Hear art curator William S. Rubin discussing seminal influences on Cubism, especially as developed by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso

WILLIAM S. RUBIN: It's sometimes asked whether it was Braque who invented Cubism or Picasso who invented Cubism. And I think there's no single answer to this, in part because there's no single definition for Cubism.

Two major sources of Cubism were the Africanism of Picasso, that is, the art which Picasso had made in 1907 and early 1908 that was influenced by tribal models of art, and, perhaps even more important, the art of Cezanne. I think you could say that to the extent that you feel that Cezanne's model was the germinal element in Cubism, Braque was a little bit more its inventor than Picasso. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine Cubism ever having been created had not Picasso painted "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" in 1907 and in one painting, so to say, swept away the whole 19th-century tradition. Moreover, Picasso made a number of pictures deeply influenced by Cezanne also. And it's very difficult to pick apart in the years 1908 and 1909 just how much it is Braque and how much it is Picasso that are responding to these things. I think we can say that what is extraordinary about it is that such elements as Africanism, so to say, the tribal type of art that Picasso leads into Cubism with, and Cezanne would seem to be totally unmixable. And yet the two fuse in some way in the crucible of the painting of 1908. And that's part of what is remarkable about the history of early Cubism.