Differences between cubism and abstractionism: analysis of the characteristics of both artistic movements, their historical and cultural origins and influences on modern art.
Cubism is a pictorial movement whose language was put into practice in the years between 1907 and 1914 by artists of the caliber of Pablo Picasso and G. Braque . Later, other painters joined, among whom we remember : J. Gris, F. Léger, and many others. Cubism was particularly widespread in France and Czechoslovakia.
Abstractionism , on the other hand, is an artistic avant-garde that spread in the early twentieth century, in distant parts of Europe, where it developed without common intentions. The term indicates the set of those pictorial and plastic works that do not follow the objective representation of the real world.
A first difference
Between 1910 and 1920, Picasso and Braque understood that by breaking the pictorial surface too much, its individual fragments could no longer be virtually recomposed and the work of art was increasingly approaching the general characteristics of abstraction. To ensure that their painting never strayed into abstraction, that is, into something purely mental, without any concrete relationship with reality, the two artists began to introduce letters of the alphabet and numbers into their works. In this way, any escape into abstraction was voluntarily blocked by the immediate recognisability of these elements, which could immediately be traced back to the concreteness of everyday life.
Shapes and colors
Following contact with Theosophy and Cubism and to distinguish itself from these two artistic currents, abstractionism arrives at the rejection of nature to take refuge in the spiritual perfection of abstract forms. The object is synthesized in lines and colors, even starting from real forms, until reaching the geometric fields of primary colors (red, green and purple).
Different ways of representing reality
With cubism we capture the abstract and metaphysical aspect, which transcends the sensible reality of the world around us. Abstractionism creates pictorial and plastic works that go beyond the objective representation of real life.
Abstraction uses a visual language of shapes, colors, and lines with the aim of creating a composition that can exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. This current goes beyond any logic of perspective and the attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality.
