Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

Stairway, staircase, stairwell, flight of stairs, or simply stairs are names for a construction designed to bridge a large vertical distance by dividing it into smaller vertical... distances, called steps. Stairways may be straight, round, or may consist of two or more straight pieces connected at angles. Special stairways include escalators and ladders. Some alternatives to stairways are elevators, stairlifts and inclined moving sidewalks as well as stationary inclined sidewalks. The step is composed of the tread and riser. The balustrade is the system of railings and balusters that prevents people from falling over the edge. Handrails may be continuous or post-to-post . For continuous handrails on long balconies, there may be multiple newels and tandem caps to cover the newels. At corners, there are quarter-turn caps. For post-to-post systems, the newels project above the handrails. Another, more classical, form of handrailing which is still in use is the tangent method. A variant of the Cylindric method of layout, it allows for continuous climbing and twisting rails and easings.
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Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and... sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics. Historians have sought to analyze the history of cubism in terms of phases. In one scheme, a first branch of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism, was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1907 and 1911 in France. In a second phase, Synthetic Cubism, the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity.
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