I used to think Cubism was just about making faces look weird.
Turns out, when Picasso and Braque started shattering objects into geometric fragments around 1907, they weren’t just being difficult—they were fundamentally rewiring how we could think about showing reality on a flat surface. The whole idea that you could show multiple viewpoints simultaneously, that you could fracture a guitar or a face into planes and angles that defied single-point perspective, it created this permission structure for every visual medium that came after. Film editors started thinking about montage differently. Graphic designers realized layouts didn’t need to follow the rigid hierarchies of classical composition. Even architects—and I’m talking about the Bauhaus crowd here, give or take a few years—started playing with intersecting planes and transparent layering that would’ve been unthinkable before Analytical Cubism showed you could see through and around objects at the same time. Honestly, the influence is so pervasive now that we don’t even notice it anymore, which is maybe the most successful kind of revolution.
But here’s the thing: Cubism didn’t just break perspective, it changed time.
Photography had already stolen realism from painting by the late 1800s, leaving artists in this weird existential crisis about what their medium was even for anymore. The Cubists—especially in that intense Analytical phase between roughly 1909 and 1912—responded by insisting that vision itself was never instantaneous anyway. When you look at a violin, you don’t just see it from one frozen angle like a camera does. You move around it, you remember what the back looks like, you synthesize information across moments. So those fragmented, overlapping planes in a Braque still life? They’re closer to how we actually experiance objects than any photograph could be. This temporal dimension, this idea of the fourth dimension leaking into two-dimensional art, it’s what hooked the Futurists, who took it and ran straight into their obsession with motion and speed. It’s also what eventually influenced how we understand sequential art—comics, storyboards, even the way we scroll through interfaces now, absorbing multiple frames of reference simultaneously.
The grid itself became a tool for destabilizing rather than organizing, which is wild when you think about it.
Before Cubism, compositional grids were about harmony and balance, right? The Renaissance had its golden ratios and vanishing points, everything converging neatly. But look at something like Picasso’s ‘Ma Jolie’ from 1911—there’s a grid structure implied in all those vertical and horizontal fractures, but it’s serving the opposite purpose. It’s creating ambiguity, making you uncertain about what’s foreground and what’s background, what’s solid and what’s void. Twentieth-century designers picked up on this immediately, or at least within a couple decades. The Swiss International Style loved its grids, sure, but they also understood that grids could create tension and dynamic relationships between elements, not just order. Magazine layouts started breaking columns in unexpected ways. Web design—wait, maybe this is obvious, but responsive design is literally about fracturing a single composition into multiple simultaneous viewpoints depending on screen size, which is such a Cubist concept it’s almost funny. The grid became a stage for controlled chaos.
I guess what strikes me most is how Cubism made abstraction feel intellectually rigorous instead of just decorative.
There’s this moment in art history where abstraction could’ve just become pretty patterns—and sometimes it did, no judgment—but Cubism gave it philosophical weight by tying it to perceptual reality. Mondrian didn’t jump straight to his pure abstractions; he worked through a Cubist phase, gradually stripping away the representational elements until he arrived at those iconic grids of primary colors and black lines. The whole language of modernist visual composition, the idea that you could communicate complex ideas through purely formal relationships—overlapping shapes, tonal gradients, fragmented space—it comes directly from watching the Cubists insist that a shattered wine bottle could contain more truth than a photorealistic rendering. Contemporary UI design does this constantly, whether designers realize it or not: layering translucent panels, using parallax scrolling to suggest spatial depth that doesn’t actually exist, breaking information into cards and tiles that you perceive as a unified whole even though they’re technically fragmented. It’s Cubism’s logic embedded in the everyday visual environment. Anyway, I’ve definitely spent too much time thinking about this, but once you see it, you can’t unsee how thoroughly those early experiments colonized our visual culture.
