Profiles of Contemporary Art and - ARTisSpectrum

The Wild Child of Impressionism at 100
Revisiting Cubism
by David J. LaBella
Having lived through the turmoil and ferment
of the twentieth century, it is not
surprising that, in our hubris and shortsightedness,
we largely dismiss the similar
character of the century that had come
before, the 1800’s. Marked by nearly as
is, perhaps, even more true in art than in
many other of the attributes and forces that
color and shape our history; for it is in the
latter half of the nineteenth century that
the accelerating evolution from traditional
painting into Romantic painting bore the
“No high-minded painter of the last fifty
years has been able to come to terms
with his art without coming to terms with
the problem of Cubism.” ~Josef Albers,
German-born American painter and art
professor.
Ping He - HP025 Acrylic on Canvas 29” x 20”
full of a measure of war, human suffering,
and socio-political heartache as the century
just passed, the events of the nineteenth
century easily rival any other such period
in western history for drama and seminal,
gatepost moments that have left their mark
on the collective human experience. This
revolutionary and liberating fruit that came
to be known as Impressionism – a method
and style of depicting the world that violated
the accepted rules of convention and
schooling in art and created a new method
and vocabulary that set loose forces in the
art word that reverberate to this day.
The maturation and diversification of the
Impressionist period’s transformation of
illustrative art was rapid and radical. It
moved from having been chained firmly to
the allegorical realism of European painting
and early American painting to a more
free-form expression of light, form, and subject.
Suddenly, the intent of the artist owed
little or nothing to historical context or the
dictations of traditionalism set forth (as if in
stone) by Ruskin. This process was viewed
with disdain by the critics of the day, who
would have preferred that painting remain
unchanged indefinitely – held captive to a
methodology and ideology and preserved,
in a sense, forever in amber – cold, immutable,
and permanent. It was not to be
– Europe and America were being swept by
social, economic, and political forces that
were rapidly transforming western culture
with industrialization and a dizzying array
of philosophical ideas that would ultimately,
and with increasing intensity, alter life in
the Western world forever and set in motion
conflicts and crises beyond the darkest
dreams of anyone living in the nineteenth
century. So, too, with Impressionism, which
quickly distilled itself into Post-Impressionism,
Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Expressionism
– all artistic representations of
the diversity and blooming self-awareness
and individuality of the artists involved in
the process; each creating and defining a
new, unique artistic vocabulary and owing
less and less to the traditional forms they so
eagerly sought to abandon.
“Cubism is like standing at a certain point
on a mountain and looking around. If you
go higher, things will look different; if you go
lower, again they will look different. It is a
point of view.”
~Jacques Lipchitz, Cubist sculptor.
Art is no different from other aspects of human
evolution. It moves at a pace that is
50 ARTisSpectrum