
When reading some of the scholarly articles in the Cubist catalogs I am currently perusing I am often finding myself disappointed at the things they are thinking and speculating about. The way I think about the Cubist paintings especially before the introduction of collage is that Picasso and Braque, among other things, were attempting to explore visual musicality even if they never thought about it that way. A lot of things could be explained by that thought alone. But you would think they must have with all of the musical references in the works. They were hung up on the idea of representing something, but this was also a problem for composers as well.
It was hard to imagine what meaning a painting would have if it didn’t seem to refer to something outside of itself. At the same time they were teetering on the very edge of the abyss of incomprehensibility. Then what would you do? Who could understand or appreciate it? Not long after that, artists figured out that abstract imagery actually could stand on its own and people could ‘get it’ but maybe not for decades.  But in 1910 that would have been a big ask of artists or viewers. Those guys were all quaking in their boots while entering new territory nobody could fathom or calculate. It just seems like the outer darkness. The unknown, the unfamiliar, the unmapped, the unaccepted and possibly unacceptable.
However, artists have to go with what they know and what artists knew at that time was that ‘old school’ was dead or dying, photography had mechanically overtaken image recording and in many ways created a crisis of epic proportion in terms of purpose for image makers. So, what could you paint that a camera can’t see better than you can? Imagination.
In the case of Cubism, there is also the influence of Impressionism at least in the use of brush strokes if not in general theory. A curious thing is why all of the insistence of a dominating charcoal drawing structure? Was that to preserve the ability to see the structure and logic of the work all the way back to the drawing? Or is that structure needed in order to then be able to exploit the dynamics of the painting process, its musicality? Was it for moving the eye around in the painting or to help maintain flatness? Obviously, the supposed image embedded in the painting was not the point of the Cubist paintings. Like Picasso said, he added the attributes later in the process. I think it was more about the experience of looking and discovering as your focal point was forced to move around the work since you can’t really take a cubist painting in without your eye wandering around the image to try to put it together in your head like in music. It depends on memory not just an immediate grasp of something familiar.
I thought about that a lot when I was younger, the problem with the familiar or you think it is familiar. We look at a painting long enough to recognize the familiar, we think we get it and most stop there and move on. Lazy viewing. Accepting the familiar is the enemy of seeing. Finding the pattern is the enemy of seeing. Seeing takes work and patience and concentration and focus otherwise we are always walking around in a fog only seeing what we think we know but not actually seeing anything at all.
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