Famous Cubist Paintings – Influential Works of Deconstruction

Often regarded as the most significant avant-garde movement, Cubism changed the face of the art world by challenging the fundamental conceptions of visual representation in the Western world. Famous Cubism artworks helped introduce an exceptionally revolutionary era of art, sparking a massive change in culture. Cubism paintings did not feature the sense of perspective artists had used since the Renaissance period, instead focusing on cubes, spheres, and other forms to produce their works. Today, we will find out more about this exciting period in art history by exploring the most famous Cubist paintings ever made!

Our Favorite Famous Cubist Paintings

Braque and Picasso were responsible for creating a new visual language comprised of geometric planes that eschewed the traditional concepts of representation. In this art form, they sought to portray their subjects from multiple angles at the same time, thereby compressing space. While this new style was regarded as very innovative, the artists chose to portray traditional subject matter in order to prove that their style was just as competent as the previous movements. The subjects featured in Cubist portraits, landscapes, and still lifes were abstracted, yet still identifiable as what they were representing. Let’s examine a few of these famous Cubist paintings below.

Woman with a mandolin in yellow and red (1950) by Max Beckmann; Max Beckmann, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso

Picasso intentionally made this artwork provocative and is regarded as characteristic of his desire to both inspire and surprise audiences. Matisse had just completed his masterpiece The Joy of Living, and as his main rival, Picasso felt compelled to create something that was equally groundbreaking. It took nine months of playing around with different sketches and compositions for the artist to finally create something that he was happy with. In one of these initial attempts, he originally added two male figures to the group of females, one student and one sailor.

Yet, in the end, he decided to instead focus on the nude feminine form, and by doing so placed the audience in a voyeuristic role.

While the figures portrayed are not life-like, one can observe how the artist’s style developed over the course of the work’s production. The figures to the left of the canvas were added first and one can make out the details of the faces even though their bodies are rendered geometrically. The figures to the right of the canvas were added afterwards, and show a further degree of abstraction, with their bodies being more broken up. The one figure has her back to the viewer, yet her face is also gazing at the viewer, revealing two different angles at the same time.

Woman with a Mandolin (1910) by Georges Braque

This was among the first Cubism paintings to be produced in an oval shape. After two years of only producing landscapes and still lifes, this was his first foray back into portraying the human figure. It was produced in the phase of the movement known as Analytical Cubism. For Braque, adding a musical instrument to the composition would effectively endow the figure with a kind of “stillness” that one associated with an object. Camille Corot had previously portrayed the same subject matter and it is believed that this may have inspired Braque who had attended Corot’s exhibition in 1909 along with Pablo Picasso.

The poetry of Mallarme was apparently cited as a source of inspiration for the inclusion of the mandolin in many Cubist artworks from this period.

It was seen as an instrument that not only hinted at musical ability but also echoed the shape of the female womb. While Picasso was often considered to have had a huge influence on Braque’s work, it seems in this case perhaps the opposite was true, as Picasso would subsequently also create a work featuring a mandolin. This work typifies the Cubist desire to portray the background and foreground on the same plane. The figure and her surroundings are woven together through a series of horizontal and vertical lines.

Still Life with Flowers (1912) by Juan Gris

Juan Gris is often regarded as among the most significant producers of Cubism paintings, despite typically being largely overshadowed by his more renowned peers. He is, in fact, the artist who coined the term Analytical Cubism in the first place. In this artwork, we can see a flower vase and flowers placed atop a checkered tablecloth.

There is also what appears to be a guitar in this still life as well as several oranges on the table.

The exact lines, smooth curves, and subdued blue, gray, white, and black tones in this artwork generate an industrial feel that pays respect to both past and contemporary art trends while intriguing the audience with its beauty. It is quite evident that the artist placed much attention on trying to balance the compositional elements in order to produce a harmonious work that manages to evoke a feeling of passion out of the ordinary. He takes objects such as fruit, flowers, and a guitar, and melds them into one unified artwork. We can observe his typical colorful and distinct style which features his heavy shading of the angles.

Still Life with Flowers (1912) by Juan Gris; Juan Gris, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ma Jolie (1912) by Pablo Picasso

This painting, a return to abstraction with a sense of representation, demonstrates the artist’s “high” Analytic style. In this piece, Picasso ups the ante, pushing his experimentation in new areas. By diminishing color and heightening the appearance of low-relief sculpture, he pushes even further away from the three-dimensionality of the Renaissance era and closer to abstraction, expanding on the overlapped, geometric forms. Picasso also incorporated painted text on the piece.

Due to the fact that the font used is similar to that found in advertising, the painting seems more like a poster, and the space is flattened even further by the addition of the words “ma jolie”.

This was the first time a creator has exploited aspects of popular culture so openly in a piece of high art. This fusion of both low and high culture may have been inspired by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s late-19th-century posters. Despite the fact that they were created as ads for various entertainment places, Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters were regarded as high art, maybe because he was also a painter. “Ma Jolie” also happened to be the name of a popular song at the time, in addition to the nickname of Picasso’s girlfriend, further connecting Picasso’s art to pop culture.

Conquest of the Air (1913) by Roger de la Fresnaye

La Fresnaye depicts himself conversing with his brother, an engineer at the Nieuport aviation manufacturer, in this piece. They are sitting at a wooden table in the open air. To the left of the canvas are various shapes resembling fields and residences, while to the right are trees, a river, and a sailing boat. A French flag, a yellow air balloon, and round white clouds drift above them against an expanse of bright blue sky. The artwork demonstrates the developing influence of Robert Delaunay on the artist with its beautiful use of colorful and prismatic forms.

This work is influenced by both classical Cubism and Delaunay’s Orphism, as seen by its incorporation of geometrical forms.

Compared to pure Orphic works, though, which embrace complete abstraction, the artist remained committed to representational art. This beautiful, mural-sized piece was created just over 10 years after the Wright brothers’ success at Kitty Hawk and embraced the dawn of the aviation age. The image, however, has a more nationalistic message. The yellow ball in the sky alludes to the Montgolfier brothers’ first human balloon flight over France in 1783, which was a historic event in the development of aviation. When the work of art was on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art, artists of all types came to see it in person.

Conquest of the Air (1913) by Roger de la Fresnaye; Roger de La Fresnaye, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

L’Oiseau bleu (1913) by Jean Metzinger

This is often regarded as the artist’s most recognizable artwork and was first exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1913. It features three nude women in addition to numerous other elements from both interior and exterior sources, such as foliage, a boat, an ibis, a mirror, and a necklace. In the foreground, we can see a figure standing, holding a bluebird in his hands, which is where the title of this painting comes from. In the lower middle part of the canvas, we can see a woman with a necklace reclining next to an Ibis and a fruit bowl on a pedestal. This Ibis is regarded as a symbol of fashion and exoticism.

The Ibis’ scarlet feathers were used in cabarets in Paris, such as the Moulin Rouge and Le Lido during the 1910s.

The ancient Egyptians also venerated the Ibis and considered it to be a symbol of purity. A third type of bird can also be made out in the composition and has been identified as possibly being a green Heron. A strange pyramidal form can be observed to the right of the head of the reclining person, yet it is unknown if it is connected with the pyramids of ancient Egypt or the Ibis. A shape like a sundial emerges in front of the pyramid, possibly representing the concept of time.

Electric Prisms (1914) by Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay’s groundbreaking color and form experiments were rewarded in 1914 when this work was first exhibited. Sonia Delaunay and her husband Robert established a non-objective style that evolved into a hybrid of Fauvism and Post-Impressionism. This painting serves as a perfect illustration of how this artist managed to integrate this eclectic style with the concepts found in Cubism paintings. She called her style Orphism and concentrated on the endless possibilities of color combinations. Her innovative breakthroughs eventually led to a retrospective exhibit of her works at the Louvre in 1964.

She was the first female artist to achieve this significant milestone.

The work of art was inspired by a trip down Paris’s Boulevard Saint-Michel, where the artist and her partner walked past some recently installed electric lamplights. They both decided to attempt to capture the brilliant colors of the lights in their paintings. She tried to capture the way the lights shed colors onto the pavement underneath in her artwork by drawing quick, semi-circular colored lines. Two overlapping circles are formed by arcs or curved patterns of main and secondary colors in the artwork. Colored geometric forms fill the rest of the canvas. Guillaume Apollinaire, a French poet, coined the term Orphism in 1912.

Horse, Pipe, and Red Flower (1920) by Joan Miró

Joan Miró created this painting in his native town of Montroig in Portugal, shortly after his initial excursion to Paris. It illustrates an intricate arrangement of shapes that employs a Cubist collage method influenced by Pablo Picasso’s work. The artwork also incorporates Cubist and cave painting sources of inspiration, as well as Miro’s unique style and Catalan history. The outcome of combining these ideas is a highly detailed artwork that experiments with perspective and depth in form. It is an important work in the world of art because of its innovative worth in terms of novelty for its period.

It is considered one of the artist’s first surrealist works, highlighting his avant-garde approach to still-life paintings.

It demonstrates his unique vision while providing insight into the growth of modern art techniques applied at the time. With its graceful attitude and attractive ornamental details, the horse draws our attention first in this image. A little book, the pipe described in the title, and a very large glass are positioned closer to the viewer. Then there are a myriad of additional elements that are a little more difficult to recognize in the middle of the visual frenzy. This painting’s palette is quite expansive, especially when contrasted to his later abstract works of art, which used just four or five hues in total.

Three Women (1921) by Fernand Léger

This artwork depicts three nudes sipping on warm beverages in a very elegant apartment. Although the naked body is a prominent theme in most art history, here the figures have been reduced into dislocated and rounded forms using the Cubist painting style. Their bodies are made up of groups of spheres and finely formed shapes that have been perfectly colored so that their ocher and silver skin and smooth, side-swept hair shimmer like sheet metal. The features of these unidentified ladies, who stare firmly at the observer, look interchangeable as if they were mass-produced machine components.

A lushly brilliant residential atmosphere packed with brightly colored furnishings, and a sharply tilted, dazzlingly patterned floor is contrasted by the confluence of bodies.

The artwork has a shallow, mural-like look due to the gridded backdrop of interconnecting angles and curved forms. After serving as a combat engineer in the army during World War I for France, the artist had an unwavering conviction in the beauty of machinery in the modern world. His distinct vision of a harmonious unification between machine and man in the modern day is reflected in the machinelike perfection with which the subjects are produced. According to the artist, the painting was also meant to reflect the hope that modern society would be able to undo the destruction and chaos that was caused by World War I.

Spanish Women (1924) by Natalia Goncharova

Gonchorova’s iconic painting features six Spanish women dressed in black dresses with white lace mantillas, taking inspiration from both her job as a costume designer in addition to her experiences while traveling around Spain. The artist was likely to have encountered African masks by this stage, as a probable source of reference and one that was shared by Pablo Picasso. She also evokes the Chinese Yin-Yang sign by depicting the face divided in two, implying a need for balance through the integration of opposites. She used Cubist concepts while also making overt references to religious art and the framework of an altarpiece.

These feminine figures associated with architectural dominance and solidity have a certain authority.

The artist uses the ladies to represent thoughts of enduring power while simultaneously enveloping them with lightness, and the patterns on their garments resemble detail chiseled in stone. Researchers discovered a few years ago that the artist created a replica of this work, or at least a largely identical one, shortly after creating the original. Goncharova explored Spanish themes constantly during her Parisian era. They were an experimental area for the artist, a reflection of her study of shapes and techniques. The artwork was originally spread over five large canvases which were at one point all exhibited in different museums and were not united as one piece until 2013.

That concludes our look at the famous Cubist paintings that have left a notable impact on the world of art. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso led the way, establishing a style that would subsequently be followed in other famous Cubism artworks. These painters employed several viewpoints to break up pictures into geometric forms, following Paul Cezanne’s focus on the foundational structure of form. Instead of representing modeled forms in an illusionistic three-dimensional space, their figures were instead portrayed as arrangements of planes and volumes where the foreground and background merged into one plane. This led to the creation of Cubist portraits, landscapes, and still lives, which took traditional subject matter and rendered it in a completely novel manner.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Themes Are Featured in Cubism Paintings?

Cubism paintings shared many of the same themes as traditional academic artworks. This included Cubist portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. However, instead of being rendered life-like, these works were constructed using various geometrical shapes such as cylinders, spheres, and cubes, hence the name Cubism. In this new style, both the foreground and the background were depicted as occupying the same plane, and the subjects were portrayed as if seen from multiple different angles at the same time.

What Are the Most Famous Cubist Paintings?

At the height of its popularity, the Cubist movement was responsible for the production of famous Cubist paintings that redefined art in that era. Among the most famous Cubism artworks are Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by the famous Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque’s Woman with a Mandolin (1910), Still Life with Flowers (1912) by the too-often overlooked artist Juan Gris, Roger de la Fresnaye’s Conquest of the Air (1913), the wonderfully colorful Electric Prisms (1914) by Sonia Delaunay, Horse, Pipe, and Red Flower (1920) by Joan Miró, and many more. These Cubism artworks were all unified in their desire to break down forms into geometrical shapes.

Jordan Anthony( Content Editor, Art Writer, Photographer )

Jordan Anthony is a Cape Town-based film photographer, curator, and arts writer. She holds a Bachelor of Art in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where she explored themes like healing, identity, dreams, and intuitive creation in her Contemporary art practice. Jordan has collaborated with various local art institutions, including the KZNSA Gallery in Durban, the Turbine Art Fair, and the Wits Art Museum. Her photography focuses on abstract color manipulations, portraiture, candid shots, and urban landscapes. She’s intrigued by philosophy, memory, and esotericism, drawing inspiration from Surrealism, Fluxus, and ancient civilizations, as well as childhood influences and found objects. Jordan is working for artfilemagazine since 2022 and writes blog posts about art history and photography.

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