... the key Cubist paintings can be obscure.
They have little to do with nature; almost every Cubist painting is a still life, and one in which man made objects predominate over natural ones like flowers or fruit. Cubism as practised by its inventors and chief interpreters - Picasso, Braque, Leger, and Gris - does not woo the eye or the senses, and its theatre is a cramped brown room or the corner of a cafe.
Nevertheless, Cubism was the first radically new proposition about the way we see that painting had made in almost five hundred years.
Since the Renaissance, almost all painting had obeyed a convention: that of one-point perspective.
Uccello: "How delightful perspective is!" And in fact it was, since no more powerful tool for the ordering of visual experience in terms of illusion had ever been invented; indeed, perspective in the fifteenth century was sometimes seen not only as a branch of mathematics but as an almost magical process, having something of the surprise that our grandparents got from their Kodaks. Apply the method and the illusion unfolds; you press the button, we do the rest.
Nevertheless, there are conventions in perspective. It presupposes a certain way of seeing things, and this way does not always accord with the way we actually see. Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain, and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a god of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker. Perspective gathers the visual facts and stabilizes them; it makes of them a unified field. The eye is clearly distinct from that field, as the brain is separate from the world it contemplates.
Despite its apparent precision, perspective is a generalization about experience. It schematizes but does not really represent the way that we see.
eyes flicker
head moves
If asked to, the brain can isolate a given view, frozen in time, but its experience of the world outside the eye is more like a mosaic than a perspective setup, a mosaic of multiple relationships, none of them (as far as vision is concerned) wholly fixed. Any sight is a sum of different glimpses. And so reality includes the painter's efforts to perceive it. Both the viewer and the view are part of the same field. Reality, in short, is interaction.
The idea that the looker affect the sight is taken for granted in most fields of scientific enquiry today, but one needs to be clear about what it does (and does not) mean.
...does not mean that "everything is subjective anyway" so that no clear or truthful statements can be made.
...does not mean that if an object is seen, it can not be willed out of existence as a figment of the imagination.
...does mean my presence may influence the object
...does mean my perception may be influenced by all I've learned or experienced of the object
Refined, this rudimentary model is a commonplace of particle physics and psychology. The eye and its objects inhabit the same plane, the same field, and they influence one another mutually and reciprocally. In the late nineteenth century, this was not generally thought to be true.
The difference between, so to speak, the I and the It was strictly preserved, like the sovereign distance between the patriarch and his children.
Nevertheless, towards 1900 as one sees the idea developing in its scientific form in the work of F. H. Bradley, Alfred North Whitehead, and Albert Einstein, so one artist, scientifically illiterate, ignorant of their work (as every Frenchman outside the scientific community was, and most inside it were), and living in seclusion in the South of France outside Aix-en-Provence, was labouring to explore it, give it aesthetic form, and finally to base his work on it. His name was Paul Cezanne.
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