The comparison which Picabia is fondest of making is that with absolute music. The rules of musical composition, he points out, are sufficiently hampering in themselves to the composer’s mood, or call it inspiration. Words, as of songs, still further confine his vision of melody, even though they give in the beginning the impression that evokes the mood. Songs without words, the expression of the impression made on him by a great poem without the necessity of following in musical form the literary form of the poet, leave him far freer, give his subjectivity far wider scope. Modern composers have rebelled against the old fetters; modern painters have begun to feel the same need of a freer, an absolute method of expression. Hence, “post-impressionism,” which refuses altogether to be bound by objectivity, by literal reproduction of the object seen, in connection with the mood, the after-impression, received and fixed on the canvas. A composer may be inspired by a walk in the country, says M. Picabia, and produce a production of the landscape scene, of its details of form and color? No; he expresses it in sound waves, he translates it into an expression of the impression, the mood. And as there are absolute sound waves, so there are absolute waves of color and form. Modern music has won its way; this modern painting, too, will find appreciation and understanding in the days to come.
The Cubists have set themselves a hard task. It is a good deal easier to sing an emotion than paint one. It is a good deal easier to paint an object than sing one—therein lies the trouble.
Yet in the beginning both music and painting were imitative. Music imitated natural sounds; drawing and painting imitated natural objects.
But soon men began to sing for the pleasure of singing and play on instruments for the pleasure of playing, and the imitation of natural sounds was left far behind as primitive and elemental, and music tended to become more and more expressive of emotions, elemental emotions at first, finer and purer emotions later, until in the western world abstract purity was reached in Beethoven.
Since Beethoven there has been a reaction to more imitative music, as in the operas of Wagner.
While music departed farther and farther from imitation of natural sounds, drawing and painting progressed toward the more perfect representation of natural objects.
Or rather painting developed along two distinct lines—one the more perfect representation of objects for the sake of the representation; the other compositions of line and color—not
