'Facets Of Cubism' At The Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston

BOSTON, MASS.

:"Facets of Cubism," a focused, rewarding exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), explores the invention and impact of Cubism, one of the most influential artistic movements of the Twentieth Century. As MFA director Malcolm Rogers puts it, "The birth of Cubism is arguably the most important event in the history of modern art."

Led by pioneers Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, artists early in the last century broke with longstanding conventions of Western painting by discarding traditional norms of pictorial illusionism and linear perspective in favor of images that reflected fragmented and multifaceted responses to everyday reality. As fellow painters and sculptors, notably Alexander Archipenko, Juan Gris, Henri Laurens, Fernand Leger, Jacques Lipchitz and others followed the Picasso-Braque example, Cubism became a defining moment in Twentieth Century art.

By 1920, the new style had transformed painting, watercolor, drawing, printmaking, collage and sculpture, often blurring distinctions among them. Over time Cubism also influenced architecture, furniture, fashion, the cinema and other aspects of popular culture. As Kenneth Wayne, chief curator at the Heckscher Museum of Art, puts it, "What had begun as a rarified pictorial style became a popular language."

Built around major Cubist examples in the MFA collection, some 70 works by a dozen artists are featured in the current exhibition, which runs through April 16. Twenty-seven works are by Picasso. Curated by Tom Rassieur, the MFA's assistant curator, prints, drawings and photographs, "Facets of Cubism" is presented in honor of major museum benefactor Irving Rabb and in memory of his wife, Dolly.

Visitors to the show can follow the friendly, trailblazing competition between Picasso and Braque - from their first geometricizing abstractions of nature, to dissolution of form, to their synthesis of new images from scraps of everyday experience. Examples of Leger's colorful exuberance and varied sculptural interpretations suggest the independence Cubism encouraged in contemporary artists.

Actually, there was no single Cubist style. Rather, the movement stimulated a variety of approaches to art-making that freed practitioners from traditional expectations. "When we invented Cubism," Picasso said many years later, "we had no intention whatever of inventing Cubism. We wanted simply to express what was in us." What was in the Spanish genius and his followers was an appetite for new forms of cultural, intellectual and industrial life that were shaping the emerging century.

In this spirit, movements like Impressionism and Art Nouveau were cast aside for the new ideas of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, offering fresh views of the human psyche and the physical universe. Since photography provided precise views of reality, artists felt freed from having to replicate exactly what they saw.

The ringleader of the Cubist movement and the star of the Boston exhibition, the brilliant, prolific and energetic Picasso (1881-1973) is the towering figure of Twentieth Century art. A child prodigy who was born in Malaga, by his early twenties he had become part of the electric Parisian art scene, mingling with Braque and Henri Matisse and meeting collectors/salon hosts Gertrude and Leo Stein.