Today I've been to Tate Modern on guides tours. They have an exhibition about Matisse's cutouts, but since I've already seen some Matisse I figured it would be more interesting to see Tate's permanent exhibitions.
The tours were really great and highly recommended and Ill have to divide all the info in several posts.
The traditional way of portrait or landscape painting was done from one specific viewpoint. The artist often marked his standing position so he could come back to the exact same place the next day. One of the characteristics of cubism on the other hand, was that the artist used several viewpoints in the same painting!
In this Picasso you can see that the woman's right shoulder is painted as if the artist was right in front of her, but the left shoulder is painted slightly from above so you can see her shoulder blade.
In cubism, compared to abstract art, you can still see a face or something else being portrayed. Can you see the clarinet in this Braque painting?
The pioneers in cubism was Pablo Picasso and George Braque. These two good friends had coffee together all the time, and some of their paintings look very alike in terms of brush strokes and color choices (no bold vivid colors). To put things in perspective, the paintings above are from around 1908-1911. Unfortunately the public at that point thought that cubism was rubbish and looked like shattered glass, but it actually opened up for the coming period of abstract art.