The maximum that such originality can achieve is madness: madness is revolutionary freedom confined to the self. No revolution is simply the result of personal originality. If the word revolution is used seriously and not merely as an epithet for this season’s novelties, it implies a process. But it is not, I believe, enough for you or me. Is it not enough that the category of Cubism includes those works that are now generally agreed to be within it? This is enough for dealers, collectors and cataloguers who go by the name of art historians. The opinions and outlook of Picasso, Braque, Léger, or Juan Gris were clearly very different even during the few years when their paintings had many features in common. The question thus arises: can Cubism be adequately defined as a style? It seems unlikely. Certain original stylistic features of Cubism can be found in the pioneer works of other movements: Suprematism, Constructivism, Futurism, Vorticism, and, later, the de Stijl movement and Dadaism. Yet there were also Cubist poets, Cubist sculptors, and later so-called Cubist architects. Then why play with conceits about time in this way? Because the sensation which I insist upon may be a key to understanding the significance of Cubism.Ĭubism was a style of painting which evolved very quickly and whose various stages can be fairly specifically defined. Through them we can imagine how we shall appear 50 years hence. The photographs of the men of that time show us strangers. We will never again find ourselves in a position that is comparable to 1907 or 1911. And for all their horror, they must be counted years of progress. They cannot be treated like a cloud that passes across the moon. The intervening years were and are mostly ones of horror. The sensation could reflect a desire to escape. Picasso broke his images into pieces and changed subjects. Nevertheless I must insist on the sensation I have in front of the works themselves: the sensation that the works and I, as I look at them, are caught, pinned down, in an enclave of time, waiting to be released and to continue a journey that began in 1907. Cubism is a description or label for a period or process of art style pioneered by Pablo Picasso. Do I make things unnecessarily complicated? Would it not be more helpful to say simply: the few great Cubist works were painted between 19? And perhaps to qualify this by adding that a few more, by Juan Gris, were painted a little later? And anyway is it not nonsense to think of Cubism having not yet taken place when we are surrounded in daily life by the apparent effects of Cubism? All modern design, architecture and town planning seems inconceivable without the initial example of Cubism. It would seem more likely that they were yet to be painted. Perhaps in a way I am surprised that they have been painted at all. They are both too optimistic and too revolutionary for that. It is true that I would not expect them to have been painted today. The Tate creates illuminating, entertaining videos on their Tate Kids YouTube channel and at /kids.I find it hard to believe that the most extreme Cubist works were painted over 50 years ago. Sonia and Robert Delaunay invented a colourful version of cubism called orphism… You know what it’s like when you look out of a window on a speeding train? How the landscape blurs and becomes lots of different colours?” Other artists started making cubist artworks, too… Lots of people have tried to decipher cubism over the years but Picasso and Braque refused to explain it. It’s like it’s in a hall of mirrors or like having x-ray eyes.” This is called Synthetic Cubism, another phase of the Cubist art movement. You can see the front, the back and the sides… all at the same time. Now imagine that same object “shown from lots of different angles. This idea of breaking forms into simple geometrical shapes and planes is at the core of Analytic Cubism. Imagine representing that object with tangram pieces-flat triangles, squares, and parallelograms of different sizes and colors. Take a look at an object in front of you… a pencil, a book, a potted plant, anything you can see. Those painters-two 26-year-olds who wanted to represent reality in perspective-shifting new ways-were Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, and this beautifully animated Tate Kids video introduces their ideas.Ĭubism celebrated fresh views on time, space, and motion in modern life of the early 1900s, and, via the Tate, it “opened up almost infinite new possibilities for the treatment of visual reality in art and was the starting point for many later abstract styles including constructivism and neo-plasticism.” What is Cubism? Invented by two young painters around 1907–08, cubism, as described by the Tate, “brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.”
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