CUBISM. — This term designates one of the most significant trends in modern painting. Its first manifestations appeared at the beginning of our century and it emerged with the characteristics of a reaction against Impressionism (q.v.), a movement to which Cubism can, in turn, be linked. The Impressionists, in fact, by choosing one aspect of nature as the object of their representation, had already, in their own way, broken the pact that painting, from Giotto onward, had believed it had established between the object represented and its representation: “art as imitation of nature.” The Cubists, starting from the concept that the pictorial language used up to their time was the result of a more or less accepted convention—just as the words that indicate different things in different 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 knew them.
Thus, by wholesale rejection of all the achievements of perspective and foreshortening and any other pictorial device, long-established through experience and convention, designed to give in paintings the sense of the third dimension—that is, the illusion even of the parts of things hidden by their accidental perspective situation—the Cubists did not hesitate to represent objects themselves overturned on the canvas, depicting the different aspects of things in a sequence determined solely by the demands of their knowledge. Hence the assertion that inspiration is the act by which the artist immerses himself in the object, living its characteristic motion.
Although in its early stages, even under the influence of certain aspects of Cézanne’s painting, Cubism pursued, in the representation of things, the aspiration toward forms proper to geometric solids (whence the name “Cubism”) or, in any case, toward reducing the representation of things to a common denominator, which was that of their geometricizability, soon the term came to denote that pure painting which is the logical consequence of the principles that had given rise to the Cubist movement; that is, painting of invention, of creation, which often resolves itself into an elegant “game of the mind,” into a decorative style, whereby the thing represented is broken down into its various aspects that have aroused the artist’s inspiration, in a very chromatic or linear taste. To render, without any mediation, more than the things themselves the sense of things, their inner meaning, their fundamental characteristic motifs—this was the aspiration of the Cubists.
The movement, which originated in France and from there spread throughout Europe and America, if only as a mediator to reach other experiences, had as its greatest representative Pablo Picasso, a Spaniard. Other Cubist painters are Braque, Derain, Léger. Among the Italians we recall G. Severini and R. Guttuso. — See pl. LXVI.