So far as the use of planes and angles is concerned, these diagrams by Durer should serve to disarm criticism. That the human figure can be decomposed into straight lines and angles will be a revelation to most of those who laughed at the Cubist paintings, and only the authority of a great name would convince that any good could result from such an analysis.
Suppose any one of the Durer diagrams had been framed and hung in the Cubist section; would it not have been treated with ridicule?
The men who arranged the exhibition could have played with critics and artists—the men who claim to know—by including many things of recognized position in academic art and teachings, which would have seemed as absurd as the newest of the new pictures.
The very high aesthetic value of drawing and painting in planes, and with small regard to the so-called laws of perspective, is illustrated in the rare beauty of Chinese and Japanese paintings. From the point of view of their greatest painters, we carry perspective and imitation to extremes that destroy art.
One value of the Cubist movement lies in arousing a sense of the strength possessed by the simple and elemental.
In oriental art, in archaic art, in primitive Italian art, in not a little modern decorative work, we have long recognized the beauty of drawing in planes and of the use of color arbitrarily. The Cubists are showing us—perhaps too violently and imperfectly—that it is possible to paint pictures and portraits in planes and masses without imitation. That it is possible we know, for the orientals have done it for two thousand years; nevertheless, we stubbornly resist the attempt in western art.
We acknowledge the singular beauty of the Italian primitives, yet we demand that portraits and paintings of today shall be carefully modelled in the vain effort to accurately and mechanically copy nature.