ART
WHAT Hiroshima was to the political structure of society the advent of Cubism was to painting. Never was demolition on such a scale achieved by so few in so short a time. An aesthetic developed through eight centuries and more was finally terminated in the span of a single decade ; now, thirty years afterwards, we have scarcely cleared the debris sufficiently to start rebuilding. Yet, faced with the representative exhibition of Cubist work which Mr. Mesens has organised at the London Gallery, one may well feel at first that these pictures are faintly dowdy and rather dull. Dull they certainly are in colour, but as the successive stages pass before one (for the collection is arranged chronologically), as the animation of the surface becomes more fevered, until the cold culmination of abstract classicism is reached, one may neverthelsss recapture some of the intellectual excitement of the period, and sense the astonish- ing courage of the explorers. The empirical basis of their work inevitably meant that much of it would be of historical interest only, but pictures like Picasso's Buste de Femme (No. 6) will always have power to move us. Indeed, the exhibition emphasises once again the complete and utter supremacy of Picasso over his followers. His was the destruction, and his the liberation.
* * * *
Previous page
