How Cubism Changed The Way We See The World
A History of Cubism and Why it’s Important
When we create art, how do we account for how we actually experience the world? In representing things, how do we represent them as we experience them in space and time?
Take an apple as an example. Traditionally, the painting of an apple would be “mimetic”. A painter would mimic all those characteristics of “appleness” in paint to evoke an apple: the round shape, the green or red shiny skin, the stalk at the top poking out of a little smooth depression. You’d recognise it as an apple.
If you think about it in these terms you come to realise that “naturalistic” (by that I mean realistic) works of art offer a kind of virtual reality. That is, a constructed approximation of real things in space.
But is that how we experience an apple? I mean in the sense of time and space. In a short moment, we’d approach the apple, look at it, walk around it. How would that experience look drawn on a page, painted on a canvas or even carved in marble? That real encounter with real things? How — fundamentally — do we account for change and flux in an artwork?
This is something that the cubists had top of mind. In a rapidly changing world at the beginning of the 20th century the cubists were looking for a new form of…
