ANALYTICAL CUBISM
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Analytical Cubism was a highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created principally by the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1911. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting Renaissance theories of art as the imitation of nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, color, and space. Instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that illustrated radically fragmented objects, whose several sides were seen simultaneously.
The Fauve were the first to experiment with the new style in which the time honored renaissance convention of space representation was often wholly abandoned for a flat two-dimensional treatment. Strong colors, and simplistic, distorted design characterized the group's work. They demonstrated the direction modern art would take in the twentieth century, but it was Picasso and Braque that simply used a new way to represent the three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface.
Cubism derived its name from remarks that were made by the painter Henri Matisse and the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who mockingly described Braque's 1908 work "Houses at L'Estaque" as composed of cubes. In Braque's work, the volumes of the houses, the cylindrical forms of the trees, and the tan-and-green color scheme are reminiscent of Paul Czanne's landscapes, which deeply inspired the Cubists in their first stage of development. It was, however, "Les Demoiselles d"Avignon," a work painted by Picasso in 1907, that forecast the new style; in this work, the forms of five female nudes became fractured, angular shapes...