Profiles of Contemporary Art and - ARTisSpectrum

sometimes undetectable to us; it is sometimes
jarred into motion or beset by mutations
or seminal moments that represent a
radical break with the past and fast-forward
us into someplace new and altogether remarkable.
Within the striking and innovative
series of forms spawned by Impressionism,
one stands out, by means of its influence
and trenchant appeal in all of the long years
in the aftermath of its inception – Cubism.
In Cubism and Twentieth Century Art, Robert
Rosenblum makes the case for Cubism
in no uncertain terms: “There are moments
in the history of art when the genesis of a
new and major style becomes so important
that it appears temporarily to dictate the
careers of most individual artists. So it was
around 1510, when the diverse geniuses of
Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bramante rapidly
coalesced to create the monumental
style of the High Renaissance; and around
1870 when painters as unlike as Monet,
Renoir, and Pissarro approached a common
goal toward Impressionism. And so it
was again around 1910, when two artists
of dissimilar backgrounds and personalities,
Picasso and Braque, invented the new
viewpoint that has come to be known as
Cubism.” Rosenblum’s words, published in
1960, are no less enlightening today than
they were then. Cubism represented a departure
from the departure itself – Impressionism
- blending form, perspective, reality,
meaning, and intent together in such a
way that art could still be based on sensual
experiences of the natural world and yet be
untied from conventional depictions of context
and space, using metaphor and intellectual
context in place of traditional depictions
of visual context that had been based
on a sense of place and time; creating a
coherent reflection of an idea married to a
formal integrity that led the viewer forever
away from idealized historical allegory and
yet still found itself to be firmly grounded
in the human condition.
Ping He - HP008 Acrylic on Canvas 18” x 23”
“The goal I proposed in making Cubism?
To paint and nothing more... with a
method linked only to my thought... Neither
the good nor the true; neither the useful nor
the useless.” ~Pablo Picasso.
If it is true that the past is always present in
art, no matter how indistinguishable or alien
it might come to be depicted as in what
comes after, it is true as well that Cubism
always held within its grasp the future of art
in the twentieth century. Going back was
impossible - once unleashed, the energy
represented by modern forms of art and the
sometimes awful, always confounding, and
yet inspiring and richly diverse elements of
that art interwoven with parallel elements in
twentieth century human history reached
out to artists across the globe and broke
down the barriers that had separated cultures,
geographical regions, and class distinctions
from each other in an older world
now left behind by the passage of time.
Even Cubism itself would find itself left
behind by the onrush of artistic evolution
and the accelerating pace of change that
became as essential to artistic conception
as the works themselves. Change begat
change; and the idea that change could
beget change drove illustrative and representational
art into an endless metamorphosis;
all the more so when the post-war
consumer culture and the advent of electronic
technology provided the imaginations
of artists with a heady brew of subject and
context and tools that none could have
imagined possible only a generation or two
before. By the middle of the twentieth century,
Action Painting, Pop Art, and Installa-
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