V What is Cubism?
One more name added to the long roll of “movements” in art. Within the memory of living men we have had “Classicists,” “Romanticists,” “Idealists,” “Naturalists,” “Realists,” “Pre-Raphaelites,” and many more.
Today we have the “Neo-Impressionists,” the “Pointilists,” the “Luminists,” the “Futurists,” the “Orphists,” the “Sensationalists,” the “Compositionalists,” the “Synchronists,” the “Cubists”—tomorrow?
New and ever new departures, experiments, achievements.
All of which goes to prove that art is living, for the sign of life is flux.
The other day I saw three well-known American painters standing before a cubist picture laughing; painters of forty years ago would have laughed quite as heartily at the works of each of the three.
The innovation of today is the conventional of tomorrow.
Because the names of Rembrandt and Hals are now household words in art we are quick to assume their pictures were always considered great. Not so.
Just now it is a fad of millionaires to own Rembrandts; consequently he is over-appreciated and ridiculously overpriced.
The bare thought of the scorn that greeted Wagner’s operas, the poems of Browning, and Whitman, sends a cold chill down our backs, makes us pause in our headlong criticism lest we, too, pillory ourselves.
Violent judgments are good fun, but they often come back to plague us. Of Wagner’s “Meistersinger” Ruskin said:
Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-headed stuff I ever saw on a human stage that thing last night—as far as the story and acting went—and of all the affected, sapless, soul-less, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tuneless, scrannelpipiest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest as far as its sound went. I never was so relieved, so far as I can remember, in my life by the stopping of any sound, not excepting railroad whistles, as I was by the cessation of the cobbler’s bellowing; even the serenader’s caricatured twangle was a rest after. As for the great “Lied,” I never made out where it began or where it ended except by the fellow’s coming off the horse block.
From which the inference is not unwarranted that Wagner did not please Ruskin!
Opposed to all movements in art and life is the academic mind, fed on learning, steeped in tradition, hence conservative.
The term is not here used in a reproachful sense; on the contrary, the philosopher lays stress upon the value of the academic in progress; it is the element that preserves; it is the mass upon which humanity rests; it is the old and stable; it is the past upon which the future is built; it is the essential groundwork of new thought and new effort.
The life of the individual passes from the enthusiasms, the radicalisms of youth to the serene and self-satisfied outlook of old age which instinctively opposes novelty and change—the academic attitude.
Youth makes friends with every chance acquaintance, age shuns the strange.
We are all Impressionists and Futurists at some times in our lives, but we tend to petrify. Sclerosis of the arteries is bad, but nothing compared with sclerosis of the emotions. We not only tend to become petrified as we grow older, but even in our youth we have our petrified sides, our hard spots.
However progressive we may be in certain directions we are sure to be stubbornly conservative in others.
The man who laughs at a cubist picture may be a cubist—that is, an innovator—in his profession or business.
The man who is a conservative in religion may be a radical in politics, and vice versa. As a matter of fact most of the followers of Lloyd George in England are the greatest sticklers for the inerrancy and the literal interpretation of the Scriptures, while most of the hide-bound conservatives are exceedingly tolerant toward “modernism” and “higher criticism” in the church.
So it goes. The merchant or manufacturer, the doctor or lawyer who is up to date in business or profession, who is keenly receptive toward the latest and most revolutionary methods, inventions, discoveries, may be—usually is—a hopeless reactionary toward other lines of human endeavor, a hopeless conservative when it comes, for instance, to looking at pictures.
Now and then one meets a man so sympathetically observant and receptive that, like a good rubber ball, he is resilient at all points of contact. But for the most part we are like defective balls, resilient only in spots, and, like rubber, we become less and less resilient with age.
Happy the man or woman who retains until late in life the power to react to new impressions and to experience new emotions.
The trouble with most of us is that even when we do react to new impressions and experience new emotions we are afraid to admit it. If any one of us, while alone in a museum, happened to run across a strange painting or a strange piece of sculpture—say a Javanese or a cubist production—we would not burst out laughing any more than we would laugh at some of the archaic sculptures and primitive works that are found in every great collection. On the contrary, we would probably study it with good healthy curiosity. But when the crowd is about we are afraid to express our curiosity, we are afraid to be honestly and genuinely interested, so we take refuge in laughter, it is so much easier to mask our ignorance with ridicule than confess it by frankly asking for information.
The man who does not understand a play or a book always condemns it.
It would not be difficult to pick out among one’s business acquaintances those who are conservative, that is, academic, and those who are inventive, speculative, venturesome, and so on to the “wild enthusiasts,” “crazy fellows,” who are always doing the unexpected; failing often but sometimes succeeding so brilliantly the world follows in their footsteps.
There is nothing strange about the Cubists—except their pictures. Their pictures strike us as strange because we do not understand them, but if they were simply trying to do what thousands of inventors are trying to do the world over, namely, devise something new to meet the needs of mankind we would laugh at them no more than—and just as much as—the world laughed at the Wright brothers when they were working on the flying machine.
There are romanticists, realists, impressionists, futurists, cubists, in the theater.
The romantic play is an old, but still delightful story. We have had realism on the stage so long it has become almost academic. Just now there is coming from the Scandinavian countries and from Germany and Russia a form of dramatic representation that is essentially Cubist, Futurist, and Orphist in its expression.33
This ferment of new ideas is very disturbing to men who are afraid of change, who favor things as they are, who like to go to bed at the same hour and get up at the same hour, to do today what they did yesterday. But the new ideas will not down; they are constantly breaking out in unexpected places and while they may seem to be different ideas when expressed in music, painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture, from those expressed in science, religion, politics, social reform, and business generally, they are not; they are all fundamentally the same, namely, they are the ideas of a progress so rapid and radical it may be revolutionary and in a measure destructive.
In the very nature of things it is not given to many men to be receptive to new ideas in many lines, for that implies thinking for themselves in many lines. The more intense and advanced a man is in one line of thought, the more apt he is to accept ready made the ideas of others in other subjects. It is a saving of time for the radical scientist to accept his politics and religion ready made from those who devote their time to those matters—the scientist does not always do so, but often when he thinks he is asserting his independence by rejecting current beliefs he is doing so without any real ideas and convictions of his own.
What has been said so far has been a plea for tolerance, for a sober suppression of hasty judgment in the presence of the strange.
Few men seem able to control their resentments and risibilities in the presence of paintings that seem to contradict all the teachings and traditions of art; but because they do seem to stand in opposition to all we have been taught to believe, they are all the more worthy our most serious consideration. It is the man who challenges and denies who stirs other men to think for themselves. That is the chief value of the cubist paintings—they compel us to think for ourselves, to take a careful inventory of our stock of stereotyped notions; with the result that while we may not accept the theories of the Cubists, we cannot fail to readjust our own notions on a broader basis.
I would be very sorry if any reader should take up this volume under the impression it is a plea for Cubism or any other “ism” in either art or life. If it is a plea for anything, it is for tolerance and intelligent receptivity, for an attitude of sympathetic appreciation toward everything that is new and strange and revolutionary in life. Not that we will necessarily end by accepting the new and the strange and the revolutionary, but we cannot get the good there may be in them unless our attitude is one of sympathetic as well as critical receptivity.
It is something more than a mere coincidence that the upheaval in the art world has paralleled the upheaval in the political world. The exhibitions of extreme modern pictures were first held in England just when extreme radical theories were gaining the ascendency. The International Exhibition in America followed hot in the footsteps of the split in the Republican party and the triumph of the Democratic along lines so progressive as to seem almost socialistic.
The artists who organized the exhibition did not realize it, but they were animated by precisely the same motive that animated the organizers of the Progressive party—an irresistible desire for a change.
Youth gazes curiously at the experiment—painting, poem, play—from which age turns in anger.
Cubist paintings interest the young; they irritate the old.
Nothing keeps a man young so effectually as a vivid and sympathetic interest in every new and seemingly revolutionary movement.
People who looked at the cubist paintings and laughed did so through ignorance; the sad part was that many frankly said they did not care to understand; not a few insisted the paintings were quite without meaning, utterly devoid of sense.
In other words, the public, day after day and week after week, struggled and paid to see works that were meaningless!
Painters, sculptors, critics, argued and fought over canvases devoid of significance! A paradox! For if devoid of significance, why should the world of artists, critics, writers, argue, swear, and fight over them?
The question answers itself; the trouble is the works do possess a significance, a significance far beyond the merits of any particular one, far beyond the merits of cubism itself; they are significant of the spirit of change that is within and about us, the spirit of unrest, of the striving, of the searching for greater and more beautiful things.
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; what he will be doing two years hence, no one can predict, save that, judging by the past, he will not be painting Cubist pictures.
The name “Cubism” was given to the new school “in derision, in the autumn of 1908, by Henri Matisse, who happened to see a picture of buildings the cubical representation of which struck him forcibly.”34
That year Georges Braque exhibited a Cubist picture in the Salon des Independents.
In 1910, Jean Metzinger exhibited a Cubist portrait in the Salle d’Automne, and a number of pictures were hung in the Salon des Independents.
The first collection was gathered together in room 41 at the Salon des Independents in 1911. The same year the first exhibition outside of Paris was held in Brussels, and there the names “Cubism” and “Cubistes” were adopted.
In 1911 the exposition of the Cubists in the Salle d’Automne caused considerable sensation. Gleizes, Metzinger, Leger, and, for the first time, Marcel Duchamp and his brother, the sculptor-architect, Duchamp-Villon, exhibited.
Other expositions were held in November, 1911, at the gallery d’Art Contemporaine rue Tronchet; in 1912, at the Salon des Independents, where Juan Gris first exhibited; in May of the same year, in Barcelona; in June, at Rouen, where Picabia joined the new school.
The different tendencies of the movement are described as follows:35
1. Cubism scientifique is the tendency toward pure cubism; it is the painting with elements borrowed not from the realities of vision, but the realities of knowledge. The geometrical lines, which so impressed all who first saw their scientific works, resulted from the attempt to paint the essential—rather than the visual—realities of things which were rendered on canvas with an abstract purity, and in which objective realities and story-telling qualities were eliminated.
Most of Picasso’s geometrical representations and Duchamp’s “King and Queen” are good illustrations of scientific or pure Cubism.
2. Cubism physique is painting compositions the elements of which are borrowed for the most part from realities of vision. Inasmuch as objective realities are more or less in evidence in these works, they are not pure Cubism.
Picasso’s “Woman and the Pot of Mustard” is a very striking—and indifferent—example of Cubism physique, which simply means cubist paintings in which figures and objects are more or less apparent to the casual observer. In Marcel Duchamp’s “Chess Players” the figures are quite plain; in Picabia’s “Dance at the Spring” one figure is distinguishable at first glance, the second is not so easily discerned, while the spring is more obscure, though plain enough after a little study.
It is under this head that some of the most interesting and also some of the most exasperating cubist pictures will be found. To the extent that figures and objects are blocked in in planes and masses in a big, elemental way, the result may be both impressive and beautiful—Derain’s “Forest at Martigues” is an example in point; but in so far as the picture is a puzzle, clear only in part, the result is exasperating; the observer, however sympathetic his attitude, is diverted from enjoying the art of the painter to the attempt to discover the hidden objects.
To the foregoing two divisions are added two more, which are, in reality, but subdivisions or refinements of Cubism Scientifique.
There are really but the two extremes—those who represent objects more or less cubically, i.e., in planes and masses of line and color; and those who compose harmonies of line and color that have no relation to figures or objects.
In the paintings of the one, objects are more or less apparent; in those of the other no object is discernible, because none is represented or suggested.
3. Cubism Orphique is created entirely by the artist; it takes nothing from visual, objective realities, but is derived wholly from the painter’s imagination; it is pure art.
4. Cubism instinctive is described as the painting of compositions of color, not based upon objective realities, but suggested by the instinct and intentions of the artist. The artist who follows his instinct, his fancy of the moment, though he may paint beautiful compositions, lacks the clear comprehension of him who paints according to some well thought out, artistic creed.
It is quite obvious that subdivisions three and four are based upon temperamental rather than logical or scientific distinctions.
To refer to some of the pictures reproduced:
There is no mystery about the “Man on the Balcony.” He is quite in evidence; the background is a little puzzling, yet fairly obvious. The attention of the casual observer is not diverted from the mode and manner of painting—from the Cubism of the picture, so to speak.
It is not a question of “Now I see it, now I don’t see it.” It is obviously the figure of a man leaning on something, apparently a railing, with a confused background. But so far as uncertainty regarding the background and accessories is concerned, that troubles no one, for uncertainty in detail is! characteristic of the backgrounds of many fine and famous portraits.
The point is that the “Man on the Balcony” belongs to that class of Cubist pictures wherein the object is almost as well defined as in pictures with which the public is more familiar; whereas the “King and Queen” belongs to the extreme class wherein the objects have been reduced to symbols or abstractions.
The one is the painting of objects in Cubist fashion; the other is the painting of ideas in Cubist fashion.
Of all the Cubist pictures exhibited, most people liked “The Man on the Balcony” best. Why?
Because it looked like a good painting of a man in armour.
“I like the ‘Man in Armour,’” was an expression frequently heard.
All of which goes to show that appreciation is largely a matter of association rather than of knowledge and taste.
Tell the people it is not a man in armour, and immediately they ask, in a tone of disgust, “Then what is he?” and the picture they liked a moment before becomes ridiculous in their eyes.
The original design is an almost academic freehand drawing of a man—artist or workman—leaning against the railing of a balcony, with roofs of the city at his back. Barring the square treatment of hand and foot, there is little to suggest Cubism.
The drawing is uninteresting, the painting is uninteresting. By blocking out details, emphasizing planes, and laying stress on masses, the artist made his painting incomparably more dignified and stronger than his design.
If he had painted an academic picture, following the lines of his original sketch, the painting probably would have been quite commonplace.
The “Chess Players” gives one a singular impression of human absorption in a game; it is elemental and impersonal. Behind the two players are onlookers, equally intent. One player is resting his chin upon his hand, the other holds a piece apparently making a move. The artist has arbitrarily placed the men and board close to the eye of the player making the move.
While most people might prefer lifelike portraits of two men playing chess, is it not true that this curious reduction of the players to elemental planes and masses gives a very vivid impression of intense absorption, and also a strange feeling of the elemental? A sculptor admired this picture greatly.
Two figures were the basis of the “King and the Queen,” the king at the right, and the queen at the left; but in the finished picture these two figures were reduced to planes, and appear as the two upright conical or cubical masses that are so evident, and a philosophical significance was attributed to the scheme, namely, a representation of the static and dynamic forms of life; the static being represented in the upright masses, the king and queen—dynastic, permanent—while the dynamic forces are represented in the stream of cubical forms that flow in different directions about the two more permanent masses.
On its technical side, Cubism is simply a systematic use of planes.
The power of lines is a manifestation of the new mode of representation.
It is not a semblance of things, but a world of objects that the picture forces us to take in with a glance. The objects may not get lost. The outline is the demarcation and designation of the objects. By its outer essence their inner nature is expressed. The nature of objects is not fixed by a correct drawing, but by a forceful and emotional, intensive and pervasive outline. Not in their restfulness and with their details do the objects serve the picture, but by their relations to each other, which relations combined lead up to the climax.
The long lines form the structure of the picture. They decide how the picture is to be constructed from its parts, and how the parts are to be interlocked in order to become a whole. The long lines define the measure and rhythm of the work. Lines are the vibrations of the soul; lines are reflections of the will, the rigidity of that which endures. Like currents of forces they flow against each other and unite into one. The smaller ones accompany them with playful gambols, like a multiple echo, the sounds of which melt away in the distance.
The picture is not a nicely divided plane. It is like a world arising from chaos. Its essence is the law of order working itself out. The picture is an agglomeration of agitated members, an agglomeration of planes pulsating with blood, enlivened by breath.
The planes may be stratified, parallel and similar to each other; they may rear and pile themselves against each other, or they may interlock like cogs. They may liquefy and melt away, or they may double up and form themselves into balls. They may, more quietly, rest within themselves, becoming effective through the contrast of their essence and yet maintaining themselves. Out of them originates the picture’s spaciousness, out of them the living force of the picture.
The dynamics of the planes is a manifestation of the new style.36
Passing one morning among a number of first year students drawing from casts in the Chicago Art Institute, I was struck by the large number who were making what would pass for Cubist sketches; yet not one of these young students had seen a Cubist picture. All were simply following the regular course of instruction and drawing in planes.
I remember one drawing of a statue by Michael Angelo. There was not a straight line in the statue; there was not a curved line in the drawing; the drawing was blocked out far more solidly and geometrically than, for instance, either the original design for “The Man on the Balcony” or the finished painting.
In another room I ran across a teacher who was indicating by a few geometrical lines drawn from points the essential features of a statue the pupil was about to begin blocking in. The lines looked exactly like the geometrical lines in a drawing by Picasso.
There is, therefore, nothing fundamentally new or strange in the technic of the Cubists; it is simply a return to the use of the elemental in drawing, of the very A, B, C of design. The new and the strange lie in the fact that the Cubists stop with planes and lines; they do not attempt to model the surfaces of the things they paint.
Not that the use of planes is all there is to the theory of Cubism, for the theory extends far beyond the painting of surfaces; it embraces the presentation of the very substance and nature of persons and objects by means of a technic in which planes are the vital feature.
Albert Dürer wrote a book on the proportions of the human figure; it was published in 1528, and translated into many languages.
He reduced the human figure to certain elemental lines.37
Applying these principles to the hand, he gets this result:
It is interesting to compare this sectional diagram of the hand with the hand of “The Man on the Balcony.”
Furthermore, one has but to consider the elemental lines at the top of the page with the words of Cézanne, quoted on page 43, and with the fundamental propositions of Chinese and Japanese art, to realize that in the last analysis the minds of men in all ages and all countries follow very closely the same channels.
There are but two lines, curved and straight, and with these two lines all outward semblances of things are constructed. So far as the unaided eye is concerned, every curved line may be entirely composed of small straight lines, the curved effect being due to a series of minute angles.
The following are Durer’s diagrams showing how to obtain sections and modifications:
He applies these sections to the human figure as follows:
So far as the use of planes and angles is concerned, these diagrams by Durer should serve to disarm criticism. That the human figure can be decomposed into straight lines and angles will be a revelation to most of those who laughed at the Cubist paintings, and only the authority of a great name would convince that any good could result from such an analysis.
Suppose any one of the Durer diagrams had been framed and hung in the Cubist section; would it not have been treated with ridicule?
The men who arranged the exhibition could have played with critics and artists—the men who claim to know—by including many things of recognized position in academic art and teachings, which would have seemed as absurd as the newest of the new pictures.
The very high aesthetic value of drawing and painting in planes, and with small regard to the so-called laws of perspective, is illustrated in the rare beauty of Chinese and Japanese paintings. From the point of view of their greatest painters, we carry perspective and imitation to extremes that destroy art.
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; nevertheless, we stubbornly resist the attempt in western art.
We acknowledge the singular beauty of the Italian primitives, yet we demand that portraits and paintings of today shall be carefully modelled in the vain effort to accurately and mechanically copy nature.
In some of Sargent’s best portraits not only the lights and shadows but character and personality are indicated by brush-strokes as arbitrary in line and color as those of a Cubist—strokes that follow neither the lines nor the colors of the original, but which convey with tremendous power the character.
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.
Rodin’s bronzes exhibit these same elemental qualities, qualities which are pushed to violent extremes in Cubist sculpture. But may it not be profoundly true that these very extremes, these very extravagances, by causing us to blink and rub our eyes, end in a finer understanding and appreciation of such work as Rodin’s?
His Balzac is, in a profound sense, his most colossal work, and at the same time his most elemental. In its simplicity, in its use of planes and masses, it is—one might say, solely for purposes of illustration—Cubist, with none of the extravagances of Cubism. It is purely Post-Impressionistic.
Twenty or twenty-five years ago painters who used a broad technic, and especially those who used the palette knife to lay the pigment in flat sweeps, were looked upon as charlatans and sensationalists. Today their pictures are accepted in the most conservative exhibitions and the public passes with scarcely a comment.
This broad technic is simply painting in planes—in a sense, simply modified Cubism.
To illustrate:
The surface of an orange may be so carefully painted or modelled in clay that the effect is a perfect sphere with no straight lines; or it may be painted or modelled in minute planes and no curved lines; or the use of planes may be carried so far the orange is represented by angles so sharp the shape is almost cubical—it is all a question of the extent to which the artist carries the use of plane surfaces. The fewer the planes used and the larger their size, the nearer the substance and more obvious the representation of mass.
The smaller the planes and the larger their number, the nearer the surface—the more superficial the representation.
The division of planes can be carried—geometrically—to such an extent that the unaided eye can no longer distinguish the minute flat surfaces, and the effect is a perfect sphere.
What is true concerning the painting or modelling of an orange is true of the painting or modelling of all objects.
“It has been charged that the new men are too much given to the geometrical. But geometrical figures are the essential elements of drawing. Geometry, the science which deals with extension, its measure and its relations, has ever been the basis of painting.
“Up to the present time the three dimensions of Euclid have sufficed to express the problems that infinity gives rise to in the souls of great artists.
“Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer.
“Today philosophers do not confine their speculations to the three dimensions of Euclid. Painters, by intention, so to speak, have cause naturally to preoccupy themselves with these new lines of extension which, in the language of modern studios, are classed under the term, fourth dimension.”38
Speaking of Cézanne, it is said:
To him a sphere was not always round, a cube always square, or an ellipse always elliptical. Thus the traditional oval of the conventional face disappeared in his portraits, the generally accepted round surfaces of a vase or bowl was represented as flat and dented in spots and the horizontal stability of the horizon was rendered elliptical whenever it so appeared to him.
The general truthfulness of his observations may readily be tested by any one of normal vision who will carefully observe the actual appearance of the surfaces of a round sugar bowl, for example, when placed in the light of a window. It will be found that certain planes are as flat as the table, that others present the appearance of dents and hollows, and the more clearly this is perceived the more grotesque will the object appear as compared with the preconceived image of it established in our minds by the unconscious interaction of the sense of touch and sight.
We know that, scientifically regarded, there is no such thing as a round surface, that what appears to be such is simply the closely adjusted juxtaposition of infinitesimal planes that are each perfectly flat. And the very fact that painters refer to the surface of a figure as planes is indicative of a partial recognition of this basic characteristic of structure. Nevertheless, both artists and laymen persist in speaking of the roundness of a torso, for example, when in reality, if we could disassociate the sense of roundness from the appearance of roundness as did Cézanne, we would find large surfaces of spheroids quite flat. Therein lies the real secret of the art of Cézanne who is the first of realists.
In a sense, “Cubism” is a misleading term, for, in the first place, “Cubist” pictures are not painted in cubes, but in all sorts of angles and curves; in the second place, the theory does not call for angles.
The theory being the expression of emotion in line and color, there is no conceivable reason why cubes and angles should be used to the exclusion of curves, swirls, sweeps, dashes. On the contrary, of all forms, cubes and angles would seem to be the most inappropriate for emotional expression, since they are peculiarly suggestive of the geometrical and the matter-of-fact.
“Curvism” or “Swirlism” would describe the movement just as well, save that for the time being angles are very much in evidence.
Picabia says that “Cubism” is a misnomer for the movement. He says:
After impressionism, neo-impressionism, then cubism, which sought a geometric third dimension in painting, the expression of things seen in geometrical figures. But a purely subjective art cannot, of course, be bound by any form of expression the moment that expression becomes a convention, an established body of laws with accepted values. Therefore, he has cut loose from cubism, and is what, again for handy classification—an evil habit from which we cannot emancipate ourselves—may perhaps best be called “post-cubist,” with entirely unfettered, spontaneous, ever-varying means of expression in form and color waves, according to the commands, the needs, the inspiration of the impression, the mood received. Objective expression is strictly barred. He even ignores form as far as possible, seeking “color harmonies.” Harmony and equilibrium are his device.
But the Cubists are rapidly getting away from the cubes and angles. It is quite possible that a year or two hence we shall see no more purely Cubist pictures.
That does not mean the movement will come to an end—not at all. The movement toward abstract painting, toward the use of line and paint on canvas for mere pleasure of using them, and without copying objects in either life or nature, is in its infancy.
“But I don’t understand them!”
Is it necessary to your enjoyment that you should?
Do you understand what Caruso is singing?
Do you understand that French song reproduced by the phonograph?
Do you understand what the orchestra is playing?
Do you understand the pattern in that Persian rug?
How many people who rave over Japanese art have the remotest idea what this or that precious print or painting represents?
Does an intricate design on a bit of Oriental pottery please you? And is your enjoyment lessened one whit by the fact it is all a mystery to you?
Why will you accept as beautiful and buy at a high price a painting you do not understand because it is by a Chinese artist, and reject as ugly the painting by a French artist simply because you cannot see “what he is driving at”?
Suppose a Cubist picture is a beautiful scheme of color; is it less beautiful in color because you do not understand the painter’s theory? His painting may be fine, his theory absurd.
Would your enjoyment of Caruso be increased if he sang in English the ridiculous stuff he sings in Italian?
Fortunate it is for most grand opera that we do not understand—we are not diverted from the music by the nonsense of the libretto.
The enjoyment of music is a curious thing.
First of all, there are all kinds of music, from rag-time to Beethoven, and each kind has its following.
Then the following of each kind breaks up into its rag-time and Beethoven divisions.
That is to say, in an audience listening to rag-time there are always a few who enjoy the music in a Beethoven way—for what there is of real value in it.
While in an audience listening to a Beethoven symphony there are always a goodly number, often a big majority, who enjoy it in a rag-time way—just the emotional reaction, without knowing a thing about the music.
There are two entirely distinct enjoyments of the same composition—the purely intellectual and the purely emotional. There may be a mingling of the two, but as a rule what one gains the other loses.
The man who follows the score, is familiar with the different interpretations of this and that leader, whose ear catches every failure by any part of the orchestra to respond, and so on, and so on—that man is constantly holding his emotional response subject to his intellectual appreciation. What is a fine performance to most of the audience may be a very indifferent performance to him.
True, when the performance is so fine it carries him off his feet, then he gets an enjoyment—intellectual and emotional—far finer than the enjoyment experienced by others. In a sense, he is the one man worth playing for.
But while it is a fine thing to both understand and enjoy, understanding is not essential to enjoyment in the purely emotional sense—to the enjoyment most people feel when listening to music.
The voice of a street singer borne in upon the night air, even the sound of a hurdy-gurdy, pleases, though we do not know the song or the air. There is a species of pleasure in not knowing that is dissipated when we recall or are told.
Many of our enjoyments are more than half dreamy. Is it not true that the dreamy element is essential to purely emotional enjoyment?
I confess to a very ignorant enjoyment of music. If I am at a concert I do not like to be told what it is all about. I enjoy good music without knowing or caring why, and I like to hear it without being seated where I am more than half-hypnotized by the rhythmical movements of the orchestra, especially the fascinating bowing of the violins.
What is true of the enjoyment of music should be true of the enjoyment of painting. But with painting, most people insist upon understanding. They will listen to Patti without knowing her language, but they will not look at a painting unless they know the painter’s language.
Why not accept at their face value all pictures that are beautiful in line and color, without bothering about their meaning? Perhaps they have no meaning beyond the vagrant fancy of the artist.
Take the three pictures by Sousa Cardoza. Suppose they have no more significance than so many illustrations to a fairy tale; they are interesting in line and fascinating in color. If the “Stronghold” had been on a Delft platter, or the “Leap of the Rabbit” on a piece of Persian pottery, everyone would have lauded their beauty, and collectors would give ten or twenty times the modest prices of the canvases.
When put to people in that matter-of-fact way the response is almost always favorable to the pictures.
In an interesting monograph entitled “Is It Art?”39 the writer says:
It will be seen, therefore, that the efforts of these men to give a subjective rendering of actuality results in nothing better than a poorly realized form of objectivity which is as much the creation of the spectator as of the artist, inasmuch as the vaguely adumbrated forms in the picture simply serve as a hint to that reality of which it is a wilfully distorted symbol, and the discovery of the “mustard pot” would scarcely have been possible without the happy cooperation of the title with the spectator’s previous knowledge of the actual appearance of a mustard pot.
Without the intervention of the title and the association of ideas called forth thereby through the memory of past experiences with actuality, these pictures would be totally meaningless even to the most recondite. They would inevitably be reduced to a personal system of shorthand, an individual code, as it were, comprehensible only to the originator.
Regarded from that viewpoint, these enigmatic paintings and drawings may very possibly be altogether successful. At all events it is only fair to assume that these works express to the originator what he intended them to express. But it is quite obvious that they express something quite different to the spectator who has not been initiated into the meaning of this personal form of shorthand, and the appending of an objective title to what is intended as a subjective impression of the actual world hardly help him over the difficulty. On the contrary it takes him just that far away from the impression the artist desires to produce, plunging him deeper into that world of reality out of which he was to be extricated by this new art, and there is no doubt that in the minds of even the most intelligent spectator it only serves to reenforce his conception of reality upon which he is forced to fall back by the objective titles as well as the concrete representations of what is supposed to be a subjective mood.
I think it may safely be said that in no case does this mood manifest itself to the persons to whom it is addressed, although by a process of auto-hypnotism, a certain few no doubt succeed in making themselves believe that they penetrate the real inwardness of these arbitrarily individual mental processes. Granted that these very discerning ones do respond to the real intention of these abstractions it cannot be denied that this work is the most circumscribed in its appeal of anything so far produced in the name of art and, until its working premise is made clearer, its influence must be correspondingly limited. At present it appears to me to be a too purely personal equation to be intelligible to others than the artist himself and therefore, generally speaking, it can not be regarded as art, whatever else it may be. For that that communicates nothing expresses nothing and as the office of art is first and last expression this new form is as yet outside of the domain of art.
But that makes the attitude of the observer the test whether a given product is or is not art, while the true test is the attitude of the producer.
Whether a given work is or is not art is determined and forever fixed at the time of its production. If art to him who creates it, it is art to all humanity for all time; neither a man’s neighbors nor future generations can deprive it of its character.
Quite a good many years ago I made the attempt, in lecture and book form, to define art.[40]
What is Art? The question is as old as man himself, for we have no records of men without some manifestation of the art impulse....
Man is the combination of thought and symbol; thought striving to express itself, and symbol, the means whereby it achieves that end. The symbol may be sound, word, or song; or it may be line, form, or structure; it matters not. A cry is the language of the child; speech is the every-day utterance of the man; the heart of the singer bursts forth in song; the musician speaks in harmonies, the painter in line and color, the sculptor in form, the architect in structure, the poet in rhyme and rhythm—and each is silent save in his own way....
Now what is the distinction between thought expression which is art and thought expression which is not art?
In its broadest significance, and in its very essence, art is delight in thought and symbol.
Mark the union—art is delight in both the thought and the symbol. Without the double delight—the combination of these two quite distinct delights, there can be no art.
To the writer of prose there may come a beautiful fancy; he delights in it and hastens to record his thought. He may write the most flowing, the most perfect prose, but as he writes he is still occupied with his thought; his sole object is to find words which will but express it. The same fancy comes to the poet; he, too, delights in it, and seeks to record it; but when the poet touches pen to paper he is seized with a new and an entirely distinct delight, a delight in his method of expressing his thought; he may even permit his delight in his symbol, the flow, rhythm and ring of rhyme, to sweep him onward in forgetfulness of his first fancy—literature is filled with such examples.
Now and then a writer of prose expresses himself so finely, writes so well, that we feel instinctively and immediately not only the delight in the thought, but also a certain amount of delight in the manner of expressing the thought, in the style,... and to the extent of the double delight such prose is art, for art, as we shall see, is by no means confined to the five so-called fine arts.
No hard and fast line can be drawn between that which is art and that which is not art, the one fades imperceptibly into the other.
And farther on in the same little volume:41
The current notions of art are such and the current notions of labor are such that it may seem to most of you as though any attempt to discuss the two together could result only in a waste of words; yet time was when art and labor were so intimately united in the great domain of human effort that the one almost invariably implied more or less of the other; and the time will yet be when there will be no labor without at least some art, even as there is now and ever has been no art without at least some labor.
Art lies not in the employment, but in the manner of the employment of the powers of nature for an end; not in the task, but in the attitude of the worker towards his task.
Whether a Cubist painting is or is not art does not depend upon the opinion of either critic or multitude; if it did it would be art to one man and not to another, art to one generation and not to another—an illogical conclusion.
Most Cubist pictures are plainly the work of men who are profoundly moved by an idea and who are striving to express that idea in a highly original manner. It may be the manner they have chosen is so abstract, so scientifically theoretical, that it will in the end—if pursued—kill the imagination, stifle all delight, and so result in failure as art expression; but so long as the men take sincere delight in both what they are trying to say and their manner of utterance, it is impossible to deny the character of art to their works.
In proportion to their originality and daring, there may be more of living and vital art in what they are doing than in the art of the academic painter who follows in the footsteps of others without any particular effort.
In other words, it is quite conceivable there may be more of vital and living art in a movement doomed to failure than in a movement that has achieved success and become stagnant.
The vitality lies in the element of earnest striving rather than in the direction the striving takes.