The chief exponent of "the new geometric art" explains the whole
movement in the following passage, as reproduced in _The Observer_:--
"Primitive space has entered into us, as it were.... Against
that space within us, as against the space that appalled the
savage from without, we erect always more hard and logical
images.... All brute material, animate and inanimate, of earth,
becomes an organism to confront the soul. Formerly the soul as a
simple figure, like a ballet, faced the environing vagueness.
"Appearance then, at present, becomes a dyke around the invision
from within. And, as a consequence even of this, the appearance,
as it is seen in art to-day, tends to be more removed from
everyday objective reality than at any former period of art. A
new religion is being built up, girder by girder, around the
vague spirit. _Space_, the physical space of savage shyness, _is
now on our side_."
The comment of the writer in _The Observer_ runs thus: "This, at any
rate, is the language of people who know what they are about."
_Mr. Punch_, being a little fearful lest the average reader of the above
passage may not share this knowledge of "what they are about," ventures
to add his own views on Cubism, confident that even those who disagree
will applaud his clarity.
From RAPHAEL until PCESZY TURGIDOFF (the brilliant young Slav whose
canvas has recently been acquired by the Royal Geological Museum) all
true artists have striven to adumbrate the eternal conflict between the
morbid pathology of Realism and the poignant simplicity of Nihilism. In
other and shorter words, chaos must ever be on the side of the angels.
But, until the advent of the new Truth, the whole mission of art had
trickled into a very delta of arid sentiment. The critic could walk all
the galleries of Europe and find nothing to lighten his melancholy until
he entered one of those caverns of earliest man and stood in ecstatic
reverence before the incomparable masterpieces wherein the first of the
Futurists created (with perfect parsimony of a sharpened flint) Man, not
as he is to his own dull eye, but Man as he is to the inner retina of
the universe. Man, the simple triangle on two stilts, the creature on
one plane and of one dimension, an outline without entity, a nothingness
staring, faceless, at the nothingness which baffles his soul.
Emotion, idealism, beauty--these have been always the evil spirits that
have fettered art. The new art has so exorcised them that they have fled
from it with demoniac cries. Pulziacco's splendid rhomboid, "Cleopatra";
Weber-Damm's tender parallelograms, "The Daughters of James Bowles,
Esq., J.P"; Todwarden Jones's rectilineal wizardry, "A Basket of
Oranges"; and Arabella Machicu's triumph of astigmatism, "The Revolving
Bookcase," are examples of this conquest of the inner retina over the
brutal insistences of form and matter.
Of still deeper significance is that terribly sad picture of Philip
Martini, "The Mumpers: a Group at Lloyds." Nothing is more illustrative
of the courage demanded for the struggle of the new art against
convention than this poignant work, wherein, true to the verities, the
artist has confounded realism in its own domain by the unrecognisable
faces of his sitters.
Let us sum up the new movement so clearly that the dullest will
apprehend. Surely the inhibition of all apperceptions in art is
correlative to the inner _ego_? That simple postulate granted, it will
be unquestioned that the true focus of vision should co-ordinate the
invisible. Faith we must have, or we faint by the roadside of the
intelligible. The only altruism is that which can defy the cold
brutality of things as they _are_, and convince us with things as they
_are not_. Thus alone can the contemplation of art bring us back to
primal infelicity, and restore in our souls the perfect vacuity of
infants and cows. Thus only can we achieve the suffusion of vision of
the happy inebriate.
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[Illustration: _Sunday-school Teacher._ "And now, Tommy, about your
prize--would you like a hymn-book?"
_Tommy._ "A yim-book's all right, teacher, but--er--er--I'd sooner 'ave
a squirt."]
* * * * *