Cubism term paper

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“By 1919, Léger's style had changed in a manner that paralleled, in the context of his own vocabulary, the transformation from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism. The card players of 1917 are still represented by the pictorial illusion of solid, rounded shapes, whose tactile reality is affirmed by the strong modeling in light and dark. Although these tangible forms may be compressed forward in a two-dimensional pattern whose almost suffocating physical density is reminiscent of certain sixteenth-century Mannerist paintings, they nevertheless maintain a traditional illusion of solids behind an imaginary picture plane. In a work of 1919 like the City, however, Léger's style has altered radically in the direction of a far greater awareness of the opaque reality of the picture surface. Here, in analogy with Synthetic Cubism, most forms have been flattened; they seem to exist in front of the plane of the canvas rather than behind it. Even where suggestions of the earlier modeling are retained, as in the figures of the central foreground or in the large smokestack to the right, the modeling no longer implies a total sculptural roundness, but, rather, a partial protrusion, like a bas-relief, from the flat surface. Furthermore, the forms themselves, as in Synthetic Cubism, are broader and more discontinuous, now offering large fragments of incomplete objects rather than small fragments of complete objects.”
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“Unlike Duchamp-Villon, the younger cubist sculptors Lipchitz and Laurens frequently adapted both the style and the static subject matter of the cubist painters, Gris, Braque and Picasso. Laurens even perfected a polychrome cubist relief which combined painting and sculpture in one piece. His Head, a construction in painted wood, is more original. In it he achieves a grotesque vividness quite surpassing his usual style. Lipchitz, in his Man with a Guitar, builds up his interlocking, interpenetrating slabs and prisms into a monumental composition which survives viewing from almost all angles. His straight lines are relieved by occasional curves, notably the round sound-hole of the guitar which with exceptional formal humor the sculptor carries all the way through the musician's body.”
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“Some of these gestures may now seem trivial, but that is to forget the task that had to be done - the breaking-up of all conventional notions of art in order to emancipate completely the visual imagination. Cubism had achieved much, but once it had rejected the laws of perspectival vision, it threatened to rest there and reverts to a formal classicism more severe and rigid than the realism it had escaped. Dada was the final act of liberation, and apart from the response it elicited from Picasso and Braque, and even Léger, it provided 'a lasting slingshot' for a new and not less important generation of artists. Dada was to be largely forgotten in the inter-war period, but it had created an impetus and established a direction for the artistic development of Western art that was not to be exhausted in our time. The state of consciousness in Europe and America which evoked such manifestations as Futurism and Dadaism still prevails: we still search for images 'to express the vortex of modern life - a life of steel, fever, pride and headlong speed'.”
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