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Cubism : A Conspicuous Rococo of Pictorial Vocabulary

by K Z Karim
CUBISM WAS PERHAPS THE most important and certainly the most complete and radical artistic revolution since the Renaissance. New forms of society, changing patronage, varying geographic conditions. all these things have gone to produce over the past five hundred years a succession of different schools, different styles, different pictorial idioms. But none of these has so altered the principles, so shaken the foundations of Western painting as did Cubism. Indeed, from a visual point of view it is easier to bridge the three hundred and fifty years separating Impressionism from the High-Renaissance than it is to bridge the fifty years that lie between Impressionism and Cubism. If social and historical factors can for a moment be forgotten, a portrait by Renoir will seem closer to a portrait by Raphel than it does to a cubist portrait by Picasso.
Despite its revolutionary quality, and the sudden, explosive way in which it seemed, almost overnight, to come into being. Cubism owed, of course, much to the art of the preceding fifty years. While the cubist reacted against the passion and expressionlstic violence of Van Gogh, and the impressionistic "intimisme" and pretentious symbolism of the Nabis. They admired Seurat for his Intellectual objectivity, his classical detachment and formal purity. Several of the future cubists began their artistic careers as Divlslonists, that is to say as his successors Gauguin, in an indirect fashion, was a powerful influence in the formation of Cubism, insofar as it was he, in the eyes of the young painters working in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century, who had been the true discoverer of the aesthetic worth of primitive art. A form of primitive’ art. Negro Sculpture was, it will be seen, one of the main influences in the birth of Cubism In that it encouraged Picasso, both on an Intellectual level and by its formal, ab-s tractjproperties. to take afresh of tra-ditional^ctorial values. In a more general way primitive art — and* here one can extend the term to include the work of that great ’primitive' painter, the Douanier Rousseau — supported the Cubists in their determination to shake themselves free of what Braque has called la fausse tradition', the conven-
blsm and Fauvism, the other important style born in Peiris during the 1st decade of the century. This existed only in the most limited sense; a move towards greater abstraction, the tendency to take greater liberties with visual appearances. was the only very concrete w^y hi whidh Fauvism foreshAdoived Cubism.. Even so. the abstract element In Cubism was the result of an entirely different approach from that of the Fauves. For while Fauve painting at its most typical sprang from a free, spontaneous and often highly subjective response to the external world, and for this reason seemed occasionally to be so
tions that had governed Western painting for the preceding five centuries. Only one nineteenth-century artist, however, played a positive, direct role in the formation of the style. This was Cezanne. His Importance cannot be too much stressed, and in a study of the development of Cubism one finds oneself returning to him again and again. It was Cezanne, more than any other painter, who provided a link between twentieth-century painting and traditional Western art.
Many of the contemporary historians and critics of Cubism agreed In seeing a direct connection between Cu-
far removed for conventional appearances, the Cubists, on the other hand, were led to still greater abstraction by the fact that their vision was conceptual and Intellectual rather than physical and sensory. The Fauves, and particularly Matisse, admired Cezanne, & Braque may well have been led to an appreciation of him through thetr example: but the ends to which he put his study of Cezanne were, once again, totally different. In the same way Picasso's attitude to primitive art had little or nothing to do with that of Matisse, Derain or Vlamlnlck.
Indeed, viewed in retrospect, Fau-
vism seems to have belonged as much to the 19th century as to the twentieth. For so far as Fauvism existed as a style or movement — that is to say when 1904 and 1906. the works of Matisse. Derain and Vlamlnlck all — resembled each other to a certain extent and had clearly defined characteristics in common — it was a synthesis of elements drawn from the art of the past fifty years; Impressionism. Dlvtstonlsm. the decorative rhythms of Gauguin and the expressionism of Van Gogh, all contributed equally to its appearance. And since Fauvism evolved no consistent technique of its own and was not governed by any very clearly-defined aesthetic, it was not a style that could have anything more than a very fugitive existence.
The formation of Cubism was in sharp contrast to that of Fauvism. Where the Fauves drew from a wide variety of sources, the development of Cubism, except for the joint influences of Cezanne and Negro Sculpture, was remarkably self-contained. And whereas the Fauves borrowed restlessly from the art of their predecessors, the Cubists reverted to fundamental principles; they began, so to speak, from the bottom upwards. Feeling that traditional painting was exhausted, they took each of the elements that comprise the vocabulary of painting — form, space, colour, and technique — and substituted for the traditional use of every one of them a new Interpretation of their own. In short Cubism was a completely 'new pictorial language', a completely new way of looking at the outside world, a clearly-defined aesthetic. As such. It has shaped the course of almost all twentieth-century paintings.
The effects of Cubism are still with us. They can be seen in much of the art of today. Inasmuch as Cubism has conditioned the development of architecture and the applied arts, It has become part of our dally life. For this reason it will, perhaps, be sometime before It is possible to pub Cubism In its proper historic^ perspective, to evaluate It with coriiplete assurance. But today it Is possible to define the characteristics of the style, to Illustrate how, from one year to the other, even from one painting to the next, the painters evolved, step by step, the means of expressing their new pictorial concepts. ■