Close on Cubism

Picasso, The Accordianist 1911

In a documentary whose argument I found somewhat tediously described, Picasso and Braque go to the Movies, Chuck Close offers a startlingly succinct definition of cubism:

"...The extreme artificiality of cubism. It was not about space. It was not about atmosphere. It was not about the way we see things in nature. It's highly compressed, insistently flat. You are always aware that you are looking at a distribution of colored dirt on a flat surface and then emerging out of that, in a fractured and totally unrealistic way, pieces of imagery that begin to coalesce in your mind."

This quote made the rest of the documentary worth watching, as did the brief clips from the early films of Lumière, Edison and Pathe Frères. Otherwise, the tie between moving pictures and cubism was loosely bound and unconvincing, even if true.