Cubists did not seek to depict things – they were striving to examine and convey their essence, their basic structure. Take a city, for instance: there are trees, people and buildings, the houses have windows and doors, the trees have leafage and branches, the people wear headwear. Yet there is no traditional attention to detail.

No need to thoroughly produce each and every window, shape of a leaf or colour of a hat to paint the city. Cubists did not even make a difference for seasonal changes and the weather – only the essence is important, regardless of external factors. All the windows, roofs and trees are just attributes that will make their way into a painting, yet in a set of dismantled elements placed from different angles. Thus we do see the attributes that are clear of anything changing and unnecessary – we see the core essence of the city, and the misshapen distorted quality of the composition lets us free from the biased perception and the distracting details. If we consider cityscapes in other styles, we will get a better picture of how the philosophy behind the style influences the manner of representation.

Impressionists, for instance, struggled to convey the translucent beauty of a fleeting moment, the vibration and the instability of everything around – and their cities look the way you would see them from the window of a train passing by. With realists a city is a living organism that bears the burden and carries the main peculiarities of the time, the geography, political status and other typical things.

As for cubist cityscapes, the city as we see it is never the purpose: what matters is the fundamental attributes that do not change with time, season, time of the day or other technicalities. The rational construction inherent to the city is presented by way of juxtaposing elementary forms – spheres, cones, cylinders etc. Despite the flat layout, local colours, straight geometrical lines and other characteristics that simplify the paintings for a common viewer, their position in the composition, the colour and the size are symbolic in cubism. When you analyze a cubist cityscape you should note the interralation and the interplay of colour plains (the sharp contrasts, the scale of different colour patches, the symbolic meaning of colours), the interaction of forms, straight and broken lines etc. Forms, lines and colours are as meaningful for cubists as the narrative and the characters are for traditional paintings.