Cubism and Futurism: the fractured plane

Between 1908 and 1914 two groups of painters broke the picture into pieces, and the pieces look alike. But they were breaking it for opposite reasons. The Cubists were dismantling space: how do you state, on a flat rectangle, everything you know about a motionless guitar? The Futurists were dismantling time: how do you state, on a flat rectangle, a tram going past? Hold that distinction and most of the confusions resolve themselves in seconds.

Analytic Cubism, 1908–12: the brown years

It begins with Cézanne, whose memorial retrospective in 1907 showed a generation how a mountain could be built from tilted patches, and with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), where Iberian and African masks and a splintered, airless space arrive at once. Braque took the lesson to L’Estaque in 1908 and came back with landscapes that Louis Vauxcelles — the same critic who named the Fauves — dismissed as full of little cubes.

For the next four years Braque and Picasso worked so closely that Braque later said they were roped together like mountaineers. What they produced has a very distinctive look.

The palette is deliberately drained. Ochre, grey, brown, black, a little dull green. Colour was suppressed because it distracts from structure. If you are shown a fragmented picture from these years with vivid colour in it, your first thought should be that it is not Braque or Picasso.

The object is shown from several viewpoints at once. Not spinning, not moving: standing perfectly still while the painter walks round it. The rim of a glass is seen from above while its foot is seen from the side.

Planes overlap and bleed. The technical name is passage: a facet is left open along one edge so that it merges into whatever is behind it. Object and air are made of the same substance, and there is almost no depth — the whole thing occupies a shallow relief a few inches deep. Nothing recedes.

The composition is dense in the middle and dissolves at the edges, often on an oval canvas, which is one of the quickest dating tells: ovals cluster around 1911–12.

By 1911 the pictures had become close to illegible — the so-called hermetic phase — and both painters began smuggling handholds back in. A moustache, a watch chain, a clarinet’s keys, the tassel of a curtain. And stencilled lettering: fragments of JOURNAL, of a bar’s name, of a brand of aperitif, painted with a shop-sign stencil so that they sit flatly on the surface and remind you that the canvas is a canvas. Braque, who had trained as a decorator, also painted trompe-l’oeil nails with cast shadows, as in Violin and Palette (1909) — a joke about how many kinds of reality one picture can hold.

Synthetic Cubism, 1912 onwards: collage and the return of colour

In May 1912 Picasso glued a piece of oilcloth printed with a chair-caning pattern onto an oval canvas and ran a length of rope round the edge for a frame. Still Life with Chair Caning is generally called the first collage. That September Braque bought imitation wood-grain wallpaper in Avignon and pasted strips of it into a charcoal drawing: Fruit Dish and Glass, the first papier collé — pasted paper, the more specific term for collage made from paper alone.

This reverses the method. Instead of analysing an object into facets, you synthesise a sign for it out of a few flat elements: a curved scrap of newsprint stands for a glass, a rectangle of wood-grain paper stands for a table. The consequences are visible instantly:

• Colour comes back, often bright and patterned.
• Shapes get larger, flatter and simpler, and the object becomes legible again.
• Surfaces become various — sand mixed into the paint, faux-bois combing, imitated marble.
• The whole picture reads as a construction lying on the surface rather than a dissection cut into it.

Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921) is the late monumental version: a flat interlocking jigsaw of coloured shapes in which the three figures are perfectly readable.

Alongside the two inventors sat the Salon Cubists — Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp — who exhibited publicly (Braque and Picasso did not) and theorised loudly. Gris is crisper, brighter and more diagrammatic than either master. Léger’s cylinders earned him the nickname Tubiste.

Braque or Picasso?

In the monochrome years attribution is genuinely hard, which was rather the point. The odds shift on touch and temperament rather than palette.

Futurism, 1909–15: speed, noise and the machine

Futurism began as literature. On 20 February 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti bought the front page of Le Figaro for his Founding and Manifesto of Futurism: a roaring motor car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace; speed, the machine, violence and war are the future; museums are cemeteries and should be flooded. The painters — Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini — signed their own technical manifesto in 1910, and after seeing Cubism in Paris in 1911 they borrowed its fragmentation wholesale.

But they used it to a different end, and the visual differences are obvious once you know them:

• Colour stays bright. Several of the Futurists came out of Italian Divisionism, so the facets are often still built from small strokes of pure colour. Severini’s Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912) even has sequins glued on.
• Contours repeat. Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) gives the dachshund about twenty legs — one object at many successive moments.
• Lines of force radiate through the canvas, tying the object to its surroundings and driving the eye along strong diagonals.
• The subject is in motion or in uproar: trams, motor cars, cyclists, a street lamp, a rioting funeral (Carrà’s Funeral of the Anarchist Galli), a building site (Boccioni’s The City Rises, 1910), later the war itself.

Boccioni’s bronze Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) is the sculptural summary: a striding figure whose muscles have been pulled into flames by its own velocity.

So: a Cubist table sits absolutely still in brown silence; a Futurist canvas is loud, coloured, diagonal, and something in it is moving.

Orphism and Vorticism in a paragraph each

Orphism is Cubist geometry reunited with the colour Cubism had renounced. Apollinaire named it in 1912, borrowing from Orpheus to suggest music. Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay-Terk, with František Kupka, built pictures from interlocking discs, arcs and prismatic segments derived from Chevreul’s law of simultaneous contrast — the principle that adjacent colours alter one another. The recognition test is simple: Cubist structure, no brown or grey anywhere, and circles rather than facets. See Delaunay’s Windows series (1912), the Circular Forms and the Eiffel Tower paintings.

Vorticism is the British answer, founded in London in 1914 round Wyndham Lewis, with Ezra Pound supplying the name and the magazine BLAST (two issues, 1914 and 1915) supplying the manifestos and the typographic violence. It looks Futurist — machinery, the city, harsh diagonals — but Lewis detested Marinetti, and the doctrinal difference shows: a vortex has a still point at its centre, so Vorticist pictures are static, hard-edged and geometric, with no blur and no sequential repetition. David Bomberg’s The Mud Bath (1914), Edward Wadsworth’s dazzle designs and Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill are the emblems. The war killed it; Gaudier-Brzeska died at Neuville-Saint-Vaast in 1915.

The traps

Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) has a Cubist palette and a Futurist subject, which is exactly why the Salon Cubists made him withdraw it.

Brown does not automatically mean Analytic Cubism. Check for faceting and passage; plenty of tonal painting is simply tonal.

Cubist-looking work after 1918 is usually something else: Purism (Ozenfant and Le Corbusier — clean, cool, machine-made bottles and guitars), Léger’s tubular machine-men, or interwar decorative Art Deco borrowing the look.

Picasso never stopped. A 1937 or 1950 Picasso can be more fragmented than a 1911 one. Date by palette, by surface and by the presence or absence of collage, not by degree of distortion alone.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Is anything moving? Repeated contours, radiating lines of force, a diagonal surge — Futurism. Dead still — Cubism.
2. Check the palette. Ochre, grey, brown, black only: Analytic Cubism, 1908–12. Bright and various: synthetic phase, Futurism, or Orphism.
3. Look for a legible object. Illegible and dense at the centre, fading at the edges, perhaps on an oval canvas — 1911–12.
4. Look for pasted or imitated material. Newspaper, wallpaper, wood-grain, sand — 1912 or after, synthetic phase.
5. Look for stencilled letters. They start in 1911 and never really stop; they place the picture in the Cubist family rather than the Futurist one.
6. Are the shapes circular? Interlocking discs of spectrum colour, no brown — Orphism, Delaunay.
7. Are the shapes hard wedges with no blur, and does it look British and cold? Vorticism, 1914–15.
8. If it is Cubist and monochrome, weigh touch against temperament. Tactile, greenish, musical, calm — Braque. Harder, blacker, figural, menacing — Picasso.
9. Name the subject. Guitar, bottle, newspaper, café table — Cubist. Car, tram, cyclist, crowd, war — Futurist.
10. Sanity-check the date. Analytic 1908–12; synthetic from 1912; Futurism 1909–15; Orphism from 1912; Vorticism 1914–15. Anything obviously later is a revival, a survival, or a long career.