-Brock, A. (Arthur)