Avant-gardes 1910 (Cubism / Futurism)

Two movements launched in the decade before the First World War rewired the visual imagination of the century that followed. Cubism, developed by Picasso and Braque in the studios of Montmartre from around 1907 onward, dismantled single-point perspective and replaced it with a simultaneous, multi-angle analysis of form: an object seen from front, side and above at once, its planes fractured and reassembled on a flat surface. Picasso's *Les Demoiselles d'Avignon* (1907) is the rough beginning; the gridded greys and browns of Analytic Cubism (1910–12) the movement's most austere moment; the collage-bright colours of Synthetic Cubism its most playful. Futurism, launched by Marinetti's 1909 manifesto and developed by Boccioni, Severini, Balla and Carrà, celebrated the opposite of Cubism's still dissection: movement, speed, machinery, the city in motion — the dynamism of modern life rendered as overlapping multiple moments in time.

How to recognise it

Cubist paintings are immediately recognisable by their fragmented, faceted planes — as if an object has been broken apart and rearranged on the picture surface. In Analytic Cubism the palette is severely restricted to greys, ochres and browns; in Synthetic Cubism it opens into brighter colour and often incorporates collage (newspaper, wallpaper). Pictorial space becomes shallow and ambiguous — figure and background interpenetrate. Futurist paintings share the fractured plane vocabulary but apply it to subjects in motion: cars, trains, dancers, charging horses. Multiple exposures of a single moving figure — what Balla called "dynamic sequences" — create a stroboscopic shimmer. Speed lines, blur trails and the splintering of a single form into its consecutive positions are Futurist fingerprints.