Cubist paintings were vastly influenced by World War I and the industrial progress of the 20th century when the world saw both the destructive and the creative power of machinery and technology, the conveyor belts and the mass industry that gradulally put the individuality and a man per se to the background.

The chaos and confusion of the military and the post-war time made people long for some kind of stability and predictability, and the artists were no longer inspired by misty landscapes and languid damsels. They had the need to systemize and rationalize the world around, to find its fundamental construction and the logical connection between its elements. Cubist genre paintings reflect the aesthetic principles and the philosophy of the style that called for conveying the essence rather than the outer form and the deceptive appearance. Individual people and actions are meaningless, individual faces and abilities are reduced to a minimum. The everyday scenes are thoroughly analyzed, dismantled and searched for major typical elements and attributes, the secondary features are discarded, along with all minor, peculiar or accidental details.  We see bathing and dancing people, farmers or city slickers who are distorted beyond all recognition, yet we always know who they are and what they are doing thanks to the key characteristics, key elements that reveal their essence regardless of resemblance.

The deformity, depiction of different elements and compounds of one unit from different perspectives, objects broken into pieces – “cubes” – became the fundamental artistic idea that made it possible for cubists to elbow their way away from realistic representation that outlived itself and find the new way of revealing the foundation, the framework of the world.

A cubist and an impressionist are antipodes. An impressionist perceives everyday scenes as fragile fleeting moments that will never happen again, and the paintings produce the impression a person has when watching a scene from the window of a train on the go: everything seems ephemeral, no details, lots of light, flickering, diffused contours. A cubist, on the other hand, will rule out everything mysterious and unstable, the subject will be clear and concise, the lines and forms will take pure geometrical forms, and each form, deformation, local colour and the combinations of these all will have a symbolic meaning that you rarely look for in impressionism.