Cubism plays a central role in the history of modern painting. He taught the painters to free themselves from a large number of conventions and especially from the illusionist depth at the base of the art of representation. The univocal perspective does not tell the truth of human experience; it is a theoretical construction, linked to a precise history. To constitute it, it is necessary to determine a horizon line and the leakage lines, and for this to close an eye, to remain motionless, to stretch the pencil at arm's length in order to elaborate a kind of grid. It is thus possible to reduce the volume and the space on the plane surface of the cloth, and to reduce to a single plane the multiplicity of details arranged in depth. There is nothing obvious or natural about it!
Modernity denounces in a thousand ways this dogmatism which creates a homogeneous, passive, neutral — completely unreal — space, where all forms are valid, and all directions are unified. The works of the classics, explains Alberto Giacometti, “represent a sum of knowledge, the sum of knowledge they had of reality, and not their vision, these works have replaced the very vision of reality. And that is why the Renaissance masterpieces are still considered by almost everyone as the masterpieces of art, that is, the most valid representations of reality”.
With Cubism, space is no longer shown as homogeneous, intellectually constructed, but broken and fragmented in the order of the perceived. There is no longer a single point of view represented: one sees for example the face of the face and the neck. No hierarchical separation distinguishes the foreground and the background. The two overlap and mix instead of being one in front of the other. The picture is no longer a window and the vision is no longer fixed and monocular. As Georges Braque explains: “The traditional perspective does not satisfy me. Mechanized as it is, this perspective never gives full possession of things. It starts from a point of view and does not come out of it. But the point of view is a very small thing. It is like the one who would draw profiles all his life by making people believe that man has only one eye...”
Several interpretations of Cubism are given. For one of the most frequent, cubism accounts more accurately than the classic perspective of the truth of our experience. Our view of things, as the philosopher Merleau-Ponty observes, is in no way reduced to the mathematical objectivity of the perspective elaborated in the Renaissance: “To say that a circle seen obliquely is seen as an ellipse is to substitute for the actual perception the scheme of what we should see if we were cameras.” “But we are not, and first of all because we have a body. Is it not time to take note of it!”
The failure of this reading of Cubism is to make it a realism, more authentic than that of academism, but a realism anyway. In the first place, cubism does not reflect, with more rigor, the experience we make of things, but it constitutes a purely pictorial space, a consideration of the rhythm, coherence, and balance of the picture. As Max Jacob writes, in the foreword of his dice Cornet: A work of art is worth by itself and not by the confrontations that can be made with reality. “This is also what the painter Jacques Villon writes that, thanks to cubism,” the painting loses its appearance of an open window to become a thing in itself... giving joy through his ordinance. “ This work at the very heart of the pictorial space is also a profound effort to question our relationship to reality and free us from our preconceptions about it.
The real is not to be regarded as what is external to me and which I can copy, reproduce, but what is established in my own relation to what is — as Paul Cézanne shows us. Cubism renounces the naive attitude that a subject is faced with an object that he must seek to grasp and represent.
However, no matter how it is understood, the most decisive feature of Cubism is the upheaval of the order of representation it introduces. For this reason, it is one of the most important movements of the twentieth century. Traces can be found in Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock or Willem De Kooning, marked by synthetic cubism, which is drawn more than painted and in which the free line gives the painting its harmony. Cubism offers a space where each place of the painting has the same importance, and where its elaboration becomes the explicit issue of the artist's work. The space that the painter fertilizes is not that of geometry proper to the perspective: he is human, alive, sensitive.
In a sense, all the arts will be marked by this revolution, which should be named, probably more accurately than Cubist, constitution in poetic freedom. It is found in the poems of Guillaume Apollinaire or Pierre Reverdy. The lack of punctuation there gives the relationships between the verses an ambiguity, opening up a multiplicity of meanings.
Parade of Erik Satie also belongs to this adventure. The part flows partly without the salient points that can be expected. It seems to continue as a cubist picture of Braque - which the framework does not limit. Music extends to infinity, into space and time, without any conclusion; it evolves in the immobile.
