What with having no electricity due to the floods, I have started reading some of my old textbooks from college. At the moment, I'm working my way through Norbert Lynton's Story of Modern Art which, at least in my day, was the UK art schools' main primer for 20th century art - an equivalent to Gombrich for modernism.
Last night I hit Cubism, that most mis-understood and perhaps most appropriated of genres and I'm grateful for the reminder. The fundamental difficulty, according to Lynton, is that Picasso and Braque were just playing with space and surface and form and even memory and in doing so they forged a new language but almost everyone else read a lot more into the paintings than that - the language based on multiple facets was so adaptable that it could be used for almost any end and so new that everyone - artists, critics and practitioners of other arts alike - all wanted a piece. As a result, a thousand claims were made for the process and it spawned many of the conflicting approaches that enriched the last century. To add to the confusion, many of these were also known as Cubism and this has lead to the difficulty in defining it. Don't get me wrong, these offshoots are good thing, but its important to remember that in the early days, the period known as Analytical Cubism, the two mountaineers were by and large just playing with language, space and surface. Sometimes there is nothing deep behind a painting and it can be appreciated for what it is, not what a critic chooses to make it. So here we have a beautiful Braque painting from 1911, mostly brown, showing a collection of planes which hint at space and light, some recognisable shapes which hint at objects, and some elements (brushwork, letters and geometry) which draw attention to the surface. If I wanted to push this further, I'd say it was a perfect precursor to so many of the 20th century's art related angsts - space vs surface, representation vs abstraction, completeness vs fragmentation.
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