Cubist sculpture is a style developed in parallel with cubist painting

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...

, centered in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, beginning around 1909 and evolving through the early 1920s.

The style is most closely associated with the formal experiments of Georges Braque

Georges Braque

Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...

 and Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

. Some sources name Picasso's 1909 bronze Head of a Woman as the first cubist sculpture, although art historian Douglas Cooper

Douglas Cooper (art historian)

Douglas Cooper, who also published as Douglas Lord was a British art historian, art critic and art collector. He mainly collected Cubist works.- Family background :...

 credits the Czech sculptor Otto Gutfreund

Otto Gutfreund

Otto Gutfreund was a Czech-Czechoslovak cubist sculptor. He is acknowledged by the art historian Douglas Cooper to be the author of the first cubist sculpture: Anxiety , created in 1911 and exhibited in Paris in 1912.- Life :...

 (1889–1927).

In either case, others were very quick to follow Braque and Picasso's lead in Paris, artists like Raymond Duchamp-Villon

Raymond Duchamp-Villon

Raymond Duchamp-Villon was a French sculptor.Duchamp-Villon was born Pierre-Maurice-Raymond Duchamp in Damville, Eure, in the Haute-Normandie region of France, the second son of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp. Of the six Duchamp children, four would become successful artists...

 (1876-1918), whose career was cut short by his death in military service, and Alexander Archipenko

Alexander Archipenko

Alexander Porfyrovych Archipenko was a Ukrainian avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist.-Biography:...

, who'd arrived in Paris in 1908 and whose 1912 Walking Woman is cited as the first modern sculpture with an abstracted void, i.e., a hole in the middle .

Just as in cubist painting, the style is rooted in Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...

's reduction of painted objects into component planes and geometric solids (cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones). According to Herbert Read

Herbert Read

Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner....

, this has the effect of "revealing the structure" of the object, or of presenting fragments and facets of the object to be visually interpreted in different ways. Both of these effects transfer to sculpture. The distinction between "analytic cubism" and "synthetic cubism" also holds true in sculpture. "In the analytical Cubism of Picasso and Braque, the definite purpose of the geometricization of the planes is to emphasize the formal structure of the motif represented. In the synthetic Cubism of Juan Gris

Juan Gris

José Victoriano González-Pérez , better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter and sculptor who lived and worked in France most of his life...

 the definite purpose is to create an effective formal pattern, geometricization being a means to this end."

By the early 1920s, significant Cubist sculpture had been done in Sweden (by sculptor Bror Hjorth

Bror Hjorth

Bror Hjorth was a Swedish artist. Hjorth was one of Sweden’s best-known sculptors and painters, and was professor of art at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1949 to 1959. On completion of his studies, he lived in Uppsala, where he built his studio home in Kåbo, now the...

), in Prague (by Gutfreund and his collaborator Emil Filla

Emil Filla

Emil Filla , a Czech painter, was a leader of the Avant-Garde in Prague between World War I and World War II and was an early Cubist painter....

), and at least two dedicated "Cubo-Futurist" sculptors were on staff at the Soviet art school Vkhutemas

VKhUTEMAS

Vkhutemas ) was the Russian state art and technical school founded in 1920 in Moscow, replacing the Moscow Svomas. The workshops were established by a decree from Vladimir Lenin with the intentions, in the words of the Soviet government, "to prepare master artists of the highest qualifications for...

 in Moscow (Boris Korolev

Boris Korolev

-General facts:Korolév , Borís Danílovich – a great Soviet sculptor-monumentalist, teacher and an outstanding public figure. As an artist Korolyóv stood at the origins of the Soviet school of sculpture, its mainstream, but he also was one of the leading figures in the avant-garde movement...

 and Vera Mukhina

Vera Mukhina

Vera Ignatyevna Mukhina was a prominent Soviet sculptor.- Life :Mukhina was born in Riga into a wealthy merchant family, and lived at Turgeneva st. 23/25, where a memorial plaque has now been placed. She later moved to Moscow, where she studied at several private art schools, including those of...

). Other significant cubist sculptors include Jacques Lipchitz

Jacques Lipchitz

Jacques Lipchitz was a Cubist sculptor.Jacques Lipchitz was born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz, son of a building contractor in Druskininkai, Lithuania, then within the Russian Empire...

 and Henri Laurens

Henri Laurens

Henri Laurens was a French sculptor and illustrator.-Early life and education:Born in Paris, Henri Laurens worked as a stonemason before he became a sculptor...

.

The movement had run its course by about 1925, but cubist approaches to sculpture didn't end as much as they became a pervasive influence, fundamental to the related developments of Constructivism

Constructivism (art)

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th...

 and Futurism

Futurism

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...

.