Cubism

CUBISM. - This term designates one of the most significant tendencies in modern painting. It had its first manifestations at the beginning of our century and appeared with the characteristics proper to a reaction against Impressionism (v.), to which movement, on the other hand, Cubism itself can be linked. The Impressionists, in fact, by choosing one of the aspects of nature as the object of their representation, had already on their own account broken the pact that painting from Giotto onward had believed it had established between the object of representation and the representation itself: "art as imitation of nature." The Cubists, starting from the concept that the pictorial language used up to their time was the fruit of a more or less accepted convention, just as the words that designate different things in different languages are themselves conventional sounds or terms, comprehensible only to those who know that particular language, sought to represent facts as they are known; better, as each of them knows them.

Therefore, rejecting wholesale all the achievements of perspective and foreshortening and any other pictorial and drawing device, the fruit of experiences or conventions by then centuries old and capable of giving, in paintings, the sense of the third dimension, that is, the illusion also of the parts of things hidden by their accidental perspectival situation, the Cubists did not hesitate to represent the objects themselves turned over onto the canvas, depicting of things the different aspects in a succession determined only by the requirements 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 at its beginnings, also through the suggestion of certain aspects of Cézanne's painting, Cubism pursued, in the representation of things, the aspiration to forms proper to geometric solids (whence the name of Cubism) or, in any case, to reduce the representation of things to a common denominator, which was that of their geometrizability, soon the term came to designate that pure painting which is the logical consequence of the principles that had originated the Cubist movement; that painting, that is, of invention, of 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 that aroused the artist's inspiration, into a pleasing chromatic or linear motif. To render, without any mediation, more than things the sense of things, their intimate 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 for no other reason than as a mediator for reaching other experiences, had as its major representative the Spaniard Pablo Picasso. Other Cubist painters are Braque, Derain, Léger. Among the Italians we recall G. Severini and R. Guttuso. - See plate LXVII.

Emilio Lavagnino.