"The art of painting original arrangements composed of elements taken from conceived rather than perceived reality.''
-- Guillaume Apollinaire, The Beginnings of Cubism, 1912.
After Cubism, the
world never looked the same again: it was one of
the most influential and revolutionary movements in art. The
Spaniard Pablo Picasso and the Frenchman Georges Braque
splintered the visual world not wantonly, but sensuously and
beautifully with their new art. They provided what we could almost
call a God's-eye view of reality: every aspect of the whole subject,
seen simultaneously in a single dimension.
The Cubist movement
in painting was developed by Picasso and
Braque around 1907 and became a major influence on Western art.
The artists chose to break down the subjects they were painting into
a number of facets, showing several different aspects of one object
simultaneously. The work up to 1912 is known as Analytical
Cubism, concentrating on geometrical forms using subdued colors.
The second phase, known as Synthetic Cubism, used more
decorative shapes, stencilling, collage, and brighter colors. It was
then that artists such as Picasso and Braque started to use pieces of
cut-up newspaper in their paintings.
GERTRUDE STEIN:
By dislocating grammar and punctuation, she achieved new "abstract" meanings as in her influential collection Tender Buttons (1914), which views objects from different angles, as in a cubist painting:
A Table A Table means
does it not my
dear it means a whole steadiness.
Is it likely that a change. A table
means more than a glass even a
looking glass is tall.
A possibly helpful summary of Stein's prose is provided by poet W. G. Rogers:
As always when at her best, she uses double talk to arrive at plain meanings: she adds nothing and nothing and gets something; her sum is an emotional impact; an excitment, an undeniable deep stirring. This is the marvel and the mystery of her language; it can be an incantation, and like the lingo of the medicine man, it can say little while accomplishing a lot. You don't blame it for what it is, you credit it for what it does.
ON HEMINGWAY'S EARLY FICTION AS CUBIST:
Many passages enact the rejection of the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories of art as the imitation of nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, color, and space; instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects, whose several sides were seen simultaneously.