Cubism and Its Influence on Cultural Productions Associated With Modernism

Cubist Ideas and the Modernist Arts

The cubist art work has certain attributes which define its construction and conception. These ideas, clustering around these works of art, were applied to other art forms with varying results. This examination will explore how these new and original ideas about cubism manifested themselves in the productions of art in other genres.

The Cubist style must be viewed as an extension of the anti-Romanic, anti-Impressionistic mood expressed by progressive artists in many creative genres in the fin de siecle period and later. As Cocteau wrote in his "Le Coq et l'Arlequin," the artists were sickened "by the vague, the melting, the superfluous"(82). It had its most intensely creative period between roughly 1908 and beginning of the First World War. The most important center for this "reaction" in all of the arts was Paris. Picasso and Braque are generally seen as the seminal artists in this new form called Cubism. They were interested in getting beyond what they saw as the limiting concept of perspective, which the artistic tradition had inherited from the Renaissance. This is revolt or reaction clearly experienced when one compares a piece of Romantic voluptuous art like Delacroix's "Liberty leading the People" with Picasso's new and abrasively angular "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." The melodic line has been interrupted by a repeated shape or rhythm. Seeing this outmoded concept of perspective as trickery, they sought what they felt to be a more "real" or "honest" way of portraying the world around them. Thus by trying to represent several viewpoints at once - the way we actually experience objects, from several angles within mini-seconds - they claimed to be getting closer to real representation. This simultaneous perspective seemed to shatter the space and time dichotomy at the heart of much artistic debate. For the first time the flat canvas seemed to come alive "in time" as the eye followed the fractured movement of the represented image.

This artistic technique was soon applied to other art forms. As Neil Cox has pointed out in is book Cubism, "This idea of multiple and shifting viewpoints became a characteristic way of understanding Cubist devices and sometimes relied on a comparison with the new popular medium of cinema" (159). In his book, The Banquet Years, Roger Shattuck describes how this concept applied to music, and more specifically to the musical creations of Erik Satie:

They investigated the complexity in time and space of a simple object studied simultaneously from several points-of-view ....Satie takes one musical idea and, instead of developing it at length and working variations on it, regards it briefly from three different directions ... An artist drawing a head from three different sides could obtain the same effect. There are obvious grounds for comparison of this procedure with that of the cubists (111).

There is of course a strange irony here in that this new music tries to be more like visual art by being what may be called "non-developmental" whereas the new art tries to take on the concept of existing "in time" as music normally does. Metzinger, the cubist artist and publicist, underlines the importance of the idea of "time" in an early essay quoted in Neil Cox's Cubism: "Formerly a picture took possession of space, now it reigns also in time" (180).

The real father of all cubist collaboration in this period was the great Russian impresario Diaghilev. His interest in bringing all the arts together into a harmonic unity can be seen the outcome of his great interest in Richard Wagner's idea of "Gesamtkunstwerk," or "total art work." Diaghilev's influence on Paris, and on all the art forms that were engendered there, cannot be overstated. He brought the music, dance, art and style of his Russia to the Parisians in the years before World War One. His collaborations with Stravinsky are perhaps his greatest accomplishments, and one can see in the composer's music how he embraced the clean, angular aesthetic of the cubists as his own. In a book published in 1968 by Stravinsky and his companion Robert Craft, entitled Dialogues and a Diary, the composer goes as far as to suggest that he was responsible for the birth of "cubist" or "neo-classicist" music single-handedly:

I played the Polka (from "Eight Easy Pieces" 1915) to Diahilev and Alfredo Casella in a hotel room in Milan in 1915, and I remember how amazed both men were that the composer of "Le Sacre du Printemps" should have produced such a piece of popcorn. But for Castella a new path had been indicated, and he was not slow to follow it; so called neoclassicism of a sort was born in that moment ( 41 ).

That this piece of cubist "popcorn" contained the kernel of neoclassicism is highly dubious and must be put down to Stravinskian hyperbole and not a little conceit. The Polka may well have triggered the composer Casella toward the production of his many neoclassical and cubist works, but it must be remembered that the Polka was the outgrowth of many similarly constructed pieces that Satie and Debussy had been writing in France.

Perhaps the most famous of the cubist work Satie was involved in at this time was the ballet Parade. Diaghilev, Satie, Massine, Picasso and Cocteau all had a hand in this colossal collaboration. Satie was able to incorporate such a wide scope of styles and colors as to include: jazz, folk songs, choral work, ragtime, cabaret song, fugal forms, and everyday sounds from the real world. As Roger Shattuck describes it, the work:

leaves the impression ....of a great number of small units ....the mosaic-like texture ....his economical orchestration corresponds to the cubists restraint in using color; and his raucous noise effects corresponds to their experiments with new surface textures (123).