Cubism Automatic translate

Critical realism, which reached its peak in the second half of the 19th century, only partially met new social and ideological demands. The art of critical realism did not embody revolutionary ideals, did not indicate new real ways for the progressive transformation of society.

Realism entered a new, higher stage of its development - the method of socialist realism was ripening, significantly expanding the possibilities of the social and aesthetic impact of art.

Artists who experimented in the field of form did not set themselves the task of more fully embodying progressive social and aesthetic ideals in their works, confining themselves to solving narrow, particular problems. These particular issues - the transfer by means of painting and sculpture of volume, movement, time, color and light - were posed and solved in their own way by modernist artists through pure form-making, which meant the destruction of the unity of form and content. This, in turn, as a logical result led to the denial of the need for meaningful content in a work of art.

Direction characteristic

The Cubists declared the artist an autonomous creator of a "different" reality. It was the Cubists who began to create works no longer to imitate nature, not to organize it, but to create, in turn, a creation bearing the stamp of man, a true work of architecture, i.e., a work that can sometimes make people believe in ontological freedom.

Forming their direction, the Cubists emphasized its opposite to all previously created fine art, which was dismissively defined by them as “imitative”.

Cubists especially emphasize the "asceticism" of their direction, "severity, reaching irrationalism." This was facilitated by the color non-individualization of Cubist works of art, their coloristic inexpressiveness. Each color shade, each modulation of color turns in cubists into a plane (i.e., into an element of form). Cubists expressed in this way planes combine sharply, without avoiding contrasts. They are trying to more clearly express the plane, present it more "solid."

The formalistic narrowness of the tasks of the cubist artist, the limitedness of artistic means lead to a decrease in artistic opportunities, to the erasure of the artist’s individuality. Cubists reduce the task of painting to the image of color volume on a flat surface. They approach this problem in an abstract way, without taking into account the material laws of the real world. The objects of art created by cubists acquire self-sufficient significance. “The Cubist’s commitment to objects is such,” writes French art historian B. Dorival, “that he seeks them within himself, regardless of credibility and any changes.”

The anti-dialectical attitude to reality determines the static nature of Cubist art. Sculptors and cubist painters deliberately avoid all elements that convey life dynamics, the gloomy edges of heavy geometric figures give the works of art in this direction unshakable, crushing weight.

Rejecting dynamism, cubists deny the very concept of time, the perception in time of the various sides of an object. The versatility of the object is transmitted on their canvases through a one-time image of its features. An attempt to show a person’s face as if visible simultaneously from different sides leads to the appearance, for example, of facial images in profile with two eyes and several noses. In the art of cubism, this technique causes a sharp violation of the norms of perception of the picture, which makes it a little communicative.

The progressive process of loss of communicativeness in works of Cubist art can be traced quite clearly. In the early canvases, which were not yet completely divorced from reality, there are separate moments of deformation that impede the perception of the work.

With the development of cubism, those few “strongholds”, which to some extent made it possible to perceive the artist’s plan, disappear — individual details reflecting reality. Replacing the parts of an object or a human body with geometric figures makes the cubist image unrecognizable, and the artist’s design is not perceived by the audience. Such, for example, is the cubist sculpture of Jacques Lipschitz "The Man with the Guitar." Without reading the signature of the work or its reproduction, it is impossible to correlate the image with any real object or phenomenon.

Cubism geometry

A heap of geometric planes does not cause the viewer any associations with the forms of reality.

Such “meaningless” works of cubism are not amenable to aesthetic analysis, and aesthetics have long replaced critical thinking with an arbitrary formalistic interpretation, devoid of any thoroughness. So, in the book “Masters of the Art of Modernism” the sculpture by J. Lipschitz “A Man with a Guitar” is described as follows: “Lipschitz in his“ Man with a Guitar ”brought together interlocking and interpenetrating plates and prisms in a monumental design that allows it to be examined from almost any angle view. Its straight lines vary in random curves. In particular, the sculptor made a round resonator hole in the guitar with exceptional formal wit through the musician’s entire body. ” Such a critical analysis reveals neither the artistic value nor the meaning of the work. However, the level of analysis in this case is “set” by the level of the work being analyzed.

The distortion of reality produced in the paintings and sculptures is stubbornly called by the cubists not deformation, but “reformation” and, creating reasonably unperceived works, they claim to be a “total image of objects”. The cubists realize their claims to “totality” in a purely formalistic way - by refusing to depict the object itself. Cubist artists have developed a specific arrangement of geometric shapes on the canvas, replacing parts of the subject. Following this pattern, Cubist artists create the same type of work that makes up a certain period in the existence of this trend. The most characteristic of Cubism is the scheme created and used by artists of this direction in 1910-1912. It is clearly visible in the cubist Juan Gris’s painting “The Guitar and the Flowers”: he uses the obvious geometric pattern of the drawing, by which the composition is given the basic order by dividing the canvas into four parts: vertically, horizontally and twice diagonally. The picture of Georges Braque “Girl with a Guitar” and many others is built in exactly the same way.

Cezanne

The definition of the early period of the existence of Cubism as “Cezanne” raises the most resolute objections: in no stage of its existence did Cubism directly relate to Cézanne — neither with his aesthetic views, nor with the practice of his art. Cubism is the opposite of Cezanne’s creativity in its artistic method.

Paintings by Paul Cezanne

The object of Cezanne’s art is the surrounding material world. The Cubists, on the other hand, used the method of formalism; the objects of their art were the work itself. Cezanne dedicated his life to the task of "developing art in contact with nature." Cubists tore their art from nature, following the path of abstract form-creation and the deformation of reality. Cezanne warned artists against the danger of distorting life to please theories. “The artist must abandon any point of view that is not based on a completely conscious observation of the characteristic. He must be afraid to follow the theoretical attitude that so often leads the artist to deviate from the true path — that is, from a concrete study of nature — in order to get lost for a long time in incomprehensible speculativeness… Nevertheless, I again and again return to the following: the artist must devote himself entirely to studying nature and create paintings that serve the cause of knowledge. " This point of view, based on his artistic practice, Cezanne expressed in 1904, remaining faithful to her all his long creative life.

The Cubists declared their art “conceptual” and devoted all their practical activities, in the words of Cezanne, to “incomprehensible speculativeness”, from which Cezanne warned the artists. Cezanne used geometric shapes as one of the means, one of the methods of reflection in the art of reality. But a separate trick does not yet determine the creative method. The Cubists did not borrow and did not develop Cezanne’s creative method in its entirety, they grabbed one of its tricks, emasculated it and turned it into an end in itself, opposed it to realism. By speculating on the authority of Cezanne, they tried to give significance to their meaningless formalistic research.

The problem of correlation of Cezanne’s creativity and cubism goes beyond the framework of particular issues of assessing Cezanne’s painting and determining the origins of cubism. It has a general methodological significance. The question of the use of individual techniques cannot be resolved abstractly from the general aesthetic positions of the artist who uses this or that technique. The nature of the use of a particular technique in artistic creation is determined primarily by the creative method of the artist. One and the same trick can serve the very opposite purposes. The deformation in realistic art, used, for example, in the grotesque, in friendly cartoon, caricature, is a means of reflecting reality, it does not remove, but strengthens the element of the artist’s assessment of the reflected phenomenon, emphasizes the artist’s creative personality.

An artistic device in the process of creativity does not appear in its pure form, it is mediated by the artist’s worldview, his creative method. The abstract emphasis on artistic means inevitably leads to confusion in assessing the phenomena of art. An example of such an anti-scientific bias in assessments is the equating of the technique of “geometrization” by Cézanne with the creation of cubists.

The evolution of cubism

An abstract consideration of artistic techniques outside of the creative method is often used by art theorists in their attempts to "dissolve" realism in various areas of modernist art.

Speaking about the stages (periods) in the evolution of cubism, researchers proceed from the purely formal foundations of periodization. The theorist of the art of modernism C. Gray in his book “Aesthetic Theories of Cubism” defines the “analytical” phase of the existence of this trend as follows: “The first phase of cubism is characterized by a more or less acute difference between the problems of form and space. There is a well-known “logic”, but there is also an object to which this logic is addressed. The object is analyzed and interpreted, but it still retains its objective reality. ”

Cubism sees the task of art in the expression of "ideas" preceding forms.

The process of evolution of cubism demonstrates the strengthening of idealistic elements in it as it develops, the gradual separation of Cubist art from life until its complete loss of communicativeness.

Picasso

The emergence of cubism is usually associated with the name of Pablo Picasso. Criticism sees the virtues of his "Avignon Maidens" in "the sharpness of handwriting, the sharp freshness of the palette, the absence of any perspective and true chiaroscuro." Picasso works in parallel and side by side (in the same house) with the Cubists, without being formally a participant in this direction. He builds his paintings on the same principles as Cubist artists, but he is skeptical of Cubism as a school. He considers his experiments as a search for new means of artistic expression. Picasso seeks to find new formal artistic means, while the cubists set themselves the goal of searching regardless of the results of these searches.

Pablo Picasso Paintings

Principles of referral

Formulating in their theoretical works the basic principles of the artistic practice of the movement, cubists first of all designated it as vicious all art connected with life and striving to reflect the phenomena of reality: “The only possible fallacy in art is imitation,” write French cubists A. Glez and J. Metzenge.

The Cubists claim that after the painting refused to imitate the subject with lines and color, the artist’s task is to express “plastic awareness of the instinct” by means of art. “We are far from thinking,” the cubists explain, “to question the existence of objects that affect our feelings. But, approaching reasonably, we cannot have confidence in anything except the images that they create in our mind. ” And further: "We are looking for the main thing, but we are looking for it in our personality, and not in some eternity, which mathematicians and philosophers so diligently fabricate." The above statements reveal the subjective-idealistic, intuitive nature of the Cubist worldview - the philosophical basis on which modernism was based from the very beginning as a direction in art.

Abandoning attempts to reflect the real world, the Cubists focused on form-making, openly proclaiming it the goal of their activities. In theoretical terms, cubists tried to find correspondence between lines and color, arguing, for example, that curved lines are also correlated with straight lines, like cold tones with warm tones.

The non-communicative creations of the cubists caused bewilderment, and often outrage, among the audience. However, the Cubists did not want to explain such a reaction with the peculiarities of their work, they blamed the misunderstanding and inertness of the audience, to whom they were treated down. Calling the audience "crowd", they claimed unconditional superiority over it.

The relationship of mutual misunderstanding of Cubist artists and spectators has become characteristic of other areas of modernist art. The art of cubism broke away from the audience and essentially became anti-people.

When comparing the theoretical principles and artistic practices of cubism with their modern and widespread in the XX century. idealistic philosophical theories, the connection of cubists with the teachings of A. Schopenhauer and A. Bergson becomes apparent. The interconnection of real objects and phenomena, from their point of view, cannot be of interest to the artist; this is a subject of science as a lower type of cognitive activity compared to art.

The Cubists made an attempt to realize in their works an understanding of the idea as a unity, not divided in space and time. Following Schopenhauer, they opposed the reality of the category of time. Staticity as an attribute of cubist canvases was essentially a symbol of the denial of dynamics, the movement of matter. Schopenhauer borrowed the idea of ​​the impersonal nature of art, of the depersonalization of the artist.

In philosophical and aesthetic terms, the theoretical programs of the cubists were a step back even in comparison with Schopenhauer: they expelled the beautiful and the sublime from art, thereby depriving it of the main means of aesthetic impact on a person. Unlike Schopenhauer, the Cubists insisted on the intranscendent, “frivolous” nature of art.

The Cubists updated the arsenal of their philosophical ideas with the teachings of A. Bergson. Under the influence of Bergson, the art of modernism acquired an obvious subjectivist character. For Cubists, the mind has not yet been completely abandoned (as later among the Surrealists), although it participated only as an instrument for the deformation of reality.

Cubism is a unique trend in the art of the early 20th century. The plastic language of direction is based on the decomposition and deformation of objects on several geometric planes and on plastic form shifts. Most Russian artists led their creative path precisely through the increase of cubism, often combining its principles with interesting techniques of other artistic and contemporary trends, for example, primitivism and futurism.

Cubofuturism has become a specific type of interpretation of cubism with a pronounced Russian tinge of art. The birth of the direction dates back to the years 1907-08 - just on the eve of the First World War. A new trend in obsolete modernist art caused inevitable rage on the part of the bourgeoisie. At one time, cubism in art was surrounded by a circle of critics and poets who followed Bergson’s philosophy, oddly enough, they also called themselves Cubists.

Left home for the Museum of Cubism? Don’t forget to do record audio on answering machine to find out who called you while you enjoyed the beautiful.

One of the main trends of cubism was the dominance of the basic concept over the artistic and personal value of the picture. Hegel also noted that the art of modern times will increasingly be imbued with reflection, and the imaginative thinking instilled in society will gradually become crowded out with abstract. In other words, the line between practical creativity and art criticism became very thin. If in Cubism this tendency was present in the form of an embryo, then in postmodernism it became dominant.

The fathers of Cubism are considered Picasso and Braque. But Delaunay, Juan Gris and Fernand Leger immediately joined the new current. They managed to make a sensational transformation of the existing artistic reality into the world of art of that time, which no one could ever see and imagine - decomposition of the form into cubes.