Cubism and War. The Crystal in the Flame

Cubism and War. The Crystal in the Flame
"Cubism and War. The Crystal in the Flame" is the catalogue of the exhibition that Christopher Green, with his habitual intellectual solidity, has curated for the Museu Picasso de Barcelona. The book includes a selection of works by cubist artists who lived in Paris, in the rearguard, during the First World War, and who responded with their work to the horrible reality that they had to live close to. The clarity and balance of their cubist works – like a crystal – and the research of aesthetic purity, confronted the mud and the terrible experiences of the frontline, and this is where the metaphor of the title came from.

 

Christopher Green shows, through works by Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, María Blanchard, Gino Severini, Jacques Lipchitz and Henri Laurens, the capacity for renovation of the cubist movement, despite the restrictions imposed by the conservative currents, which during the war period yearned for order, with the romantic desire to return to a lost past. These artists, completely committed to exploring the new possibilities that challenged the ways of representation, managed to keep alive the cubist revolution for painting and sculpture, and lead to the abstraction and surrealism of the postwar period, and they did so as a rejection in front of the dehumanizing reality of the war.

 

Christopher Green, Neil Cox, Giovanni Casini
Year: 2016
Pages: 182
Languages: Catalan, Castilian, English
Size: 23 x 28.5 cm
Publisher: Fundació Museu Picasso de Barcelona
ISBN: English 978-84-944228-7-4
Catalan 978-84-944228-5-0
Castilian 978-84-944228-6-7

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