Historically, Cubism originated in Cezanne's work because for him painting should treat the forms of nature as if they were cones, spheres, and cylinders. For Cezanne, the painting could not be detached from nature, nor could it copy nature; in fact, it transformed her. He said, "I change water into wine, the world into painting." And it was true. On his canvases, the landscape tree or the fruit of death nature was not the tree and fruit we know - it was painting. The external references that identified them as tree or fruit were preserved, they acquired another substance: they were beings from the pictorial world and not from the natural world. It is therefore correct to say that Cezanne painted in a boundary zone, on the border of nature and art.

However, the cubists went further than Cezanne. They now represent the objects with all their parts in the same plane. It is as if they were open and presented all their sides in the frontal plane concerning the viewer. This attitude of decomposing objects had no commitment to faithfulness to the actual appearance of things.

The cubist painter tries to represent objects in three dimensions, on a flat surface, under geometric shapes, with the predominance of straight lines. It does not represent but suggests the structure of bodies or objects. It represents them as moving around them, seeing them from all visual angles, above and below, perceiving all planes and volumes.

Main features of the painting:

geometrization of shapes and volumes;

renunciation of perspective, composition in two dimensions;

chiaroscuro loses its function;

representation of the coloured volume on flat surfaces;

preference for cut, cross lines;

sensation of sculptural painting;

austere colours, from white to black through grey, dull ocher or soft brown