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 work, Picasso revolutionised the entire history of painting. Cubism was thus born in 1907. Transforming natural forms into cylinders and cubes, painters like Juan Gris and Robert Delaunay, led by Braque and Picasso, imposed a new vision upon the world that was in total opposition to the principles of the Impressionists. Largely diffused in Europe, Cubism developed rapidly in successive phases that brought art history to all the richness of the 20th century: from the futurism of Boccioni to the abstraction of Kandinsky, from the suprematism of Malevich to 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.


About the authors:
An ardent admirer of Cézanne, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire was one of the first to support and defend the de-structured art of Picasso. His essay “The Cubist Painters” constitutes the first reference text on Cubism.

For several years, Dr. Dorothea Eimert has directed the Leopold Hoesch Museum in Düren, Germany. After studying art history, musicology and archaeology, she specialised in art history of the 20th century. She has published diverse works treating Expressionism, Futurism, New Objectivity and Contemporary Art.