The interim verdict: you prefer cubist paintings. Cubism is one of the few “big” styles in avant-garde art that did not escape but rather rationalized the reality turning its harsh face on people in the mid-war period. Cubists believed that there is a rational framework, the construction beneath the world we see.

Everything unstable, indefinite and seemingly haphazard can be brought under this framework. In search of this inherent fundamental rationale cubists broke things and people into simple elements to discover the invisible construction reduced to elementary forms – spheres, cones, cylinders etc. It is implied, however, that nothing has an absolute form – everything and everybody is moving and changing, examined from different perspectives. And so, cubist artists started to juxtapose fragments of the thing depicted in different combinations, from different angles, which explains the disturbing appearance of the articles represented in cubist paintings.

Here lies the secret of misshapen women in Picasso’s canvases. Roughly speaking it was not the woman he enjoyed by the invisible construction, the framework of a woman. The basic thinking behind it is that the more a woman looks herself in the painting, the more attention will be brought to the woman rather than the construction… especially if the gal is pretty.

So, the subjects in cubist paintings are misshapen, the objects are reduced to simple forms, the lines – broken or flowing – are used to convey emotions: suffering, peace and harmony etc. The paintings provide different pieces of an object represented from different angles, which allows to switch off from the outer form and grasp their inner essence, the stable structure. The deformation and broken lines come to be symbolic in cubist paintings. You should refrain from judging the cubist paintings based on whether they are realistic or not, whether the objects resemble their prototypes in real life. Cubists developed their own theory and rationalized the rejection of realistic representation. Therefore you need to treat their paintings as an explorer, a mathematician, equipped with basic knowledge on the subject. Their beauty is intellectual – similar to the elegance of proving a scientific hypothesis or solving an intricate problem. A popular saying is that if you hate Picasso, it tells nothing of Picasso, but lots about you.