Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: five young women that changed modern art forever. Faces seen simultaneously from the front and in profile, angular bodies whose once-voluptuous feminine forms disappear behind asymmetric lines – with this painting, Picasso revolutionised the entire history of art. Cubism was thus born in 1907. Transforming natural forms into cylinders and cubes, painters like Juan Gris and Robert Delaunay, driven by Braque and Picasso, imposed a new vision upon the world, in total opposition to the principles of the Impressionists. Spreading quickly in Europe, Cubism developed rapidly in successive phases that brought art history into the 20th century, which would be filled with dramatic movements, from the Futurism of Boccioni to the abstraction of Kandinsky, from the Suprematism of Malevich and the Constructivism of Tatlin. Linking the core text of Guillaume Apollinaire with the studies of Dr Dorothea Eimert, this work offers a new interpretation of modernity’s crucial moment, and permits the reader to rediscover, through their biographies, the principal representatives of the movement.
