So, you prefer cubist still lifes. A person who has no idea of the basic principles of the style will say something like that: “Is it really so hard to paint a decent nice vase?” You, on the other hand, know that it is not difficult to portray a “nice” vase – it’s more exciting to make it mean something…
A still life is not a mere picture of some objects placed in a certain order. A still life may be the way to reveal an artist’s vision of the world, no less. Take, for instance, an impressionist still life – it will be light, vibrant, bursting with light, producing the impression of fragility and the evanescense. Anything stable, solid and rational is ruled out, and the focus is placed on individual, peculiar and fleeting attributes – the play of light, the sparkling dew, the shades and patches of light on drapery and hair, the slight movement of curtains in the wind. This is how the impressionist vision of the world made its way into a still life.
With surrealist vision still lifes take a different meaning. These artists responded to the horrors of the war and the hardships of the economic depression in their own way. Thery proclaimed that the world is irrational, submerged into the subconscious and indulged in the absurd images generated by their subconscious mind. Surrealist still lifes are expressly contradictory, they evoke anxiety, mystery and suspense. Eyes on the plate, melting clocks, apples that take up the entire room – if you see something as crazy as that – call it surrealist, you can’t go wrong.
So, what’s the matter with cubists? Well, they believed in the absolute rationality of being, that provides stable solid construction of everything in this world. One wants to believe in some reason and logics when facing the chaos and the irrationality of military time, doesn’t one? The cubists broke the reality, people and objects into compounds, analyzed them in search of the hidden framework, the construction, the basic defining elements. In the artistic plain this meant depicting objects with basic forms – spheres, cones, cylinders etc. An object was portrayed as an absolute thing, not a unique one with its individual story and characteristics.
For instance, a table can be wooden or glass, round or square, three-legged or one-legged. When cubists set off to depict a table, they didn’t care for these peculiarities, they needed to represent a table as a notion, meaning its stable attributes that made it a table. Therefore a viewer was supposed to see a table in the painting as a concept, and it did not matter what kind of table it was. Individual, peculiar features stay in the realm of chaos that cubists were trying to escape from. Aside from that an object looks different from different angles, so to achieve the unbiased representation of the essence of a thing that exists regardless of space orientation, cubists portrayed elements of the object from different angles, which explains the deformity in their paintings.
Other things to consider when analyzing a cubist still life: you need to look for symbols in the artistic devices and techniques. Colours, forms and lines have an expressly symbolic meaning accounted for in theoretical background provided by the artists. The broken, deformed, or flowing and straight lines reveal emotions – passions, horror or love. Analyze the colours: look at the colour plains, their position and size compared to each other, the meaning of the colours (yellow may stand for envy or joy, blue may symbolize the universe, black may mean silence and emptiness etc.). Forms are another thing to interpret: a circle symbolizes movement, a square stands for substance and limits, a triangle symbolizes thinking. Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder – one can find beauty in a bouquet, another one may look for it in an elegant solution of a mathematical problem.
It is useless to apply the traditional rules and principles of analyzing a painting to cubist art, since they never attempted to represent appearances. This is why so many people repel these paintings – they just don’t understand the basic thinking behind the style. You need to solve these paintings as a puzzle, a theorem, and the excitement you get is first intellectual, and only after that you can understand the aesthetics.
