Just as important, oil cloth was a material that had had no previous connection with art. Its inclusion implied that art could be created with scissors and glue as well as with brushes and paint. Both Picasso and Braque began to include bits of newspaper, wallpaper, or advertising in their paintings. Picasso, after all, was playing with forms. Instead of working toward a consistent, unified surface as analytical cubism had done, synthetic cubism tended toward multiplicity by combining a variety of styles, surfaces, and visual languages into one painting.
Some forms are flat, whereas others, though simplified, appear three-dimensional and cast shadows.
The later work of Picasso and Braque underwent numerous stylistic changes, but a great deal of it continued to show the influence of cubism. However, the ways that they used cubism no longer fit neatly into the strictly defined categories of analytical or synthetic cubism. Many artists took up cubism, but in ways and with intentions different from those that motivated Picasso and Braque. Picasso and Braque were reluctant to explain their work verbally, but French artists Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote a cubist manifesto in 1912. The geometric fragmentation, mixture of drawing styles, and use of lettering in this painting are clearly cubist, but each individual plane remains distinct, without the interpenetration or transparency characteristic of Picasso's or Braque's cubism.