CUBISM. — This term denotes one of the most significant trends in modern pictorial art. It first manifested itself at the beginning of our century and appeared with the characteristic Impressionism (v.), although the same c. can, on the other hand, be connected with that movement. The Impressionists, in fact, by choosing one aspect of nature as the object of their representation, had already, for their part, broken the pact which pictorial art, from Giotto onward, had believed it had established between the object represented and the representation itself: “art as imitation of nature.” The Cubists, proceeding from the idea that the pictorial language used up to their time was the product of a more or less accepted convention, just as the words indicating different things in the various languages are themselves conventional sounds or terms, comprehensible only to those who know that particular language, wished to represent facts as they are known; or rather, as each of them knows them.
Thus, rejecting wholesale all the achievements of perspective and foreshortening, as well as every other pictorial and drawing device, the fruit of centuries-old experience or conventions and capable of conveying in paintings the sense of the third dimension—that is, the illusion even of those parts of things concealed by their accidental perspectival position—the Cubists did not hesitate to represent objects themselves overturned upon the canvas, depicting the different aspects of things in a sequence determined solely by the requirements of their knowledge. Hence the assertion that inspiration is the act by which the artist immerses himself in the object, experiencing its characteristic movement.
Although at its beginnings, partly under the influence of certain aspects of Cézanne’s painting, c. pursued, in the representation of things, an aspiration toward forms proper to geometric solids (hence the name c.) or, in any event, toward reducing the representation of things to a common denominator, namely their geometrizability, the term soon came to designate that pure painting which is the logical consequence of the principles that had given rise to the Cubist movement; that is, a painting of invention and creation, which often resolves itself into an elegant “play of the spirit,” into a decorativism whereby the thing represented is broken down into its different aspects, which have inspired the artist, and transformed into a pleasing chromatic or linear motif. To render, without any mediation, more than things themselves, the sense of things, their inner meaning, their fundamental characteristic motives: this was the aspiration of the Cubists.
The movement, which originated in France and from there spread throughout Europe and America, if only as an intermediary leading to other experiments, had its principal representative in the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. Other Cubist painters are Braque, Derain, and Léger. Among the Italians we may mention G. Severini and R. Guttuso. — Vedi tav. LXVII.