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Picasso and Braque: Mano a Mano
| Article
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16621 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1989 |
2,203 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
What distinguished Cubism from all art that had preceded it, as Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset ingeniously discerned, was its focus on the world as idea. In his 1913 essay "One Point of View in the Arts," Ortega y Gasset set forth a theory of the evolution of styles in Western painting, declaring, "First things were painted; then, sensations; finally, ideas .... The artist, starting from the world about him, ends by withdrawing into himself."
In Cubist art, the world no longer existed apart from human awareness. Implicit was the idea that only by means of our awareness do things come into being. "I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them," Picasso said. In rendering the subjective process of seeing, Cubism became the first art to extend beyond the visual appearance of a subject.
Setting Cubism in its historical context, we can note, as Robert Rosenblum does in his Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art, that Cubist techniques were occurring in the other arts. For example, Igor Stravinsky's fragmented melodic lines and experiments in polytonality parallel the shifting angular planes and multiple images of Cubist painting. In literature, the dissected and recomposed temporal structures of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf share affinities with the Cubist aesthetic.
Picasso and Georges Braque, the originators of the style, held that Cubism developed in relative isolation from extra-artistic influences. In examining the sequence of stylistic innovations that occurred during the period of the formation of Cubism, it does indeed appear to be the case that although it happened to conform with contemporary developments in various
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