Difference in Both Cubisms

What are the main differences between Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism? How can you tell one from the other? Provide several differences.

Braque and Picasso created cubism by using Picasso’s ideas of breading down the subject into ambiguous planes suggesting you are seeing them from more the one angle. The first phase of cubism was Analytic Cubism. Cubists couldn’t achieve the total view through the traditional method of drawing from one position. So they began to dissect the forms of their subjects. So basically Analytic Cubism involves analyzing the structure of forms. Breaking down the subjects and analyzing them into smaller parts best describe Analytical. Then those parts are turned into geometric shape example being a cylinder, cone, and sphere. Those three dimensional shapes would then be shown on a two dimensional canvas. Analytic cubism is also with a lack of color they tried to limit their colors to like gray, blue, white and black. As you can see in the portrait of Ambrose Vollard it is flat and the multiple perspective that Picasso is producing.

Then in 1912 cubism became synthetic cubism. Which was the construction of painting and drawing from objects and shapes cut from paper and other materials to represent parts of a subject. This phase came from Picassos “Still Life with Chair-Caning.” It was a piece that imprinted a photolithographed pattern of a cane chair seat on the canvas. The best way to explain Synthetic cubism is it is like a collage.

The best way to think of the two is that analytic and synthesis mean two different things. To analyze is to break something down and that’s exactly what analytic cubism means. Then to synthesize means to bring smaller parts together and that’s what synthetic cubism does.

Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner's Art through the Ages: A Concise History of Western Art, 2nd Edition., 2010. The Art Institutes. Web. 29 July 2013 <http://digitalbookshelf.aionline.edu/books/1111904871/id/F14-9>.

Lingelbach, D.J.. N.p.. Web. 29 Jul 2013. <http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/d/j/djl5092/cubism.html>.