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...
As Neil Cox has pointed out in is book Cubism, "This idea of multiple and shifting viewpoints became a characteristic way of understanding Cubist devices and sometimes relied on a comparison with the new popular medium of cinema" (159). In his book, The Banquet Years, Roger Shattuck describes how this concept applied to music, and more specifically to the musical creations of Erik Satie:
They investigated the complexity in time and space of a simple object studied simultaneously from several points-of-view ....Satie takes one musical idea and, instead of developing it at length and working variations on it, regards it briefly from three different directions ... An artist drawing a head from three different sides could obtain the same effect. There are obvious grounds for comparison of this procedure with that of the cubists (111).
There is of course a strange irony here in that this new music tries to be more like visual art by being what may be called "non-developmental" whereas the new art tries to take on the concept of existing "in time" as music normally does. Metzinger, the cubist artist and publicist, underlines the importance of the idea of "time" in an early essay quoted in Neil Cox's Cubism: "Formerly a picture took possession of space, now it reigns also in time" (180).
The real father of all cubist collaboration in this period was the great Russian impresario Diaghilev. His interest in bringing all the arts together into a harmonic unity can be seen the outcome of his great interest in Richard Wagner's idea of "Gesamtkunstwerk," or "total art work." Diaghilev's influence on Paris, and on all the art forms that were engendered…
