Cubism

“ And against this my contemporaries set up a conscious æstheticism, slightly tinged with certain metaphysico-moral doctrines concerning the cowiness of cows and the thing in itself. With Cubism conscious æstheticism holds the field, for the Cubist theory is, in the main, æsthetic. That is one reason why I cannot think that there is any great future for Cubism. An artistic movement is unlikely to live long on anything so relevant to art; for artists, it seems, must believe that they are concerned with something altogether different. ”

“ The artist who concedes nothing, who does not explain himself and relates nothing, accumulates an internal strength whose radiance shines on every hand.
It is in consummating ourselves within ourselves that we shall purify humanity; it is by increasing our own riches that we shall enrich others; it is by kindling the heart of the star for our own pleasure that we shall exalt the universe.
To explain Cubism, or any attempt in art to suppress the objective, one must fall back on music. ”

“ Even today, after the vital contributions of the Cubists have altered the whole trend of modern art, there are few who see in them aught but the material for laughter. The critics who have accepted the Impressionists and Cézanne deny the merits of Cubism, venting their derision in a manner which recalls the detractors of the very schools which these critics now uphold. ”

“ Again, we all know how insipid are most of the portraits that are faithfully rounded and modelled to reproduce every curve of the sitters’ features.
The truth is there is more of Cubism in great painting than we dream, and the extravagances of the Cubists may serve to open our eyes to beauties we have always felt without quite understanding.
Take, for instance, the strongest things by Winslow Homer; the strength lies in the big, elemental manner in which the artist rendered his impressions in lines and masses which departed widely from photographic reproductions of scenes and people. ”

“ The Cubists’ greatest apport to art (not in theory but in achievement) is their almost total abolition of the painter’s slavery to nature. It was but a step from Matisse to the complete elimination of recognisable objects, and though Cubism did not cover the entire distance, it nevertheless made an advance toward that pure expression which Cézanne saw was inevitable. Even today the followers of this school are beginning to realise their early mistakes and to throw off their self-imposed restrictions. They are launching forth into colour and are seeking expression in purely arbitrary form. ”

“ If the painter who laughs at a Cubist painting and denounces it will only stop to think he will find one of two things true, he himself is either advancing in his art or he is not. If he is not, there is nothing further to be said, his attitude toward the Cubist painting is quite consistent; but if he is advancing, if his style, his technic, his point of view are changing, however slightly, from year to year, then he should be exceedingly cautious how he ridicules or condemns, for without knowing it he may be traveling the highroad, one of the interesting byways of which is Cubism. ”

“ But to say a school or a movement, irrespective of particular works, is a worthless movement involves not one’s taste but one’s philosophy of life; it involves the proposition that a movement in art that challenges the attention of the art-world is so devoid of force of any kind that it is unworthy attention—an obvious contradiction.
Cubism has produced a lot of inane, uninteresting, and ugly pictures, pictures hopelessly bad in both line and color, but it has also produced pictures that are fine in line and color ”

“ Cubism is interesting because it accentuates the value of planes and shows what can be done with elemental propositions in drawing. But the student or painter who turns to Cubism because he thinks it is to become a fad and will pay, runs the risk of making a great mistake; he would better stick to older methods.
The Orphists have been mentioned; there were no Orphist pictures in the International Exhibition. The movement is based on the purely practical proposition that color in itself, and color alone without drawing, may be beautiful. ”

“ Cubism will pass away, but the spirit of change will not pass away. One enthusiasm will follow another enthusiasm so long as men possess ambition.
Already there are signs that Cubism is passing. Some of the men are calling themselves Neo-Cubists and Post-Cubists, and they are painting in very different manner.
One has but to look at a series of Picasso’s work to see how often and radically he has changed his style in these ten years from drawing and painting with great facility and success in Impressionistic and Neo-Impressionistic manner to the most abstract Cubism ”

“ Herein we have an explanation for the fact that Cubism is incomprehensible to the untutored person who regards art as an imitation of nature. The very word “form” is æsthetically meaningless to the average spectator. In order to experience its meaning, aside from organisation, one’s attention has to be given over253 to the object’s weight, its force, its circumferential volume. A form in a picture cannot be considered merely as to its employment and its utilitarian destiny, or from the standpoint of one’s experience with it. ”

“ And each conception is assumed to have the finality of a miracle. In the uproar of rival christenings the accredited Cubist pamphleteer announces "Cubism is painting itself." The Futurist manifesto proclaims; "We inaugurate a new epoch of painting." A Synchromist confided to me, "Ours is the last painters' movement; there can be no other." One conviction, however, they hold in common: art, which has been the courtesan of princes and the holiday playmate of republics, is dead. ”

“ In primitive pictures, it is true, we look for the expression of emotion rather than for illusion, and that is the reason why so many people get a real pleasure from primitive art. They judge it by the right standard, and ask of it what it offers to them. But from modern pictures they demand illusion—that is to say, the kind of representation they are used to; and when they do not get it they accuse the artist of incompetence. [15]
In painting this reaction, this tendency—call it what you please—has taken many forms, one of which is Cubism. ”

“ One finds oneself in somewhat the same predicament when one tries to describe these "new movements" in art. The movement is so rapid and the men shift their ground so quickly that there is no telling where to find them. You have no sooner arrived at some notion of the difference between Cubism and Futurism than you find your Cubist doing things that are both Cubist and Futurist, or neither Cubist nor Futurist, according as you look at them. ”

“ Lipps made a distinction between the moral satisfaction induced by the objective reality, the meaning of the artefact, and the process of observation, which is different: the observer enjoys something that has an ideal content, an objectified ego. Aesthetic pleasure therefore is identical neither with moral satisfaction nor with merely sensual enjoyment. (Moravánszky)
Some critics of cubist architecture rejected this distinction, seeing in the style (especially in late cubism) mere sensuality, an unhealthy emphasis on mere ornamentation. ”

“ In a book like this, written as an off-hand comment upon what is now going on in the world of art—in the world generally, for that matter—it would be quite impracticable to follow the development of even the principal lines of human activity; [16] hence the works and theories of the Cubists have been chosen as typical of radical and revolutionary ideas and the attempt is made to find wherein these works and{32} ideas are not so radical and extravagant as they seem, but are, in fact, only an illustration of what is going on in the minds of men generally. ”

“ The cubists proclaim, "The mission of the artist is to divest objects of their banal appearance and to fashion the real image of the spirit." The painter is to search for "the plastic essence of the world," tending to express itself as "a colored mathematics of things." Observe the absolutist's contempt for the merely phenomenal world. Objects are appearances, thin and unreal things. Vision is only a form of illusion; reality is elsewhere. The artist pondering on the nature of his art begins to reflect on the nature of reality. ”

“ One of the charms of the Cubists is their child-like faith in the absolute supremacy of their art; this faith is interesting in them because it leads them to produce works that cause us to stop and look and think, but when their followers indulge the same blind faith in print their utterances are mostly incoherent and boresome.
The violent partisan who sees all sorts of things in the modern painting is at one extreme, the violent opponent who sees nothing at all is at the other—let them fight it out. ”

“ Speaking of the Cubists and Post-Impressionists generally:
“While we admire the heroism of these painters of great worth, who have displayed a laudable contempt for artistic commercialism and a powerful hatred of academism, we feel ourselves and we declare ourselves to be absolutely opposed to their art.
“They obstinately continue to paint objects motionless, frozen, and all the static aspects of nature; they worship the traditionalism of Poussin, of Ingres, of Corot, ageing and petrifying their art with an obstinate attachment to the past, which to our eyes remains totally incomprehensible. ”

“ One value of the Cubist movement lies in arousing a sense of the strength possessed by the simple and elemental.
In oriental art, in archaic art, in primitive Italian art, in not a little modern decorative work, we have long recognized the beauty of drawing in planes and of the use of color arbitrarily. The Cubists are showing us—perhaps too violently and imperfectly—that it is possible to paint pictures and portraits in planes and masses without imitation. That it is possible we know, for the orientals have done it for two thousand years ”

“ Thus, in art, we have the classical spirit for the thesis, the modern art movement, its antithesis, and we may confidently expect and hope for an age which shall select the bold, fresh spirit of the modern movement and infuse it into the proportion of classical art, which shall be the great synthesis of the artistic future. Thus the extravagant and apparently insane movement of the Futurist and Cubist will be of the greatest value in reviving art, putting red blood into art again. ”

“ Beyond the few lines they use there is the bare canvas; they have reached the limit and they must turn in their tracks. The reaction is bound to come, and come quickly.{102}
Meanwhile the Cubists, who have been painting along emotional, as distinguished from the coldly scientific lines, are still turning out pictures that possess a charm in line and color irrespective of their theoretical significance and much may still be done in this direction. ”

“ Art itself complied more and more with the tendency to express erudite ideas by subtle symbolism, and it represented in allegorical figures the relations of divine powers and cosmic forces, like the sky, the earth, the ocean, the planets, the constellations and the winds. The sculptors engraved on stone everything man thought and taught. In a general way the belief prevailed that redemption and salvation depended on the revelation of certain truths, on a knowledge of the gods, of the world and of our person, and piety became gnosis. ”

“ The Cubists are entitled to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored puzzle-pictures of the Sunday newspapers. Of course there is no reason for choosing the cube as a symbol, except that it is probably less fitted than any other mathematical expression for any but the most formal decorative art. ”

“ For upon the canvas was only a huge smear of many colored pigments—utterly formless, without meaning. I stared an instant, then turned and met the eyes of the little old man beside me. They gleamed into mine with triumph and pride, and in them I saw again—and this time plainly—the look of madness.
I held back the smile that struggled to my lips. “This—this painting—is it you who—”
“Is that not life, señor?” His thin, treble voice carried an exultant, masterful note. “Can you not see it there? Human life—painted in with pigments to make it immortal.” ”

“ Beatific vision of the splendour of God, immediate perception of all truth, mystic love for an ineffable Beauty—these were sublime speculations which were to be unendingly reproduced and developed after the fall of paganism. Unavailing efforts to represent a state inconceivable to any human imagination, they expressed the ardent yearning of religious souls towards an ideal of perfection and felicity. ”

“ The disintegration of the "ego" in Cubist art—the presentation of reality from a multiple standpoint instead of that of the "I"—£lowed, paradoxically, from an aspect of Impressionism, which had emphasized the "I"-standpoint to an extreme degree. For in attempting to convey an impression of reality as it is actually experienced by the senses, the Impressionists had tried to penetrate to the inner mind, to the mind half-awake, to the mental realms beyond the conceptualizing, calculating intellect. ”

“ There is a gaping incongruity between the obsolete German romanticism and the new German atheism which exploited it, between their talk about Siegfried and their talk about the struggle for life. And there is the same incongruity between the cubist effort to see the visible world as a mechanical process and art itself. The cubist seems to force himself with a savage irony into this caricature of nature; we have emptied reality of its content in our thought and he will empty it of its content to our eyes ”