Cubism & the Cubist Movement
Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque...
The outbreak of the First World War ceased the development of Cubism as, many of the artists went to war. The war stopped the development of Cubism for Braque but, Picasso resumed painting. The poet Apollinaire and the painter Duchamp-Villon were both killed in the fighting and Braque sustained a serious head wound. After coming out of a comatose state and recovering from his temporary blindness Braque, continued a long spell of recuperation. It wasn't until 1918 that Braque started to paint. He continued with the work that he had started before the war, paper collage with slightly different ideas, rectangles and diamond forms. By the 1920's Cubism began to fade out of a contemporary status but, with the help of writers like Pierre Reverdy, it started a short revival.
Reverdy's Nord-Sud review a woke new works by the cubist's. Braque displayed his works in a one man show organised by Paul Rosenberg who had become Braque's dealer in 1919. Gris, Picasso and Laurens continued to practice Synthetic Cubism and, gradually brought this back into a form of Neo-Classicism. Leger and Delaunay continued working with colour, mingling abstract and figurative elements together into their work. Many of the cubist's returned to realistic styled work Braque, However was irritated by the way cubism evaporated from modern art. In 1919 the poet Blaise Cendrars who was a close friend to Braque wrote
To refuse to recognize the importance of the cubist movement would be fatuous, just as to laugh at it was idiotic. But it is quite as idiotic and fatuous to try to stop at a doctrine which today is dated, and to refuse to recognize that cubism no longer offers enough novelty and surprise to provide nourishment for a new generation.... The 'home from the front generation' has its mind aroused by other problems, and its researches point in a new direction
The only original practitioner of cubism, still painting in this style was Juan Gris. Gris developed his own style of cubism in the 1920's after first abandoning papier colle and collage, which he had been using since the start of the war. He started to develop different interior and exterior spatial elements. The canvas is broken up by juxtaposing and over lapping these two elements together so that the foreground looks flatter than the background. Gris used different planes so that, one plane could contain part of another, still life objects are used to coincide with the landscape background. After the premature death of Gris in 1927, Cubism seemed to disappear, new art movements began to develop but, could not replace Cubism.