ELI5: What Is Cubism?

Cubism is a style of art where the painter shows an object from many different sides all at the exact same time, breaking it into flat shapes like cubes, triangles, and squares.

Imagine you are holding your favorite coffee mug. In everyday life, if you take a regular photo of that mug:

• You only see the front of the cup.


• You cannot see the inside where the drink is.


• You cannot see the bottom or the handle if it is turned away.

A cubist artist does something completely different. Instead of painting the mug from just one spot, they walk all the way around it. They look at the front, peek inside at the top, check the bottom, and look at the handle. Then, they take a pair of pretend scissors, cut those different views into flat pieces, and glue them back together on a single canvas.

When you look at the finished painting, you might see the round top of the mug, the side with the picture, and the handle all flat next to each other. It looks a bit like a mixed-up puzzle, but it tells you the whole truth about the mug in one quick glance.

You can also think of cubism like everyday life examples:

• A cardboard box: If you unfold a cereal box completely flat on the kitchen table, you can see the front, back, top, and sides all at once.


• A broken mirror: If a mirror cracks, you might see your nose in one piece of glass, your eye in another, and your smile tilted in a third piece.

Artists like Pablo Picasso started this style because they wanted to show how our brains actually remember things. When you think of a cat, you do not just picture one frozen photo; you remember its whiskers, the top of its pointy ears, and its tail swishing from the back. Cubism puts all of those different everyday angles together into one exciting, geometric picture.