Apollinaire was a French poet, writer, and one of a few art critics credited with coining the word "surrealism." In this essay, he describes cubism as a pure art free from the distractions of subject, a step on the way to complete abstraction. Cubists like Pablo Picasso and George Braque, primary artists of the movement, liked to break up, analyze, and reassemble objects in their work. Personally, I've always thought it was kind of lame, but at the time it was innovative. Kind of how we feel about impressionism now, whoopee- you painted what you SAW, good job- no small potatoes back in the day. Anyways, I like how Apollinaire describes cubism, this one sentence really does a good job of describing it for me: "A Picasso studies an object the way a surgeon disects a corpse."
Violin and Checkerboard, Juan Gris, 1913, oil on canvas
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