Art Chronicle
Recent Tendencies in Europe
CULTURAL ACHIEVEMENT
has usually
been
regarded as a happy
by-product of national peace and security. On this a;sumption it
might be supposed that nothing could prove more dislocating to the
progress of art-movements than a general world war. The years
1914-18 were to show, however, that when an esthetic evolution
has been fertilized by an expanding creative instinct, not even the
proximity of the conflict itself will entirely restrict its advance.
The outbreak of the last war came at the height of what Apolli–
naire had called the heroic period of Cubism. It was probably
luck which proceeded to spare the leading painters (more gener·
ously than the writers, for instance), many of whom underwent
service in the trenches, but what never ceases to astonish is the high
quality of work to come down to us fron:t the years 1915, 16, and
17. Naturally the output was very much curtailed. Yet the im–
pressive war-records of Braque, Leger, and de la Fresnaye among
others, did not preclude them from the production of important
paintings during brief periods of leave from the.front.
The continued evolution of the modern movement would
hardly have been possible had the Great War come a decade
earlier. The painters were indeed fortunate in having transcended
the first feverish years of experiment. By 1914 the new paths that
they were to follow were thoroughly open and secure; thus the
works of the Cubist painters (both Frenchmen and
non-combat~
ants like Picasso and Gris who were immersed in the war-atmos–
phere of northern France) could appear quite different in char–
acter from what the external conditions might normally lead one
to expect. One would have prophesied results notable for their
violent projection of horror and confusion. Yet the nightmare
which attended the creation of the war-pictures seems to have
directed them toward a realization which was, if anything, more
internal and considered than ever before. It may be that an envel·
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