PARTISAN REVIEW
in which the scientific outlook had at last won a confirmation that only
some literary men quarreled with seriously, and in which society seemed
to have demonstrated its complete capacity to solve its most serious
internal as well as environmental
proble~s.
Cubism, by its rejection
of illusionist effects in painting or sculpture and its insistence on the
physical nature of the two-dimensional picture plane-which it made
prominent again in a way quite different from that in ·which Oriental,
medieval, or barbaric art did--expressed the positivist or empirical
state of mind with its refusal to refer to anything outside the concrete
experience of the particular discipline, field, or medium in which one
worked; and it also expressed the empiricist's faith in the supreme
reality of concrete experience. Along with this-regardless of whether
the individual Cubist happened to believe in God, David Hume, or
Hermes Trismegistus, for it was a question of a state of mind, not of
a reasoned, consistent philosophical position-went an all-pervasive
conviction that the world would inevitably go on improving, so that
no matter what chances one took with the new, the unknown, or the
unforeseeable, there was no risk of getting anything inferior or more
dangerous than what one already had.
Cubism reached its height during the First World War and, though
the optimism on which it unconsciously floated was draining away fast,
during the twenties it was · still capable, not only of masterpieces from
the hands of Picasso, Braque, Leger, but also of sending forth such bold
innovators as Arp, Mondrian, and Giacometti, not to mention Mir6.
But in the early thirties, by which time both Picasso's and Braque's art
had entered upon a crisis from which neither artist has since shown
any signs of recovering, the social, emotional, and intellectual substruc–
ture of Cubism began crumbling fast. Even Klee fell off after 1930.
Surrealism and Nee-Romanticism, with their rejuvenated academicism,
sprang up to compete for attention, and Bonnard, painting better and
better within a discipline and frame of mind established as long ago
as 1905 and for that reason, apparently, more impervious to the preva–
lent malaise, began to be talked about as the greatest French painter of
his time, notwithstanding the presence of Matisse to whom Bonnard
himself owed so much.
After 1939 the Cubist heritage ·entered what would seem the final
stage of its decline in Europe. True, Dubuffet, a Cubist at heart, has
appeared since then, and the best of the younger generation of French
artists-Tal Coat, Kermadec, Manessier, Le Moal, Pignon, Tailleux, etc.,
etc.-work within Cubism; but so far they have added nothing but
refinements. None of them, except Dubuffet, is truly original. It is no
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