Home Go West, Young Art, Go West American Painting 1865-1934 American Painters - The Older Generation The Meaning of Modernism Isms and Wasms American Art in 1900 American Modernism The Whitney Museum of American Art Modern Art's First Museum The twentieth-century principle of form in art The Beginning of American Modernism American Modern Movements Cubism in England and America Activity in Art with American Subjects Backgrounds in European Art The importance of Gauguin and Van Gogh The importance of Picasso and Braque Munch, The Bridge, Kandinsky, Moreau American Backgrounds The establishment of a professional art Contemporary appreciation tends Early Twentieth Century New Directions since 1913 Max Weber, Maurice Sterne, Abraham Walkowitz, Ben Benn Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth Dada and Despair Early 1900s American Artists The Spirit of Research and Significant Form Joseph De Martini, Louis Schanker, De Hirsh Margules Pinoeers of Abstract Art American Abstract Pinoeers American Abstract Artists Art in a Skyscraper Significant Vision The term "significant vision" The Influence of the Oriental Scroll Painters Traditionalists and Modernists American Modern Art - Fantasy American Artists More Artists The Painters Discover America The Painters of America American Modern Artists Regionalism in a Broadening View Regional American Artists Pop Art - Modern American Art Stage Design Sculpture Sculptors More Sculptors Definitions Art and Beauty Modern Painting History of Art   Abstract Art Architecture History Painting Process Picasso	The importance of Picasso and Braque Pablo Picasso (born 1881) and Georges Braque (born 1881) together made the beginnings of such an art when they initiated in 1908 what was to be known as Cubism. Picasso's now historic Factories in Horta and Houses in Horta are said to have been prominent among the paintings to which Matisse applied the derisive term Cubism (with the same scorn that had caused the group which he dominated to be dubbed the Fauves, or wild men, a few years earlier). These first formally ordered arrangements of architectural abstractions did not depart radically from representations of the seen world. It was only gradually that naturalism was abandoned and that Cubism actually became what it was called by Apollinaire, who wrote the Cubist manifesto, "not an art of imitation, but a conception that rises itself to creation." Dismembered segments of familiar objects were made the elements of design in one experimental period, the eye being accorded omniscience to take testimony from all aspects of the object and to aid in a revised synthesis truer to the essential reality than is the conventionally limited visual aspect. In another, papiers collés, or constructions of pasteboard, wood, metal, cork, bits of newspaper, and what not incorporated into the picture, were conspicuous and were made instruments of an actual step forward in the Cubist direction towards the plastic expressiveness of nonnaturalistic forms. This is the point at which texture contrast was incorporated into Cubist practice as a prominent stylistic device. Besides Picasso and Braque important pioneers of Cubism were Léger and Gris, while the names of Ozenfant and Jeanneret ( Le Corbusier), Hélion, Arp, Gleizes, Metzinger, and Mondrian and Domela the Dutchmen have carried the movement down through Purism, Constructivism, and Concretism in a direction opposed to illusionistic art. Meantime André Lhote and others have applied the Cubist principles of planar construction derived from Cézanne and Picasso in a new order of subject painting which has strongly influenced later generations of students. Both the Cubism which tends towards greater abstraction and that which is a basic device in subject painting have come down as important determinants in the style of contemporary American art. The French Purism of Ozenfant and Jeanneret and the closely related neo-Plasticism of Mondrian, van Doesburg, and others became basic in the aesthetic of a new international architectural style which emerged in the twenties, with distinctive appearance values that arise from the prevailingly horizontal divisions of rectangular space. Constructivism, or the theory of a creative art employing abstract elements from the fields of technical invention and engineering, gave the aesthetic for industrial design. It was carried to completest expression in Russia in nonrepresentative creations akin to sculpture and was meantime embodied in educational principles originated at the Bauhaus in Germany. Continuers of Cubism, in opposition to representational or illusionistic art, have variously claimed a classic tradition for their theory of abstraction in a passage from Plato's last work, the Philebus. This already much-quoted passage represents Socrates as saying: "True pleasures are those which arise from the colors we call beautiful and from shapes; and most of the pleasures of smell and sound. True pleasures arise from those things the want of which is not felt as painful but the satisfaction from which is consciously pleasant and unconditioned by pain. . . . I do not mean by beauty of form such beauty as that of animal or pictures which the many would suppose to be my meaning; but . . . understand me to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane or solid figures which are formed out of them by turning lathes and rulers and measurers of angles; for these I affirm to be not only relatively beautiful, like other things, but they are eternally and absolutely beautiful. If arithmetic, mensuration, and weighing be taken away from any art that which remains will not be much--the rest will be only conjecture. . . . " Henri Matisse (born 1869) stands at the head of another stream of influence deriving from Cézanne, contributing to the broad revolt against naturalism, and coming to prominence almost simultaneously with the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. In contemporary judgment, he is one of the century's most important figures thus far. His is an art of color and line, and of sensuous, rhythmic patterns which are as true in their "representations" of scenes and subjects as are Cézanne's voluminous architectonic forms. Gauguin and the Symbolists had brought recognition of the fact that there was valuable precedent for the Western world's movement toward a new art in the art expressions of the antique world and the Orient. Matisse pursued independently his own further researches, studying the Persian miniature, Moorish arabesques, and Hindu wall frescoes, and originated finally a wholly new means of organizing his pictorial elements around a central point of interest. All conventions of perspective are abandoned. All nonessentials are drastically eliminated; the figures exist wholly in the interest of the design, which is pure plastic design and is the product of a highly sensitive intuition. Matisse has described his method as a spontaneous recording of the subject as it has registered in his consciousness. The beholder's eye responds as instantaneously when, after it has been led over the canvas, with its Oriental motives and its rich areas of contrasted textures, it is drawn irresistibly to the central point of interest by reference to which the whole falls suddenly into a highly organized unity. Derain, Vlaminck, and Rouault were the names most conspicuously associated with that of Matisse in the group which won for itself around 1905 the name of the Fauves. With Surréalisme, or Surrealism, a frustrated postwar generation turned to seek a refuge from reality in a world of Freudian wish-fulfillment dreaming and of fantasy. "The dream alone leaves man the right to liberty," said the first manifesto of 1924, pledging faith with the unconscious "to release man from a dull prison routine of reality in which he is sealed as in a vacuum." Surrealism was at the outset a literary movement sponsored by a poet, André Breton, and was one of a series of revolts against the chilly intellectualism into which the Cubists tended constantly to plunge. Chirico, Pierre Roy, Masson, Ernst, Tanguy, and Dali are among the names which have come variously to prominence. The work of Joan Miró, the Spaniard, is most conspicuous because of its charm and taste. The movement on the whole gives little promise of furthering twentieth-century art aesthetically or technically, though certain superficial aspects of American painting of the late nineteen thirties undoubtedly derive from it, and though there are undoubtedly the beginnings of an international literary expression, in fiction, poetry, and drama, deriving from the same source of subjective imagery and rooted in the same despair of any further progress along civilization's intellectually and materialistically determinative directions.