What distinguished Cubism from all art that had preceded it, as Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset ingeniously discerned, was its focus on the world as idea. In his 1913 essay "On Point of View in the Arts," Ortega y Gasset set forth a theory of the evolution of styles in Western painting, declaring, "First things were painted; then, sensations; finally, ideas…. The artist, starting from the world about him, ends by withdrawing into himself."
In Cubist art, the world no longer existed apart from human awareness. Implicit was the idea that only by means of our awareness do things come into being. "I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them," Picasso said. In rendering the subjective process of seeing, Cubism became the first art to extend beyond the visual appearance of a subject.
Setting Cubism in its historical context, we can note, as Robert Rosenblum does in his Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art, that Cubist techniques were occurring in the other arts. For example, Igor Stravinsky's fragmented melodic lines and experiments in polytonality parallel the shifting angular planes and multiple images of Cubist painting. In literature, the dissected and recomposed temporal structures of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf share affinities with the Cubist aesthetic.
Picasso and Braque, the originators of the style, held that Cubism developed in relative isolation from extra-artistic influences. In examining the sequence of stylistic innovations that occurred during the period of the formation of Cubism, it does indeed appear to be the case that although it happened to conform with contemporary developments in various disciplines, cubism was conceived wholly within the tradition of painting. Its subsequent development, moreover, adheres not to the strictures of any definitive theory or doctrine but to the creative predilections of Picasso and Braque.
The genesis of Cubism during the years 1907 to 1914 has become the stuff of legend, according to which in the autumn of 1907, poet Guillaume Apollinaire brought Braque to Picasso's studio in Montmartre, where he was confronted by the newly completed canvas, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). According to tradition, this proto-Cubist hybrid of primitive and abstract geometric tendencies was the first Cubist work, and was responsible for swaying Braque toward the new style.
The primacy of Picasso in this tale is the result of his having later attained preeminence among twentieth-century artists, his greater reputation at the time of their meeting, and his having produced three or four times the number of Cubist pictures that Braque did. It has therefore been expedient to credit Picasso with the invention of Cubism, and to designate the quieter and less prolific Braque a close follower.
Meticulous research, however, particularly that by the Museum of Modern Art's William Rubin, has convincingly demonstrated that it was Braque who developed the pictorial language of Cubism. And he did so prior to his encounter with Picasso's Les Demoiselles. Picasso, according to Rubin, should be seen "less as a contributor to the formal language of early Cubism than a model of daring whose radical departures probably inspired the basically conservative Braque to take uncharacteristic chances."
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