Cubism. By Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger. (Fisher Unwin. 5s.
net.)—Aesthetics is certainly not the easiest branch of philosophy, yet it is the one into which amateurs always seem the most anxious to rush. Painters especially have a passionate desire for giving theoretical explanations of their methods, and seem almost to imagine that aesthetics is a branch of painting rather than of philosophy. It is clearly true, however, that no amount of theorizing will help a man to paint a good picture, and that the greatest painter in the world might be unable to make a single correct inference. A neglect of this obvious truth has led, it is to be feared, to much bad painting and much bad philosophy. Relying upon an incontrovertible system of aesthetics, the fourth-rate painter hurries to his studio and dashes off innumerable fourth-rate pictures; while the great creative genius, overwhelmed by the splendour of his productions, spends his spare time in convincing the world, by means of endless pamphlets—that man is not always a ratiocinative animal. The book before us contains twenty-five reproductions of Cubist paintings and fifty pages of apologia by two Cubist painters. The impulsive reader, glancing with horror at the pictures, will brush the whole book aside in a rage, or, carried away by the persuasive logic of the text, will convince himself that the illustrations are masterpieces. The more moderate man will remember that, as we have shown above, two other possibilities remain. The book may be an admirable philosophical work with irrelevant pictures by incom- petent artists, or it may be a portfolio of striking works of art accompanied by meandering observations in an unintelligible jargon. Words and pictures, to put it shortly, must be judged separately. We must be content here to judge the words only, for so we shall be on safer ground. The standards of taste are constantly changing, and we may fail to appreciate the beauty of the pictures merely through being out of date. But the standards of intellect are fortunately more stable, and we can be comparatively safe in commenting upon the complete inadequacy of the authors' aesthetic argument. It is possible, of course, that their theory is at bottom a sound one, but the exposition is so incoherent that wo are puzzled to trace even a dim outline of what their theory is. The translation may be partly at fault for this, as may be seen from a few sentences chosen at random: "Let us study, behind form and colour, the integration of the plastic consciousness." "From a reciprocity of concessions arise those mixed images, which we hasten to confront with artistic creations in order to compute what they contain of the objective." All that emerges from the welter of words is an uncertain feeling that the authors are maintaining the non-representative nature of painting—that is, its resemblance to music rather than to photography. The obvious sincerity and honesty of the work make us especially regret its confused language and nebulous argument. MM. Gleizes and Metzinger might well have chosen as a motto for their title-page the delightfully alliterative sentence which they themselves apply to the art of painting : "Decorum demands a certain degree of dimness."
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