The Cubist Revolution

Invented by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque during the early twentieth century, Cubism revolutionized Western art like never before in history. The name derives from a 1908 landscape painting by Braque that was critiqued as a “cube.” The movement was an attempt at breaking away from three-dimensional representations of space using the traditional Western painting techniques of perspective and shading and at creating compositions from forms geometrically transformed into planes. Cubism freed painting from its positioning since the Renaissance, in which it was regarded as an imitation of the real world. In addition, by fundamentally changing the way painting and sculpture should be, Cubism paved the way for abstract art, Dada, and Surrealism. Boldly challenging conventional aesthetics and opening up new possibilities for visual expression, Cubism had a powerful impact on the young artists who flocked to Paris. It spread around the world at lightning speed, into fields as varied as decoration and design, architecture, and Performing arts, and had a decisive influence on subsequent diverse developments in art.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris boasts one of the world’s finest collections of modern and contemporary art. This exhibition brings numerous priceless works in that collection that define the history of Cubism to Japan. Among these, over fifty will be shown in Japan for the first time. Cubism was the true starting point of twentieth-century art and opened up new horizons. This exhibition presents its rich developments and dynamism through about 140 works consisting mainly of paintings by about forty major artists, as well as sculptures, drawings, prints, film, and documents. It is the first full-scale Japanese exhibition to tackle Cubism head-on in about fifty years.