Art, Cubism And Cinema

In part because its creators said so little about it during their lifetime, guarding it like a kind of state secret, Cubism has generated a library’s worth of scholarship, probably more than any other artistic innovation in the last century. The general picture that has emerged is one of Cubism bubbling up out of a thick Parisian stew of symbolist poetry, Cézanne, cafe society, African masks, absinthe and a fascination with all things mechanical and modern, mostly airplanes and automatons. For more than 20 years the New York art dealer Arne Glimcher had carried around a theory, more gut feeling than scholarly conjecture, that Picasso and Braque had been seduced by that siren song of the early cinema, and that Cubism, with its fractured surfaces and multiple perspectives, owed much more to the movies than anyone had noticed. Five years ago Mr. Glimcher finally decided to do something about his hunch. He enlisted Bernice Rose, a longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art and now director of Mr. Glimcher’s gallery, PaceWildenstein, to undertake the daunting academic work of trying to find traces of the silver screen hiding among the endless histories, archives, criticism and art of the early Cubist years. The result of that work, which opens Friday at the gallery’s New York East 57th Street location, is “Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism.” (For full source and article click the Headline). Irish Art