WHAT is “Cubism?”
One more name added to the long roll of “movements” in art. Within the memory of living men we have had “Classicists,” “Romanticists,” “Idealists,” “Naturalists,” “Realists,” “Pre-Raphaelites,” and many more.
Today we have the “Neo-Impressionists,” the “Pointilists,” the “Luminists,” the “Futurists,” the “Orphists,” the “Sensationalists,” the “Compositionalists,” the “Synchronists,” the “Cubists”—tomorrow?
New and ever new departures, experiments, achievements.
All of which goes to prove that art is living, for the sign of life is flux.
The other day I saw three well-known American painters standing before a cubist picture laughing; painters of forty years ago would have laughed quite as heartily at the works of each of the three.
The innovation of today is the conventional of tomorrow.
Because the names of Rembrandt and Hals are now household words in art we are quick to assume their pictures were always considered great. Not so.
Just now it is a fad of millionaires to own Rembrandts; consequently he is over-appreciated and ridiculously overpriced.