STILL Kalabasa

Strange how one epithet of a word, uttered in confusion, can grow to have a life of its own. Ironic, too, that the perpetrator of such mischief could be the most influential critic of the time.

One such word was the cubeand one such critic was someone named Louis Vauxcelles. He first heard the word from Matisse, the reputed rival of Picasso, who told the critic, Braque has just sent in[to the 1908 Salon dAutomne] a painting made of little cubes. Matisse was referring to a painting that depicted simplified, boxy shapes of houses with deconstructed perspective. Braque and Picasso had worked so closely that the latter had described their relationship, thus: We were like mountaineers roped together.

Thence in an exhibition of Cubist works, the critic disparagingly described them as bizarreries cubiques. And thus the term Cubism came to be.

Cubism became the first abstract style, characterized by its rejection of perspective and its emphasis on a multiple perspective.

The Cubists wanted an art that recognized the changing world, now reflected in the advancement of photography and cinematography. The invention of the telephone, the motor car and the airplane destroyed the boundaries of communication and travel.

STATUE of David 1

The impact of Cubism was felt by artists in Germany, Holland, Italy, England, America and Russia. In Italy, an outgrowth of Cubism was called Futurism, which celebrated speed, violence and the mechanization of the modern world. In America, the Cubist practitioners depicted the New York landscape of soaring skyscrapers, speeding automobiles and wide-spanning iron bridges.

Alas, after a little more than a decade, Cubism quickly fell into disrepute. An art historian, Paul Johnson, wrote, Being the first form of fashion art, Cubism itself was soon abandoned by all its abler practitioners, who moved on to new styles. By 1930 there was no artist so out-of-date as a Cubist. It had however a curious persistence in the works of countless artists of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, who wished to paint in a figurative manner but who also wished to identify themselves as modern. Indeed, while Marcel Duchamp was referring to a painting, he might as well be alluding to an art movement, when he said that after 40 or 50 years, a picture dies, because its freshness disappears. I think a painting dies after a few years like the man who painted it. Afterwards its called the history of art.

In the Philippines, one such artist was Vicente Manansala, whose name became most closely associated with the term Transparent Cubism. Like the original Cubists, Manansala favored the still life. Thus he fragmented the forms of fruits and vegetables, kitchen and domestic scenes, and later, human figures such as beggars, candle vendors, sabungeros, and Mother and Child.

Read more:

A SYM card to cubism