One has but to look at a series of Picasso’s work to see how often and
radically he has changed his style in these ten years from drawing and
painting with great facility and success in Impressionistic and
Neo-Impressionistic manner to the most abstract Cubism; what he will be
doing two years hence, no one can predict, save that, judging by the
past, he will not be painting Cubist pictures.
* * * * *
The name “Cubism” was given to the new school “in derision, in the
autumn of 1908, by Henri Matisse, who happened to see a picture of
buildings the cubical representation of which struck him forcibly.”[34]
That year Georges Braque exhibited a Cubist picture in the Salon des
Independents.
In 1910, Jean Metzinger exhibited a Cubist portrait in the Salle
d’Automne, and a number of pictures were hung in the Salon des
Independents.
The first collection was gathered together in room 41 at the Salon des
Independents in 1911. The same year the first exhibition outside of
Paris was held in Brussels, and there the names “Cubism” and “Cubistes”
were adopted.
In 1911 the exposition of the Cubists in the Salle d’Automne caused
considerable sensation. Gleizes, Metzinger, Leger, and, for the first
time, Marcel Duchamp and his brother, the sculptor-architect,
Duchamp-Villon, exhibited.
Other expositions were held in November, 1911, at the gallery d’Art
Contemporaine rue Tronchet; in 1912, at the Salon des Independents,
where Juan Gris first exhibited; in May of the same year, in Barcelona;
in June, at Rouen, where Picabia joined the new school.
The different tendencies of the movement are described as follows:[35]
1. _Cubism scientifique_ is the tendency toward pure cubism; it is the
painting with elements borrowed not from the realities of vision, but
the realities of knowledge. The geometrical lines, which so impressed
all who first saw their scientific works, resulted from the attempt to
paint the essential--rather than the visual--realities of things which
were rendered on canvas with an abstract purity, and in which objective
realities and story-telling qualities were eliminated.
Most of Picasso’s geometrical representations and Duchamp’s “King and
Queen” are good illustrations of _scientific_ or _pure_ Cubism.
2. _Cubism physique_ is painting compositions the elements of which are
borrowed for the most part from realities of vision. Inasmuch as
objective realities are more or less in evidence in these works, they
are not pure Cubism.
Picasso’s “Woman and the Pot of Mustard” is a very striking--and
indifferent--example of _Cubism physique_, which simply means cubist
paintings in which figures and objects are more or less apparent to the
casual observer. In Marcel Duchamp’s “Chess Players” the figures are
quite plain; in Picabia’s “Dance at the Spring” one figure is
distinguishable at first glance, the second is not so easily discerned,
while the spring is more obscure, though plain enough after a little
study.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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