Cubism (Sculpture)
Cubist sculpture essentially is the dynamic rendering of three-dimensional objects in the language of non-Euclidean geometry by shifting viewpoints of volume or mass in terms of spherical, flat and hyperbolic surfaces.

The beginnings of Cubism have variously been dated 1907, 1908, 1909 and 1911. By 1911 Picasso was accepted as the inventor of Cubism, a view that began to be challenged only with the publication of John Golding’s influential history of Cubism in 1959; here Braque’s importance and possible precedence was recognized for the first time.
In 1907 Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (New York, MOMA), which has often been considered a proto-Cubist work. In 1908 Braque produced Houses at L’Estaque(Berne, Kstmus.) and related landscapes, which prompted the reference by Vauxcelles to ‘cubes’. The landscapes made by Picasso at Horta de Ebro in 1909, such as Reservoir at Horta de Ebro (New York, priv. col., see 1983 exh. cat., p. 245), were regarded by Gertrude Stein as the first Cubist pictures. The first organized group showing by Cubists took place in a separate room, ‘Salle 41’, at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1911; it included work by Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, but nothing by Picasso or Braque.
Before 1914 the image of Cubism both in France and internationally was based on an extremely broad definition. A more heterogeneous view of Cubism is certainly encouraged by the earliest promotional writings by its practitioners and associates. Picasso, Braque and Gris made almost no published statements on the subject before 1914. The first major text, Du cubisme, was produced by two ‘Salle 41’ Cubists, Gleizes and Metzinger, in 1912; this was followed in 1913 by a far from systematic collection of reflections and commentaries by the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who had been closely involved with Picasso (from 1905) and Braque (from 1907), but who gave as much attention to artists such as Delaunay, Picabia and Duchamp. Along with Léger he identified these three with a new tendency, which he labelled Orphic Cubism or Orphism and which he considered of special significance for the future. Painters such as Gleizes, Metzinger, Delaunay and Duchamp were powerful influences alongside Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger in the development of art related to Cubism in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Italy, the Netherlands, Britain, Spain and the USA.

In 1909, over a ten-month period, Picasso was inspired to create more than sixty Cubist paintings, sculptures, and drawings of women that bear a striking resemblance to his paramour at the time, Fernande Olivier.