How Cubism Tried To Create A New Language

Stuart Greenstreet wonders why Cubist communication failed to catch on.

- Stuart Greenstreet

In 1906 Pablo Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein, an American avant-garde writer and art collector who had settled in Paris. To the complaint that the picture did not look like her, Picasso replied “No matter, it will.” What he meant is that when people had got used to ‘reading’ his new way of representing things they would be able to see the portrait’s likeness to Mrs Stein.

Picasso finished the Stein portrait two years before producing any of his explicitly Cubist works, and before the term ‘Cubism’ was invented. But it foreshadows Cubism through the influence of Cézanne’s late paintings, with their shifting, mobile viewpoint. However, Picasso and Cézanne had crucially different attitudes to their work. Cézanne drew his inspiration from his immediate visual reaction to the objects before him; whereas Picasso famously claimed “I paint objects as I think of them, not as I see them.” From 1908 onwards he was drawn to creating art according to his own internal vision.

A New Perspective on Art