By Farhat Hasan and Professor Dr. Saadat Saeed

The term Cubism is fraternal to a method of visualization developed during the early years of this twentieth century.

Its roots could be searched in the master pieces of painting based on formal approach and compositional ideas of Cezanne, Picasso and Braque with their limited capacity of focusing the relationship between foreground and background and the simplification and generalizations of the specific shapes; this school of painting came into existence before World War I. In past we can grope its marks in the history of African statues having sensitively angled appearances and visible outlines.

In twentieth century Cubism developed in three phases. First phase belongs to breaking up individual form into angular planes. In the second phase painters merged transparently the clear an separated facets with the backgrounds of their paintings. Its final phase is synthetic. In it the painter built in artificial or synthetic fashion compositions consisting of haphazardly picked angles which for them seemed appropriate for compositional motives. In this phase artists did not bother about the real basis and, aspects of the objects.

Paris Figaro on 4. November 1911 in the magazine "Art News" wrote humorously that cubism does not consist as one might believe, in painting the cube exclusively. The cubist produces also the quadrilateral, the trapeze, and plays pleasantly with the triangle. The polygon, the hexagon and the rectangle are also familiar to him.

Leaving aside this opinion it could be said many cubists had created phenomenal impressions and they astonished really the viewers having good aesthetic taste. The critics of art rightly think that Cubism provided basis to the styles adopted by Orphism, Futurism and Constructivism in painting. Jacques Martain writes in his book "Creative intuition in art and poetry" Cubism set out to transpose natural appearances by decomposing and reshaping them in reference to the free expansion of forms and volumes in a newly organised space, which depends on the construction requirements of painting as painting, and makes our vision less bound to the limitations and opacity of matter (to make it possible to have all the sides of an object simultaneously present to the eye). It provided us in this way with a number of admirable paintings.