Art before the twentieth century was recognized as an imitation

Art before the twentieth century was recognized as an imitation of nature. Paintings and portraits were made to look as realistic and three-dimensional as possible, as if we are looking at the real object. The first cubist works were those in which objects, landscapes, and people are represented as many-sided solids. Artists were painting in a flamboyant style. Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1882-1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963) initiated the movement when they followed the advice of Paul Cezanne, who in 1904 said artists should treat nature “in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone.” (art)
In Cubism the subject matter is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form. Cubism changed the way art was represented and viewed. There were three phases in the development of Cubism: Early Cubism, Analystical Cubism and Synthetic Cubism. It brought in new ways of composing pictures and also showed new ways of representing nature. This new movement also brought in new attitudes towards the picture surface and the application of paint. The ideas of colour theory were all changed. This caused a liberation of these elements from a merely descriptive function have all featured in the development of Cubism. The main distinguishing characteristic between cubism and other styles such as impressionism is that cubism does portray nature in art. Cubist painters are not limited to painting a certain color, or form, or a certain texture. Cubism broke objects down into basic shapes of cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones and line thickness. The shapes are flattened onto canvas so that different sides of each shape can be shown simultaneously from many angles. This resulted in strong geometric patterns and angles. The style was described as being able to show objects in multiple viewpoints.
The first stage, Early Cubism, was characterized by the simplification, distortion, and emphasis of the forms of objects. It consisted of facet…