Cubists and Post-Impressionism

by Arthur Jerome Eddy

DUCHAMP

Chess Players

What has been said so far has been a plea for tolerance, for a sober suppression of hasty judgment in the presence of the strange.

Few men seem able to control their resentments and risibilities in the presence of paintings that seem to contradict all the teachings and traditions of art; but because they do seem to stand in opposition to all we have been taught to believe, they are all the more worthy our most serious consideration. It is the man who challenges and denies who stirs other men to think for themselves. That is the chief value of the cubist paintings—they compel us to think for ourselves, to take a careful inventory of our stock of stereotyped notions; with the result that while we may not accept the theories of the Cubists, we cannot fail to readjust our own notions on a broader basis.

I would be very sorry if any reader should take up this volume under the impression it is a plea for Cubism or any other “ism” in either art or life. If it is a plea for anything, it is for tolerance and intelligent receptivity, for an attitude of sympathetic appreciation toward everything that is new and strange and revolutionary in life. Not that we will necessarily end by accepting the new and the strange and the revolutionary, but we cannot get the good there may be in them unless our attitude is one of sympathetic as well as critical receptivity.

It is something more than a mere coincidence that the upheaval in the art world has paralleled the upheaval in the political world. The exhibitions of extreme modern pictures were first held in England just when extreme radical theories were gaining the ascendency. The International Exhibition in America followed hot in the footsteps of the split in the Republican party and the triumph of the Democratic along lines so progressive as to seem almost socialistic.

The artists who organized the exhibition did not realize it, but they were animated by precisely the same motive that animated the organizers of the Progressive party—an irresistible desire for a change.