A second says, “I will not paint her portrait, but I will put on canvas a composition of colors so joyous it will express my admiration for her.”
A third says, “I will compose a sonata or a symphony or a ‘song without words’ to express my love for her.”
The public accepts without question the work of the first and third—the portrait painter and the musician—but rejects the work of the second—the painter of harmonies. Why? Because he does not copy the features and the dress of the woman.
Picabia again says:
Art, art, what is art? Is it copying faithfully a person’s face? A landscape? No, that is machinery. Painting Nature as she is, is not art, it is mechanical genius. The old masters turned out by hand the most perfect models, the most faithful copies of what they saw. That all their paintings are not alike is due to the fact that no two men see the same things the same way. Those old masters were, and their modern followers are, faithful depicters of the actual, but I do not call that art today, because we have outgrown it. It is old, and only the new should live. Creating a picture without models is art.
They were successful, those old masters; they filled a place in our life that cannot be filled otherwise, but we have outgrown them. It is a most excellent thing to keep their paintings in the art museums as curiosities for us and for those who will come after us. Their paintings are to us what the alphabet is to the child.
We moderns, if so you think of us, express the spirit of the modern time, the twentieth century. And we express it on canvas the way the great composers express it in their music.
There is plenty of clear expression and fine enthusiasm in those three paragraphs.
There is, however, another side to Cubism and one not so easy to understand.