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World of Art
Cubism and Culture
"This is a book whose great achievement is to bring out the importance of the Cubists in a history far bigger than the history of art."―Christopher Green, Courtauld Institute of Art Often considered to be the seminal art movement of the twentieth century, Cubism initiated a pictorial revolution through its radical approach to image making, invention of the new media of collage and sculptural assemblage, and evolution toward pure abstraction. Scholarly yet accessible, Cubism and Culture reveals these profound formal innovations as integrally related to changes in French society. The authors first examine the movement's origins in primitivism and its engagement with issues of race and colonialism, and then consider the Cubists' responses to anti-Enlightenment philosophies, the relation of Cubist art to the "classical," the role played by gender conceptually and within particular careers and practices, collage and its interplay with cultural themes, and the impact of anarchism, nationalism, and pacifism on Cubism's cultural politics. This comprehensive and fresh examination of Cubism in its wider context―social, cultural, political, scientific, and philosophical―covers the full range of art and artists from the movement's advent in 1908.
Among the artists Alexander Archipenko, Maria Blanchard, Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, André Derain, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Alice Halicka, Roger de La Fresnaye, Marie Laurencin, Henri Laurens, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Louis Marcoussis, Frans Masereel, Jean Metzinger, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso. 182 illustrations, 54 in color
Among the artists Alexander Archipenko, Maria Blanchard, Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, André Derain, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Alice Halicka, Roger de La Fresnaye, Marie Laurencin, Henri Laurens, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Louis Marcoussis, Frans Masereel, Jean Metzinger, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso. 182 illustrations, 54 in color
- GenresArtNonfictionArt History
224 pages, Paperback
First published September 14, 2001
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December 9, 2025I only picked this up to check if, as I thought, the design layout is better in World of Art books than in Taschen ones, however in order to reach this book in the library I had to clamber over -ok round- a room full of kindergarten children and their minders, who looked on with gracious amusement as I found a shifting path among the little monsters. After all that endeavour I felt quite committed to this book.
It takes a thematic look at Cubism and society cover te period from 1907 to 1920 - actually it seems to end sometime in the middle of the first world war. That itself interested me in that Cubism in my imagination was a major movement in Art, yet it's peak period seemed to be extremely short, less than ten years.
The six themes are: European Primitives, Philosophies of Time and Space, Political Uses of the Past, Geder Codes, Pasted papers and revolution, and Cubism at war.
My first surprise was that there were two groups of Cubists, the principal division seemed to be which art dealer was representing them.
Then I learnt that the poet Apollinaire was not just your standard French graduate of l'ecole nationale de Poesie, but part Polish, mostly Italian, and just a bit French.
Intellectually these artists were inspired by Bergson and the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, politically by anarcho-syndicalism and the peace movement, artistically by Cezanne, African masks, and pre-Roman Iberian carved heads amongst other things.
Intially, around 1907 the Cubists were interested in how Cezanne had represented the body, particularly in paintings like "The bathers" in which if you look at it you might find the nude figures quite clunky and the faces stylised, rather similar in fact to the African masks and those Iberian heads. The group name 'Cubists' comes from this time when they were inspired by Cezanne's blocky style.
From their intellectual influences they picked up the idea of there being no fixed objective perspective. The single fixed perspective that artists had previously aspired to, was understood to be misleading - it pretended that the observer was always in fixed relation to the observed scene both in time and place. The distortions you see in a cubist psinting might sugest that the sitter was moving over a period of time, or that we as observers are dynamic and are moving through this space seeing people and objects at different angles or only partially. I noticed looking at the illustrations in this book that the paintings with a little distortion came to look quite boring and safe; at the same time I couldn't understand what I was looking at in the more complex paintings but they started to fascinate me.
All of which brought Uccello and his paintings of "the battle of San Romano", in a couple of the panals he creates a lattice work of broken lances on the ground which maybe functioned as guidelines fir the painter to create his illusion of perspective- perhaps they help the viewer too, to draw them 'deeper' into the flat surface and suggest depth to our innocent brains, well the Cubists were not interested in that. They require some different ways of seeing and of responding. It struck me as interesting that while the Cubists alinged themaelves with an idea of everyday French oeople and lives - cafes catering for the working class people, using everyday materials to make collages, and so on, their artistic production was not so open and accessible. It is nit just that I read this book, and maybe you might too, even at the time, those involved in cubism were writing about it and explaining the work as in for example Du Cubism (1912) .
Equally for all their alingement with anarchism and progressive politics, as you might expect, the position of women artists in the movement confirmed by and large to the gender ideals of period. Women's creativity, or indeed, Bergsonian Elan Vital , manifested supposedly through reproduction and childbirth, since men could not give birth male creativity could only manifest through Art. Therefore women could not be great painters, but they could work in textiles - which everyone was happy to think of as second rate artistically, particularly if they were commercially successful. Still, three women get special mention in the book: Marie Laurencin - Picasso included her work to be shown along with his and other Cubists in the Armory show in New York (1913), she seems to have specialised in paintings of non-threatening childlike young women, then Alice Halicka, and Sonia Terk.
Perhaps I can round off my ramblings by babbling a bit about the collages. One point was that a significant percentage of the newspaper clippings that Picasso used in his collages related to the Balkan wars (1912 & 1913), this was related in the book to his engagement in the peace movement. An idwa was that clippings from different newspapers could suggest the idea of different voices and (well-lubricated) opinions in a bar or cafe, at that time newspapers were available in bars for the payrons to read for free. Both points bothered me because when I have seen these kind of works on display I have never been able to get close enough to read the news print. I haven't seen tgem displayed alongside enlarged and translated versions of the text(s) either. On a related note it seems that the originals are already significantly discoloured - at least one work originally had a French tricolor worked into a collage via different found materials, like bottle labels, which had all faded to beige within a century. Work which was created out of ephemeral found material and responding to the events of the day is now a fish out of water on display in galleries far away from its context.
There was also some lovely material about Georges Braque, his intial training as a house painter, showing Picasso how to use special combs to create a wood grain effect on paint - layers of artificially and work to trick the eye of the observer.
As a first tect about Cubism I felt that I gained a lot about it. There are two authors, I can't say that I saw the join between their work. 183 illustrations, but only 58 of those in colour.
It takes a thematic look at Cubism and society cover te period from 1907 to 1920 - actually it seems to end sometime in the middle of the first world war. That itself interested me in that Cubism in my imagination was a major movement in Art, yet it's peak period seemed to be extremely short, less than ten years.
The six themes are: European Primitives, Philosophies of Time and Space, Political Uses of the Past, Geder Codes, Pasted papers and revolution, and Cubism at war.
My first surprise was that there were two groups of Cubists, the principal division seemed to be which art dealer was representing them.
Then I learnt that the poet Apollinaire was not just your standard French graduate of l'ecole nationale de Poesie, but part Polish, mostly Italian, and just a bit French.
Intellectually these artists were inspired by Bergson and the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, politically by anarcho-syndicalism and the peace movement, artistically by Cezanne, African masks, and pre-Roman Iberian carved heads amongst other things.
Intially, around 1907 the Cubists were interested in how Cezanne had represented the body, particularly in paintings like "The bathers" in which if you look at it you might find the nude figures quite clunky and the faces stylised, rather similar in fact to the African masks and those Iberian heads. The group name 'Cubists' comes from this time when they were inspired by Cezanne's blocky style.
From their intellectual influences they picked up the idea of there being no fixed objective perspective. The single fixed perspective that artists had previously aspired to, was understood to be misleading - it pretended that the observer was always in fixed relation to the observed scene both in time and place. The distortions you see in a cubist psinting might sugest that the sitter was moving over a period of time, or that we as observers are dynamic and are moving through this space seeing people and objects at different angles or only partially. I noticed looking at the illustrations in this book that the paintings with a little distortion came to look quite boring and safe; at the same time I couldn't understand what I was looking at in the more complex paintings but they started to fascinate me.
All of which brought Uccello and his paintings of "the battle of San Romano", in a couple of the panals he creates a lattice work of broken lances on the ground which maybe functioned as guidelines fir the painter to create his illusion of perspective- perhaps they help the viewer too, to draw them 'deeper' into the flat surface and suggest depth to our innocent brains, well the Cubists were not interested in that. They require some different ways of seeing and of responding. It struck me as interesting that while the Cubists alinged themaelves with an idea of everyday French oeople and lives - cafes catering for the working class people, using everyday materials to make collages, and so on, their artistic production was not so open and accessible. It is nit just that I read this book, and maybe you might too, even at the time, those involved in cubism were writing about it and explaining the work as in for example Du Cubism (1912) .
Equally for all their alingement with anarchism and progressive politics, as you might expect, the position of women artists in the movement confirmed by and large to the gender ideals of period. Women's creativity, or indeed, Bergsonian Elan Vital , manifested supposedly through reproduction and childbirth, since men could not give birth male creativity could only manifest through Art. Therefore women could not be great painters, but they could work in textiles - which everyone was happy to think of as second rate artistically, particularly if they were commercially successful. Still, three women get special mention in the book: Marie Laurencin - Picasso included her work to be shown along with his and other Cubists in the Armory show in New York (1913), she seems to have specialised in paintings of non-threatening childlike young women, then Alice Halicka, and Sonia Terk.
Perhaps I can round off my ramblings by babbling a bit about the collages. One point was that a significant percentage of the newspaper clippings that Picasso used in his collages related to the Balkan wars (1912 & 1913), this was related in the book to his engagement in the peace movement. An idwa was that clippings from different newspapers could suggest the idea of different voices and (well-lubricated) opinions in a bar or cafe, at that time newspapers were available in bars for the payrons to read for free. Both points bothered me because when I have seen these kind of works on display I have never been able to get close enough to read the news print. I haven't seen tgem displayed alongside enlarged and translated versions of the text(s) either. On a related note it seems that the originals are already significantly discoloured - at least one work originally had a French tricolor worked into a collage via different found materials, like bottle labels, which had all faded to beige within a century. Work which was created out of ephemeral found material and responding to the events of the day is now a fish out of water on display in galleries far away from its context.
There was also some lovely material about Georges Braque, his intial training as a house painter, showing Picasso how to use special combs to create a wood grain effect on paint - layers of artificially and work to trick the eye of the observer.
As a first tect about Cubism I felt that I gained a lot about it. There are two authors, I can't say that I saw the join between their work. 183 illustrations, but only 58 of those in colour.
June 21, 2015
A very good introduction for me, a novice in art history.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews