"I" which could look on things from all sides at once was obviously a disintegrated or multiple "1", an "I" which was already a "We". As the Russian suprematist painter, Malevich, put it, with the arrival of Cubism there now spoke through art
- not only the individual "egg", but the "ego" of an elemental world movement...[1]
Or as Paul Laporte later wrote of the Cubists:
- They are no longer limited to their human isolation and to a local relationship but are themselves integrated into a universal relationship.[2]
Given this "universal" relationship to other human beings and to the world, the thirst for an art-form to transcend the entire globe became felt. Apollinaire asked why-—in an era of the telephone, the wireless and aviation, and when the new communications media ranged over the continents, embracing a vast diversity of human experience——it should be assumed that the poet "should not have at least an equal freedom...in confronting space."[3] Writing of the new artists whose world had been transformed by science, he explained that they were bound to attempt to match the demands of the age with a totally new and globe—embracing art:
- One should not be astonished if, with only the means they have now at their disposal, they set themselves to preparing this new art (vaster than the plain art of words) in which, like conductors of an orchestra of un—
- ↑ "In the Italian Renaissance, the ideal of a spiritualized personal anonymity gradually changed to one of singular individuality; the Cubist impulse moved in the opposite direction, towards an expression and an order transcending the individual"—Schwartz, op cit p 12. Like Khlebnikov and the Russian Futurists, the Cubists renounced the stand—point of the "I" in art even to the point of repudiating the notion of personal authorship. Picasso is quoted as having said: "People didn‘t understand very well at the time why very often we didn't sign our canvasses. Most of those that are signed we signed years later. It was because...we felt the temptation, the hope of an anonymous art, not in its expression but in its point of departure"—Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life With Picasso, quoted by Schwartz, op cit p 7.
- ↑ 2. P.M.Laporte, Cubism and Science, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
- ↑ Roger Shattuck (ed) op cit p 229
