We are entering the zone of the one hundredth anniversary of the epochal pan-cultural paradigm shift that changed all art and science. The year 1912 is the locus of revolutions in painting, physics, music, dance, fiction, poetry, politics and technology. It was as if the earth passed through an intergalactic cloud whose molecules shook our civilization to its roots. Imagine a gas was inhaled by creative geniuses of the time: Picasso and Braque invent Cubism, Einstein develops the Special Theory of Relativity, Stravinsky and Schoenberg develop new tonal systems for making music, Isadora Duncan unpins Baroque dance (classical ballet), the Wright Brothers introduce pitch, yaw and roll simultaneously into the possibilities of human mechanized movement, James Joyce experiments with fictional expression, motion pictures are invented and all of life begins to accelerate intensely.It is time to celebrate one of the more potent of these manifestations of the 1912 shift - Cubism. Locating the locus of the birth of Cubism (rather than the proto-Cubism of “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon”) in the work done by Picasso in the mountain village of Gosol in the summer of 1909 and spring of 1910 when he painted “Portrait of Fanny Tellier”. The autumn of 2009 and spring of 2010 is the one hundredth anniversary of this epochal group of paintings. Let’s celebrate this development, Cubism, that revolutionized all visual art and architecture. As a painter and architect, Cubism is my slice of the paradigm shift pie.
Artwork: quasi-cubist inspired painting: Jim Blake 2009