This essay examines how the defining ideas of Cubism — particularly the representation of multiple simultaneous viewpoints — migrated from the visual arts into other creative genres during the early twentieth century. Beginning with Picasso and Braque's rejection of Renaissance perspective, the paper traces Cubist influence through Erik Satie's "non-developmental" music, Diaghilev's cross-disciplinary ballet collaborations (especially Parade), Stravinsky's neoclassical aesthetic, and the collage technique's impact on early cinema. Drawing on scholarship by Neil Cox, Roger Shattuck, and David Bordwell, the essay argues that what once appeared a disjointed vision of reality became a new and more honest mode of artistic representation.
Cubist artworks possess certain attributes that define their construction and conception. The ideas clustering around these works were applied to other art forms with varying results. This examination explores how the new and original ideas of Cubism manifested themselves in the production of art across other genres.
The Cubist style must be viewed as an extension of the anti-Romantic, anti-Impressionistic mood expressed by progressive artists across many creative genres in the fin de siècle period and beyond. As Cocteau wrote in "Le Coq et l'Arlequin," artists were sickened "by the vague, the melting, the superfluous" (82). Cubism had its most intensely creative period between roughly 1908 and the beginning of the First World War, with Paris as the most important center for this reaction across all the arts.
Picasso and Braque are generally seen as the seminal figures in Cubism. They were interested in moving beyond what they saw as the limiting concept of perspective inherited from the Renaissance. This revolt is clearly felt when one compares a piece of Romantic, voluptuous art such as Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People with Picasso's abrasively angular Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The melodic line has been interrupted by a repeated shape or rhythm. Seeing the conventional concept of perspective as a form of trickery, these artists sought what they felt to be a more "real" or "honest" way of portraying the world around them.
By attempting to represent several viewpoints at once — the way we actually experience objects, from multiple angles within milliseconds — the Cubists claimed to be achieving closer and truer representation. This simultaneous perspective seemed to shatter the space-and-time dichotomy at the heart of much artistic debate. For the first time, the flat canvas appeared to come alive "in time" as the eye followed the fractured movement of the represented image.
This artistic technique was soon applied to other art forms. As Neil Cox points out in his 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). Metzinger, the Cubist artist and publicist, underlines the importance of the idea of "time" in an early essay quoted in Cox's Cubism: "Formerly a picture took possession of space, now it reigns also in time" (180).
In his book The Banquet Years, Roger Shattuck describes how the Cubist 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 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 visual art tries to take on the concept of existing "in time" as music normally does. The two disciplines were, in effect, borrowing each other's defining qualities.
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 as the outcome of his deep engagement with Richard Wagner's idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total artwork." Diaghilev's influence on Paris, and on all the art forms engendered there, cannot be overstated. He brought the music, dance, art, and style of Russia to Parisian audiences in the years before World War One.
His collaborations with Stravinsky are perhaps his greatest accomplishments, and one can see in the composer's music how he embraced the clean, angular aesthetic of the Cubists as his own. In a book published in 1968, Dialogues and a Diary, Stravinsky goes as far as to suggest that he was responsible for the birth of "Cubist" or "neo-classicist" music single-handedly:
"I played the Polka (from 'Eight Easy Pieces,' 1915) to Diaghilev and Alfredo Casella in a hotel room in Milan in 1915, and I remember how amazed both men were that the composer of Le Sacre du Printemps should have produced such a piece of popcorn. But for Casella a new path had been indicated, and he was not slow to follow it; so-called neoclassicism of a sort was born in that moment" (41).
That this piece of Cubist "popcorn" contained the kernel of neoclassicism is highly dubious and must be put down to Stravinskian hyperbole and not a little conceit. The Polka may well have guided the composer Casella toward the production of his many neoclassical and Cubist works, but it must be remembered that the Polka itself was the outgrowth of many similarly constructed pieces that Satie and Debussy had already been writing in France.
"Diaghilev unites arts; Stravinsky claims neoclassicism"
"Parade as landmark Cubist cross-arts collaboration"
"Collage technique shapes abstract early film"
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