On Cubism and Démoiselles d’ Avignon

First question: What is cubism and who were the cubists? Is it acceptable to call Picasso and Braque the “true” cubists and everyone else a “derivative” cubist? Is the distinction between “salon” cubism and “gallery” cubism more useful? For the French public in the early 20 century, the “salon” cubists were the real (and probably the only) cubists. Picasso and Braque did not participate in the salon system, so most people did not see their work. Second question: If cubism changed the nature of art, what precisely was so revolutionary about it and why can’t social critics and historians agree as to what this revolutionary achievement consisted of? There are two leading answers to the question about what makes cubism revolutionary and they are quite different. The first, and at least until now, more widely known answer, makes the claim that cubism broke with the Renaissance approach to art, an art of vision, or an art of the camera obscura, in which the artist tries to reproduce the external appearance of objects as seen by the human eye. The cubist, in contrast, recognized that we do not perceive objects in their entirety at one glance, and that, as a result, our visual knowledge comprises a more conceptual and experiential understanding of things. For some adherents of this position, this conceptual vision can be a bridge to a higher reality, the fourth dimension, and it is also a step toward complete abstraction. Although Picasso and Braque did not go there, this theory essentially sees them as paving the way. One of the problems with it is that Picasso and Braque were not the first artists to reconceptualize the nature of seeing in art. The second answer is based on theories which were coming into existence at the same time that Picasso and Braque were producing their cubist paintings. But they would not have been familiar with these theories because they were new theories about language and meaning (semiotics). The first insight of this theory is that signs or names of things do not have any predetermined relationship to the thing they signify. The sign has an arbitrary or conventionalized relationship to the referent (the thing it signifies). But in fact, it does not signify a specific thing; the sign signifies an idea or class of things. Hence: signifier (or sign) denotes the signified (an idea) which contains a referent (something in particular which you want to call attention to). Example: the word: Cat (is a sign or signifier) —> it signifies a class of four-legged animals which meow (the idea which the sign refers to) —> you think of: your particular pet which happens to be a cat (a referent and it may not be the same referent for everyone)