Sander Vos

Inspired by the nontraditional ways Postimpressionists like Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat depicted the world, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneered an even more abstract style in which reality was fragmented into flat, geometric forms. Cubism majorly influenced 20th-century Western art as it radically broke with the adherence to composition and linear perspectives that dated back to the Renaissance. Its watershed moments are considered Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in which nude figures are fractured into angular shapes, and Georges Braque’s 1908 painting show, which prompted a critic to describe his visual reductions as “cubes.”

Although Cubism was a revolutionary art movement for European culture, it was informed by African masks and other tribal art. Its artists, which included Fernand Léger, Alexander Archipenko, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris and Jean Metzinger, experimented with compressing space and playing with the tension between solid and void forms in their work. While their subjects were often conventional, such as still lifes, nudes and landscapes, they were distorted without any illusion of realism.

Cubist art evolved through different distinct phases. In Analytic Cubism, from 1908 to 1912, figures or objects were “analyzed” into pieces that were reassembled in paintings and sculptures, as if presenting the same subject matter from many perspectives at once. The palette was usually monochromatic and muted, giving attention to the overlapping planes. Synthetic Cubism, dating from 1912 to 1914, moved to brighter colors and a further flattening of images. This unmooring from formal ideas of art would shape numerous styles that followed, from Dada to Surrealism.

Find a collection of authentic Cubist paintings, prints and multiples, sculptures and more art on 1stDibs.

Find a broad range of photography on 1stDibs today.

The first permanent image created by a camera — which materialized during the 1820s — is attributed to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The French inventor was on to something for sure. Kodak introduced roll film in the 1880s, allowing photography to become more democratic, although cameras wouldn’t be universally accessible until several decades later. 

Digital photographic techniques, software, smartphone cameras and social-networking platforms such as Instagram have made it even easier in the modern era for budding photographers to capture the world around them as well as disseminate their images far and wide. 

What might leading figures of visual art such as Andy Warhol have done with these tools at their disposal?

Today, when we aren’t looking at the digital photos that inundate us on our phones, we look to the past to celebrate the photographers who have broken rules as well as records — provocative and prolific artists like Horst P. Horst, Lillian Bassman and Helmut Newton, who altered the face of fashion and portrait photography; visionary documentary photographers such as Gordon Parks, whose best-known work was guided by social justice; and pioneers of street photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who shot for revolutionary travel magazines like Holiday with the likes of globetrotting society lensman Slim Aarons.

Find photographers you may not know in Introspective and The Study — where you’ll read about Berenice Abbott, who positioned herself atop skyscrapers for the perfect shot, or “conceptual artist-adventurer” Charles Lindsay, whose work combines scientific rigor with artistic expression, or Massimo Listri, known for his epic interiors of opulent Old World libraries. Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron was given a Kodak camera as a child. Later, she shot on Polaroid film before buying her first 35mm camera in her teens. Barron's stunning portraits of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Warhol and other artists chronicle a crucial chapter of New York’s cultural history.

Throughout the past two centuries, photographers have used their medium to create expressive work that has resonated for generations. Shop a voluminous collection of this powerful fine photography on 1stDibs. Search by photographer to find the perfect piece for your living room wall, or spend some time with the work organized under various categories, such as landscape photography, nude photography and more.