(2004). Approaches to Cubism. In: Edwards, Steve and Wood, Paul
eds. Art of the Avant-Gardes. London: Yale University Press, pp.
135–155. Of all the labels given to movements in twentieth-
century art, "Cubism" is perhaps the most misleading. At worst,
it can encourage us to think of Cubism as little more than a
mannerism - a style of painting in which the "touches" of
Impressionism or the "dots" of Pointillism give way to hard-
edged planes that allow the world to be represented in the more
modern and mechanistic guise of interlocking boxes and cubes.
Anyone who is tempted to interpret Cubism in this way is likely
to be pulled up short by the assertion, to be found in just
about every major study of the movement, that Cubism brought
about the wholesale transformation of western art. For the art
historian Robert Rosenblum, writing in 1959, it was as
"revolutionary as the discoveries of Einstein or Freud", while
for Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, writing at the start of
the twenty-first century, it "initiat