How did braque turn subjects into geometric planes in early cubism?

[NicholasL]

I’ve been trying to understand the shift in early 20th century painting, but I keep hitting a wall when I look at my own attempts. My work feels stuck between depicting a recognizable scene and breaking it into facets, and I can’t seem to commit fully to that analytical decomposition of form. How did painters like Braque make that mental leap to see the subject as a series of geometric planes rather than a whole?

[Eleanor.M]

I kept thinking about the leap Braque made, where a bowl becomes a field of planes. I tried a still life, cut it into rectangles, and the fruit still looked like fruit at first. The more I chopped it, the more I felt edges turning into answers, then questions. It took weeks of painting and scraping to hear the color blocks talking instead of the object.

[Steven66]

I did a bunch of quick studies where I stopped worrying about shading to describe form. I painted the same cup from two or three angles on the same canvas, and the cup held together but the shadow started to feel like a separate plane. The result looked flat to others and alive to me, which was maddening.

[Madison.M]

Maybe the real problem isn't whether to decompose forms but what I want that decomposition to do for the feeling. If the subject is still a place in time, am I chasing a diagram or a memory?

[Brandon96]

I drifted to textures and line quality, then back to planarity, then out again. One day I painted a chair and found the planes, then I lost the chair and kept the planes. It felt like the problem never left, just moved.