Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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If we look at the southern landscape by Cézanne, we shall perceive that in his desire to make the objects look solid and enduring the artist has sharpened some curves into angles and emphasized cubic forms. This method of expressing the volume of objects was seen to be powerful and effective, and was seized upon by certain of the Fauves, who, desirous above all things of being forcible, elaborated their discovery into a dogma. Further, they supported their practice by a specious theory based on a smattering of science. We have seen how at the beginning of the present century there was a craze for the Primitive among a certain section of artists. These young men picked up from mineralogists the idea that crystal was the primitive form of all things. A strange new test was applied to pictures: Did they or did they not show evidence of crystallization? A phrase torn from a scientific handbook was adopted as an aesthetic watchword:

All secondary forms arise from the decrement of particles from the edges and angles of these primitive forms.

Therefore to restore natural objects and human beings to their ‘primitive’ forms, it was necessary to eliminate all curved lines and to reconstruct forms and faces in their ‘primary form’, octahedraon, dodecahedron, six-sided prism or whatever other geometrical figure might be most suitable. Among the earliest pictures embodying this new doctrine were landscapes in which meadows were crumpled up into crisp, candy-like masses, and marines in which all the waves had a sharp edge. These pictures were the work of a young Frenchman names Georges Bracque; and it is still a matter for considerable argument whether Bracque or the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso is to be regarded as the true founder of Cubism.

Picasso was born at Malaga in 1881, and appeared in Paris about the end of the nineteenth century as an accomplished and masterly draughtsman. His early work ‘Mother and Child’ shows the normality of his art and his genuine gifts before he attached himself definitely to the Fauviste movement. Possessed of the quick and fertile brain of an inventive engineer, Picasso poured forth in quick succession a number of paintings of startling novelty in a variety of styles before he reached the mode that is now known as Cubism. On his practice, the outcome of a restless search for novelty of effect and of tireless experiments in pattern-making, others built up a new pseudo-philosophy of art. As a theory Cubism was based on two dogmatic assertions and a fallacious conclusion. It was argued:

1. Strength is beauty.
2. A straight line is stronger than a curved line.

It is hardly necessary to point out how fairly are both these contentions, for in the first place nothing is more beautiful or weaker than a flower, and in the second it is a commonplace of construction that an arch is stronger than a horizontal on two perpendiculars. Nevertheless, blind to the error of their major and minor premise, the Cubists with a parade of logic proceeded to the conclusion that a painting wholly composed of straight lines is stronger and therefore more beautiful than a painting containing curved lines. Picasso’s ‘Head of a Lady in a Mantilla’ illustrates the first phase of Cubism, in which the human body is cut up into geometrical forms. It is a ‘crystallization’ of a human head, which looks less like a painting than a woodcarving executed by a savage with a blunt instrument, yet once our eyes have grown accustomed to the strange barbarism of the technique we have to acknowledge that this head is not altogether wanting in expression.

Post-Impressionism, Cubism, And Futurism (continued)