By Katelyn Amendolara-Russo
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Some of my favorite experiences in a museum happen when I am standing in front of a work of art that I don’t immediately understand.
After years of studying, teaching and working with art, I have learned that I don’t always need to understand a work the moment I see it. Sometimes the best thing I can do is stand there a little longer.
Cubism has always been one of those movements for me.
I remember introducing Cubism to students and watching their faces when they first encountered a Picasso. Their first reaction was often, “What is that supposed to be?” And that question is actually the perfect place to begin.
Cubism developed in Paris in the early 20th century, primarily through Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Rather than accepting the traditional idea that a painting should show one fixed view of the world, they began asking a much bigger question: What if we could show more than one view at the same time?
I often explain it to students with something as ordinary as a coffee cup.
If you draw a cup sitting on a table, you might show the side, the handle and the opening at the top. But you are still drawing it from one position. Now imagine showing the top, side, inside and handle all at once.
It wouldn’t look “realistic.”
That was exactly the point.
For centuries, European artists had worked to create the illusion of reality. Perspective, light and shadow allowed a flat canvas to appear three-dimensional. Picasso and Braque understood these traditions very well. They chose to challenge them.
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted in 1907, is one of the paintings that marks this dramatic shift. Five figures fill the canvas, but their bodies are angular and fragmented, and their faces are distorted into almost mask-like forms.
It is not an easy painting. But it is an important one because Picasso was beginning to question what a figure, and ultimately what a painting, could be.
The artists began breaking objects into geometric planes and showing different viewpoints within the same composition. In Cubism, their paintings became increasingly fragmented and their colors often became muted, drawing attention to structure rather than decoration.
Later, Cubism introduced another radical idea: real materials could become part of the artwork. Picasso and Braque incorporated newspaper, wallpaper, printed letters and other everyday materials into their compositions. This helped establish collage as an important artistic practice.
My connection to Picasso’s work is also a very personal one. At Medici Museum of Art, we are fortunate to have two works by Picasso in our collection.
Some of my favorite Cubist works by Picasso, however, are his portraits of Jacqueline Roque, his second wife and one of the most frequently depicted people in his later years. I find these paintings especially fascinating because you can see how Picasso continued to use the visual language he had developed decades earlier while interpreting the same person again and again. Her features could become angular, simplified or rearranged, yet somehow her presence remained recognizable.
That is part of what makes Picasso so interesting to me. Cubism was never simply about breaking things apart. It was about finding new ways to put them together.
When I teach this period, I often tell students not to worry about “getting it” immediately. Look for the objects hiding within the fragments; a guitar, bottle, newspaper or a face.
Working in museums has taught me that art reveals itself differently depending on how much time we give it. I have stood in front of paintings I thought I understood, only to notice something years later that I had completely missed before.
We spend so much of our lives looking quickly. We recognize something and move on. Cubism asks us to slow down, question our first impression and consider another perspective.
The painting hasn’t changed, but perhaps our way of seeing has. And that, to me, is one of the enduring gifts of art.
