(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:
The first phase of Cubism is simple in comparison with the second, for if the first consisted in cutting up natural objects into geometrical shapes, the second consisted in shuffling the pieces. This curious development, with which the name of Picasso is chiefly associated, professed to show, not merely one aspect of objects, but a number of sectional aspects seen from different standpoints and arbitrarily grouped together in one composition. By this method the painting of a simple object like a teacup is transfigured into an unrecognizable fugue—consisting of fragments of the cup as seen from above, from the sides, and, as held up in the air, from below. These ingenious conglomerations, professing to give us ‘the greater reality’ of things seen, leave us as bewildered, confused, and uninformed as a metaphysician’s analysis of truth and error. As an example of the second phase of Cubism we give Picasso’s ‘Portrait of M Kahnweiler’, in which all we can recognize are fragmentary frontal aspects of his waistcoat (with watch-chain), left eye, left ear, and one side of his nose drowned in a chaotic sea of various aspects of receipt-files and other unrecognizable objects. Thus a movement which originated in an attempt to secure a primitive simplicity was led astray by false doctrine, till it finally wandered into a blind alley of complexity, for the complications of neo-Impressionist painting were child’s play in comparison with the entaglements of the puzzle-pictures of the later Cubists.
Following upon the distortions of M Matisse and the strange pictures of the Cubists, in which the facts of vision were either ignored or so juggled with that they became incomprehensible, it is not surprising that yet another school of painters arose who abandoned representation as an indispensable element in picture-making and argued that painting should be as free as music to give emotional pleasure without any appeal to association of material ideas. This claim that painting should be abstract, and not concern itself with the concrete, was argued by the Polish artist Wassily Kandinsky, working at Munich in 1914, more convincingly in his book The Art of Spiritual Harmony than in his kaleidoscopic pictures. In theory it seems plausible enough that if a musician is free to weave melodies without reference to natural sounds, a painter should be free to construct compositions without reference to natural forms. It is also true that the emotional pleasure we derive from the stained-glass windows of an old cathedral does not depend on the subject painted. We are enchanted with the radiant beauty of the pattern of color. So far so good, but now comes the point that no artist living or dead has yet succeeded in convincing the world that these stained-glass windows would give us any keener or purer emotional pleasure if they had no subjects, or been able himself to produce an abstract painting more beautiful in color and pattern than paintings based on concrete forms.
Kandinsky, however, went a step further, and claimed that his abstract paintings were not mere dream patterns, but had a meaning for the initiated in that they were based on the psychological effect on the observer of various lines and colors. But these effects are by no means definitely established, they are still a subject for speculation, and till they are fixed by the common consent of mankind, experiments in the ‘art of spiritual harmony’ must necessarily be uncertain and inconclusive. Indeed, in Kandinsky’s own ‘Compositions’—as his abstract paintings are entitled—outward and visible signs alone give us a clue to the inward and spiritual meaning, and it is by discerning faint traces of a gun carriage, a puff of smoke, and falling houses in one of his pre-War pictures, painted in 1913, that we obtain a sense of that ‘clash and conflict of ideas in the spiritual world’ that the painting is said to express.
The sectional representation of divers aspects of different objects was developed with an added emphasis on the expression of movement, by the group of Italian painters known as the ‘Futurists’. Futurism was a literary as well as an artistic movement, and it was largely a protest against the tyranny of the past on the part of ardent nationalists, who resented that the present achievements of their country should be obscured by the glory of its past. The leader of the movement was a writer, Signor Marinetti, and his skilled pen justified the extraordinary practices of his artist friends by sonorous phrases. A pictorial record of the commonplace fact that the seat of a chair is visible after the sitter has got up and walked away, was majestically alluded to as an example of ‘the plastic interpenetration of matter.’ As regards color, the Futurists accepted the divisionism and complementarism of the neo-Impressionists, but in the rendering of form they sought to introduce new principles: ‘Universal dynamism must be rendered in painting as a dynamic sensation; movement and light destroy te materiality of bodies.’ An amusing example of the ‘dynamic decomposition of matter’ is Giacomo Balla’s painting ‘A Lady and her Dog’, which may be regarded as a synthesis of rapid motion photography. A multiplicity of paws and tails indicates that the animal is trotting with wagging tail, four ghostly chains suggest the whirling of his lead, and an army of shoes presents the movement of his owner’s feet. In concentrating their endeavors on the expression of movement, the Futurists attempted to convert painting from an art of space to an art of time. Their daring experiments have produced few pictures likely to stand the test of time, but possibly an exception may be made for Signor Balla’s ‘Centrifugal Force’. This painting of revolving spheres shooting forth golden sparks into an azure void was not only decorative in design and color, but also nobly expressive of the Force that shoots meteorolites through the universe. An abstract painting that succeeds in expressing an abstract idea is clearly legitimate art, but pictures of this calibre are unfortunately the exception among abstract paintings.
Nevertheless it would be wrong to assert that the experiments of the modern extremists in painting have been wholly valueless. Technically they have widened the horizon of painting and opened the road to a new realism in which the firm structure and rigid design of te Cubists can be combined with a truth and beauty of color derived from the Impressionists. Psychologically their work is of profound interest to every student of history. Coming events cast their shadow before them on the field of art. The patient reader who has followed this history thus far will have observed the increasing endeavor on the part of painters to give an expression of strength. In examining their works he will have noticed that, however greatly they may vary in their aspects and styles, nearly all of them contain en element of violence. These Fauviste, Cubist, and Futurist paintings never soothe us to rest; they aim at galvanising us into action. All of them must be regarded as symptoms, as expressions in art of the unrest, agitation, and suppressed violence seething subterraneously in Europe prior to the oubreak of the Great War.
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