Cubism

noun

noun ·3 syllables ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An artistic movement in the early 20th Century characterized by the depiction of natural forms as geometric structures of planes. capitalized, countable, often, uncountable

    "Matisse coined the name Cubism as a derisive joke."

  2. 2
    an artistic movement in France beginning in 1907 that featured surfaces of geometrical planes wordnet

Synonyms

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artstyle

Example

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"Ted Nash explored cubism and the four sides of a square through the idea of fourths in this composition. For example, four musical chords are repeated in this work."

Etymology

From French cubisme. One story is that, in 1908, as a new canvas by Braque was being carried past, someone said, “Encore des cubes! assez de cubisme!”. The quotations below ascribe the coinage to Matisse. Sometimes attributed to French art critic Louis Vauxcelles who popularized the term. See also the word cube (from Latin cubus, from Ancient Greek κύβος (kúbos)).

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.