Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, oil on canvas by Pablo Picasso, 1907; in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
Cubism, highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created principally by the artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories that art should imitate nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space. Instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects.
立体主义是20世纪极具影响力的视觉艺术风格，主要由画家巴勃罗·毕加索（Pablo Picasso）和乔治·布拉克（Georges Braque）于1907年至1914年间在巴黎创立。立体主义风格强调画面平面的二维表面，拒绝了传统的透视、缩短、塑造和明暗对比技法，并反对艺术应模仿自然的传统理论。立体主义画家不拘泥于复制形状、质地、色彩和空间，而是呈现了一种全新的现实，通过绘画描绘出被彻底分割的物体。
Cubism derived its name from remarks that were made by the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who derisively described Braque’s 1908 work Houses at L’Estaque as being composed of cubes. In Braque’s painting, the volumes of the houses, the cylindrical forms of the trees, and the tan-and-green colour scheme are reminiscent of Paul Cézanne’s landscapes, which deeply inspired the Cubists in their first stage of development (until 1909). It was, however, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted by Picasso in 1907, that presaged the new style; in this work, the forms of five female nudes become fractured, angular shapes. As in Cézanne’s art, perspective is rendered through colour, with the warm reddish-browns advancing and the cool blues receding.
立体主义的名称源于评论家路易·沃塞尔（Louis Vauxcelles）的评论，他讥讽布拉克1908年的作品《拉斯塔克的房屋》（Houses at L’Estaque）由“立方体”组成。在布拉克的画作中，房屋的体积、树木的圆柱形形态以及棕绿的色调令人想起保罗·塞尚（Paul Cézanne）的风景画，后者对立体主义者在其最初阶段（直到1909年）的发展产生了深远影响。然而，毕加索在1907年创作的《亚维农的少女》（Les Demoiselles d’Avignon）预示了这一新风格；在这幅作品中，五位女性裸体的形体被破碎为棱角分明的形状。就像塞尚的艺术一样，透视通过色彩来表现，温暖的红棕色调前进，而冷蓝色调则后退。
Analytical Cubism. During this period, the work of Picasso and Braque became so similar that their paintings are almost indistinguishable. Analytical Cubist paintings by both artists show the breaking down, or analysis, of form. Picasso and Braque favoured right-angle and straight-line construction, though occasionally some areas of their paintings appear sculptural, as in Picasso’s Girl with a Mandolin (1910). They simplified their colour schemes to a nearly monochromatic scale (hues of tan, brown, gray, cream, green, or blue were preferred) in order not to distract the viewer from the artist’s primary interest—the structure of form itself. The monochromatic colour scheme was suited to the presentation of complex, multiple views of the object, which was reduced to overlapping opaque and transparent planes. These planes appear to move beyond the surface of the canvas rather than to recede in depth. Forms are generally compact and dense in the centre of an Analytical Cubist painting, growing larger as they diffuse toward the edges of the canvas, as in Picasso’s Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1909–10). In their work from this period, Picasso and Braque frequently combined representational motifs with letters; their favourite motifs were musical instruments, bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, and the human face and figure.
分析立体主义（Analytical Cubism）。在这一时期，毕加索和布拉克的作品变得如此相似，以至于他们的画作几乎无法区分。两位艺术家的分析立体主义绘画展示了对形体的分解或分析。毕加索和布拉克偏爱直角和直线构图，尽管有些画作的某些区域偶尔呈现雕塑般的效果，例如毕加索1910年的《带曼陀铃的女孩》（Girl with a Mandolin）。他们简化了色彩方案，接近单色调（偏好棕褐色、灰色、奶油色、绿色或蓝色），以免分散观者对画作主要兴趣——形体结构本身的注意力。单色的色彩方案适合于表现物体的复杂、多重视角，这些物体被还原为重叠的不透明和透明平面。这些平面似乎超越了画布的表面，而不是在深度上后退。分析立体主义画作中的形体通常在画面中心处紧凑浓密，向画布边缘扩散时逐渐变大，例如毕加索的《安布罗斯·沃拉尔像》（Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1909-10）。在这一时期的作品中，毕加索和布拉克经常将具象图案与字母结合，他们最喜欢的主题包括乐器、瓶子、水壶、玻璃杯、报纸以及人脸和人像。
