Cubist Ideas and the Modernist Arts
The cubist art work has certain attributes which define its construction and conception. These ideas, clustering around these works of art, were applied to other art forms with varying results. This examination will explore how these new and original ideas about cubism manifested themselves in the productions of art in other genres.
The Cubist style must be viewed as an extension of the anti-Romanic, anti-Impressionistic mood expressed by progressive artists in many creative genres in the fin de siecle period and later. As Cocteau wrote in his "Le Coq et l'Arlequin," the artists were sickened "by the vague, the melting, the superfluous"(82). It had its most intensely creative period between roughly 1908 and beginning of the First World War. The most important center for this "reaction" in all of the arts was Paris. Picasso and Braque are generally seen as the seminal artists in this new form called Cubism. They were interested in getting beyond what they saw as the limiting concept of perspective, which the artistic tradition had inherited from the Renaissance. This is revolt or reaction clearly experienced when one compares a piece of Romantic voluptuous art like Delacroix's "Liberty leading the People" with Picasso's new and abrasively angular "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." The melodic line has been interrupted by a repeated shape or rhythm. Seeing this outmoded concept of perspective as trickery, they sought what they felt to be a more "real" or "honest" way of portraying the world around them. Thus by trying to represent several viewpoints at once - the way we actually experience objects, from several angles within mini-seconds - they claimed to be getting closer to real representation. This simultaneous perspective seemed to shatter the space and time dichotomy at the heart of much artistic debate. For the first...
(269) It would seem that the artists and the press of the era both recognized a hot commodity when they saw one, and in this pre-Internet/Cable/Hustler era, beautiful women portrayed in a lascivious fashion would naturally appeal to the prurient interests of the men of the day who might well have been personally fed up with the Victorian morals that controlled and dominated their lives otherwise. In this regard, Pyne
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