Cubism is one attempt, Futurism is another, Compositional painting is another; there will be many more attempts before freedom of expression is attained.
Cubism is interesting because it accentuates the value of planes and shows what can be done with elemental propositions in drawing. But the student or painter who turns to Cubism because he thinks it is to become a fad and will pay, runs the risk of making a great mistake; he would better stick to older methods.
The Orphists have been mentioned; there were no Orphist pictures in the International Exhibition. The movement is based on the purely practical proposition that color in itself, and color alone without drawing, may be beautiful. So they just place lines and masses of color on a canvas and frame the canvas.
It sounds absurd, yet the theory is the very foundation of wall decoration, of interior furnishing, of dressmaking—the mere juxtaposition of masses of color, with or without pattern.
The Orphist “picture” may not be much of a picture in the accepted sense of the term, but it may afford pleasure as a color combination and may be of very real value to the decorator, the furnisher, the dressmaker, the scene-painter, the costumer.
The theory is not new. So long as man has loved color he has used it irrespective of pattern.
One part of the theory of the Cubists is as old as that of the Orphists. It is simply that the painter can do with line and color what the composer does with sound. In other words they demand the same freedom in the use of line and color that every great composer has in the use of sound.
If, for instance, a great musician composes a pastoral symphony does he imitate the mooing of cows, the bleating of lambs, the rippling of brooks? Such attempts would be recognized as cheap in the extreme.
“Very well,” the Cubist says, “if I paint a pastoral symphony why should I so much as suggest cows, sheep, landscape, brook? Why should people insist upon seeing in my painting what they cannot hear in Mozart’s or Beethoven’s music?”