LITERATURE AND HUMANITIES

CUBIST MAN IN THE WESTERN WORLD

Speaker: Rex Valentine, Member, on 15 September 1998

The speaker claimed that changes that took place in the Western world at the turn of the century in science, philosophy, religion and art were as great as in the Italian Renaissance and the Reformation put together, and that from then onwards science rather than religion decided the fate of the world.
He contrasted a portrait by a conventional artist of Ambrose Vollard and a cubist portrait by Picasso and then used them as a paradigm to discuss these fundamental changes, to which Virginia Woolf refers in her pronouncement: ‘At or about December 1910, human ‘nature’ changed.’
Firstly, he showed how Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ emancipates Man and his art from a conventional God to become an anthropocentric part of nature.
Secondly, how Nietzsche, also an advocate of the survival of the fittest, by stating ‘Life has no purpose outside itself’, pre-empted existentialism.
Thirdly, how Freud’s exposure of Unconscious Man, and the doctrine of the ‘unflinching acceptance of the Self without protective illusions’, set the stage for Cubist Man to exist, where truth predominates over beauty and the glory of God.
Referring back to events ‘at or about 1910’, he then illustrated how this was manifest in the art of the times. Starting with the collaboration between Kandinsky and Schoenberg as revealed in ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ and Schoenberg’s ‘Theory of Harmony’ (both 1911), he showed that Kandinsky’s ‘Emancipation from Dependence on Nature’ and Schoenberg’s ‘Being and Becoming’ laid the foundations for abstract expressionism and atonal music.
Next the speaker took James Joyce and his apostasy as exhibited in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’; then the unflinching acceptance of self as exemplified in ‘Ulysses’. Here he explained the internal monologue as an invasive process comparable to cubism.
Similarly, he compared Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles D’Avignon’, with its primitive mask-like figures, and Stravinsky’s ‘Le Sacre de Printemps’, with its obsessive uncompromising rhythmicity ,and saw them as of the same spirit - savage man in extremis stripped of illusions.
Finally, as the ultimate study of self, as cubist existentialist man ‘condemned to be free’ with no transcendental realm, the speaker showed how Kafka presents Man’s alienation without ‘God the Father’ in absurd symbolic terms, then treats it as the universal norm, but with no certainties, only the distorted reflection of Descartes’ mirror held up to the truth.
In summing up the speaker reminded us that the Western world in which we now live is a logical sequel to these changes and that, like cubist man, we are totally responsible for our own situation and an integral part of the environment we have ourselves created.
Rex Valentine