Cubism Synthetic

Cubism Synthetic is an art movement of the 1910–1920 period. The gallery holds 187 works in this movement, including works by Marsden Hartley, Henri Matisse and Juan Gris. Browse Cubism Synthetic paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Synthetic Cubism is the second phase of Cubism, generally dated from about 1912 to 1914, in which Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque reversed the logic of the movement's first phase. Where Analytic Cubism (c. 1908–1912) had dissected objects into a near-monochrome lattice of shifting facets, the Synthetic phase built images back up—"synthesizing" them from flat, legible signs and fragments. The pivot came in the summer of 1912, when Braque, holidaying in Sorgues in Provence, bought a roll of imitation wood-grain (faux bois) wallpaper in nearby Avignon and pasted strips of it into his charcoal drawings. The gesture inaugurated papier collé, and Cubism turned decisively from analysis to construction.

Two 1912 works anchor the breakthrough. Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning, an oval canvas combining oil, a printed oilcloth that mimics caning, and a rope frame, is widely called the first Cubist collage; Braque's Fruit Dish and Glass is credited as the first papier collé. From these experiments came the style's defining traits: pasted paper, newsprint, and patterned fabric incorporated directly into the picture; a brighter, broader palette; bold, simplified geometric planes; and a flattened space that all but abandoned the illusion of depth. Real-world fragments now stood as witty signs for the things they depicted rather than as descriptions of them.

The phase produced its most systematic practitioner in Juan Gris (1887–1927), who arrived at his own lucid, rigorously composed Synthetic Cubism around 1913 in works such as Still Life with a Guitar; Fernand Léger brought a robust, tubular vocabulary that pushed the style toward machine-age imagery. Around them, the Salon Cubists—Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, and Roger de La Fresnaye among them—extended Cubist ideas to larger, more public canvases, while artists like Marc Chagall and the American Marsden Hartley absorbed its flattened, sign-based language.

Synthetic Cubism's legacy is outsized. Collage and the assembled image fed directly into Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism, and Picasso's pasted constructions helped invent modern assemblage sculpture. By 1914–1915 the style hardened into the more abstract "Crystal Cubism," but its core insight—that a picture can be made of borrowed materials and visual signs—remains foundational to twentieth-century art.