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THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

ROBERT HUGHES 1991

How could you produce a parallel dynamicism to the machine age without falling into the elementary trap of just becoming a machine illustrator?

The first artists to sketch an answer to all this was Cubists

The key Cubist painting can be observed that they do not present an immediately coherent view of life in the way that Impressionism set forth its images of mid-bourgeois pleasure and boulevard manners.  They have very little to do with nature.  Cubism as practiced by its inventors and chief interpreters - Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris.  Cubism was the first radicalled new proposition about the way we see that painting had made in about five hundred years.

Cezanne's late work was the governing element of reality.  Braque followed Cezanne was The Village of la Roche Guyon  - Ready made in nature the formality towards which his art was moving.  Could Braque have invented Cubism on his own?  Quite possibly but it would have lacked the power and tension that Picasso brought to it.  He had unequalled (compared to Picasso) ability to realize form: to make your feel the shape, the weight, the edginess, the silence of things.  In the meantime the paintings of Braque and Picasso were moving rapidly towards abstraction.

Léger was the son of a Normandy farmer, an instinctive socialist who became a practicing one in the trenches of World War I, he said "Once I had got my teeth into that sort of reality, I never let go of object again".

Léger confessed that his great visual epiphany in the trenches had been "the breach of a 75-millimetre gun in the sun light, the magic of light on white metal are applied to human body, and even the insignia and medals on these robots might as well be factory brands,

Lege works the card players, the three women.

With its geometrically simplified bodies and furniture, as deliberate as an Alexandrine of French classicism, embodying an idea of society- as machine, bringing harmony and an end to loneliness.  This philosophical harem, though dealing with a subject not unlike that of Picasso Demoiselles is far from it in spirit.

We are offered a metaphor of human relationships working as smoothly as a clock, all passion sublimated with the binding energy of desired transformed into rhymes of shape.