All those colorful smudges and loose brush work seemed insubstantial and ephemeral when you compared them to the rigorous forms of the cubists and futurists.
Like many Analytical Cubism pieces, the painting uses very few colors, because the Cubists wanted the viewer to concentrate on the shapes more than the color.
She painted landscape like the landscape painter, abstractions like the cubist, and with the help of picture postcards sailing-boats lying at anchor like the Scandinavian.
During this period, the Cubists started pasting real objects like newspaper, colored paper, or cloth onto the canvas in place of former planes of the subject, inventing a collage.
Cubism was popular during this time, and Stein was an early collector of cubist art, including the art of Pablo Picasso, who was a close friend of Stein.
The Cubists decided to break from the belief that a painting should be a window onto a realistic scene and instead show it as it truly is — a flat, two-dimensional surface.
As an art critic, Apollinaire explained the cubist and surrealist movements to the world, and rose to the defense of many young artists in the face of what was often a xenophobic and narrow-minded public.