Cubists and Post-Impressionism

by Arthur Jerome Eddy

Painting color harmonies for the sake of their emotional effect is easy of comprehension. But when the Cubist sets out to convey the impression, not of the surfaces, but of the very substance of things, he is attempting something very different from what has heretofore been considered within the sphere of painting. Possibly he is attempting something painting cannot do.

The theory is so abstract and so scientific it comes near paralyzing the art. It is too coldly logical and unemotional to produce great art, for great art is and must be fundamentally emotional.

Of Picasso, the founder and leading exponent of Cubism, a sympathetic writer says:

His whole tendency is a negation of the main tenets of the gospel of Cézanne whose conception of form he rejects, together with Monet’s conception of light and color. To him both are non-existent. Instead he endeavors “to produce with his work an impression, not with the subject, but the manner in which he expresses it,” to quote his confrère, Marius De Zayas, who studied the raison d’être of this work, together with Picasso. Describing his process of aesthetic deduction further, M. De Zayas tells us that “he (Picasso) receives a direct impression from external nature; he analyzes, develops, and translates it, and afterwards executes it in his own particular style, with the intention that the picture should be the pictorial equivalent of the emotion produced by nature. In presenting his work he wants the spectator to look for the emotion or idea generated from the spectacle and not the spectacle itself.

“From this to the psychology of form there is but one step, and the artist has given it resolutely and deliberately. Instead of the physical manifestation he seeks in form the psychic one, and on account of his peculiar temperament, his psychical manifestation inspires him with geometrical sensations. When he paints he does not limit himself to taking from an object only those planes which the eye perceives, but deals with all those which, according to him, constitute the individuality of form; and with his peculiar fantasy he develops and transforms them.

“And this suggests to him new impressions, which he manifests with new forms, because from the idea of the representation of a being, a new being is born, perhaps different from the first one, and this becomes the represented being. Each one of his paintings is the coefficient of the impressions that form has performed in his spirit, and in these paintings the public must see the realization of an artistic ideal, and must judge them by the abstract sensation they produce, without trying to look for the factors that entered into the composition of the final result.

“As it is not his purpose to perpetuate on canvas an aspect of the external world, by which to produce an artistic impression, but to represent with the brush the impression he has directly received from nature, synthesized by his fantasy, he does not put on the canvas the remembrance of a past sensation, but describes a present sensation.... In his paintings perspective does not exist; in them there are nothing but harmonies suggested by form, and registers which succeed themselves, to compose a general harmony which fills the rectangle that constitutes the picture.

“Following the same philosophical system in dealing with light, as the one he follows in regard to form, to him color does not exist, but only the effects of light. This produces in matter certain vibrations, which produce in the individual certain impressions. From this it results that Picasso’s paintings present to us the evolution by which light and form have operated in developing themselves in his brain to produce the idea, and his composition is nothing but the synthetic expression of his emotion.”

Thus it will be seen that he tries to represent in essence what seems to exist only in substance. And, inasmuch as his psychical impressions inspire in him geometrical sensations, certain of these exhibits are in the nature of geometrical abstractions that have little or nothing in common with anything hitherto produced in art. Its whole tendency would appear to be away from art into the realm of metaphysics.

Here is a design, a pattern of triangles, ellipses and semi-circles that at first glance appears to be little more than the incoherent passage of a compass across the paper in the hands of some absent-minded engineer. After a little attentive study, however, these enigmatic lines resolve themselves into the semblance of a human figure and one begins to discover a clearly defined intention behind this apparent chaos of ideated sensations. There is evident a method in his madness which, after all, may only be truth turned inside out. And this is what should make one pause and investigate the matter further.