Cubist Ideas and Their Influence on Modernist Arts
This essay examines how the defining ideas of Cubism — particularly the representation of multiple simultaneous viewpoints — migrated from the visual arts into other creative genres during the early twentieth century. Beginning with Picasso and Braque's rejection of Renaissance perspective, the paper traces Cubist influence through Erik Satie's "non-developmental" music, Diaghilev's cross-disciplinary ballet collaborations (especially Parade), Stravinsky's neoclassical aesthetic, and the collage technique's impact on early cinema. Drawing on scholarship by Neil Cox, Roger Shattuck, and David Bordwell, the essay argues that what once appeared a disjointed vision of reality became a new and more honest mode of artistic representation.
- Introduction to Cubism and Its Aesthetic Revolt: Origins and aesthetic principles of Cubist style
- Simultaneous Perspective and the Dimension of Time: Multiple viewpoints and Cubism's temporal dimension
- Cubist Ideas in the Music of Erik Satie: Satie's music as parallel to Cubist visual technique
- Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Diaghilev unites arts; Stravinsky claims neoclassicism
- The Ballet Parade and the Collage Technique: Parade as landmark Cubist cross-arts collaboration
- Cubism's Influence on Early Cinema: Collage technique shapes abstract early film
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay moves logically from the visual origins of Cubism outward to music, ballet, and film, giving the argument a clear developmental arc.
- It uses well-chosen primary and secondary quotations — from Cocteau, Metzinger, Stravinsky, Shattuck, and Bordwell — to anchor claims rather than relying on assertion alone.
- The writer demonstrates critical independence by qualifying Stravinsky's self-aggrandizing claim about neoclassicism, showing awareness that sources can be unreliable.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper exemplifies comparative cross-disciplinary analysis: it takes a single aesthetic principle (simultaneous multiple viewpoints) and traces how it was adapted — with varying fidelity and results — across music, dance, and film. Each section applies the same analytical lens to a new medium, creating coherence across diverse examples.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a brief thesis statement before establishing Cubism's historical and aesthetic context. It then proceeds medium by medium — music, collaborative ballet, and finally cinema — using transitions that connect each genre back to core Cubist principles. The conclusion is compact but effective, reframing Cubism's apparent fragmentation as a more honest representational mode. The Works Cited page follows MLA conventions throughout.
Introduction to Cubism and Its Aesthetic Revolt
Cubist artworks possess certain attributes that define their construction and conception. The ideas clustering around these works were applied to other art forms with varying results. This examination explores how the new and original ideas of Cubism manifested themselves in the production of art across other genres.
The Cubist style must be viewed as an extension of the anti-Romantic, anti-Impressionistic mood expressed by progressive artists across many creative genres in the fin de siècle period and beyond. As Cocteau wrote in "Le Coq et l'Arlequin," artists were sickened "by the vague, the melting, the superfluous" (82). Cubism had its most intensely creative period between roughly 1908 and the beginning of the First World War, with Paris as the most important center for this reaction across all the arts.
Picasso and Braque are generally seen as the seminal figures in Cubism. They were interested in moving beyond what they saw as the limiting concept of perspective inherited from the Renaissance. This revolt is clearly felt when one compares a piece of Romantic, voluptuous art such as Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People with Picasso's abrasively angular Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The melodic line has been interrupted by a repeated shape or rhythm. Seeing the conventional concept of perspective as a form of trickery, these artists sought what they felt to be a more "real" or "honest" way of portraying the world around them.
Simultaneous Perspective and the Dimension of Time
By attempting to represent several viewpoints at once — the way we actually experience objects, from multiple angles within milliseconds — the Cubists claimed to be achieving closer and truer 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 appeared 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 points out in his 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). Metzinger, the Cubist artist and publicist, underlines the importance of the idea of "time" in an early essay quoted in Cox's Cubism: "Formerly a picture took possession of space, now it reigns also in time" (180).
Cubist Ideas in the Music of Erik Satie
In his book The Banquet Years, Roger Shattuck describes how the Cubist 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 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 visual art tries to take on the concept of existing "in time" as music normally does. The two disciplines were, in effect, borrowing each other's defining qualities.
Works Cited
Cocteau, Jean. Professional Secrets. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970.
Cox, Neil. Cubism. London: Phaidon Press, 2000.
Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958.
Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. Dialogues and a Diary. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.
Bordwell, David. Film Art: An Introduction. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979.
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