Focus on Dancer in a Café and discuss the Simultaneity and multiplicity.
With the overthrow of classical perspective and its implicit staticity quasi-complete, the new concept of mobile perspective, first propounded by Metzinger in his 1910 publication Note sur la peinture, implied explicitly the dynamism of motion within multiple-spatial dimensions. In the article Metzinger notes the similarities between Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, stressing the distance between their works and traditional perspective. These artists, with Metzinger flanked between, granted themselves 'the liberty of moving around objects', and combining many different views in one image, each recording varying experiences over the course of time.Apollinaire, possibly with the work of Eadweard Muybridge in mind, wrote a year later of this "state of motion" as akin to "cinematic" movement around an object, revealing a "plastic truth" compatible with reality by showing the spectator "all its facets".Gleizes again in 1911 remarks Metzinger is "haunted by the desire to inscribe a total image":He will put down the greatest number of possible planes: to purely objective truth he wishes to add a new truth, born from what his intelligence permits him to know. Thus—and he said himself: to space he will join time. ... he wishes to develop the visual field by multiplying it, to inscribe them all in the space of the same canvas: it is then that the cube will play a role, for Metzinger will utilize this means to reestablish the equilibrium that these audacious inscriptions will have momentarily broken.
Now liberated from the one-to-one relationship between a fixed coordinate in space captured at a single moment in time assumed by classical vanishing-point perspective, the artist became free to explore notions of simultaneity, whereby several positions in space captured at successive time intervals could be depicted within the bounds of a single painting.This picture plane, write Metzinger and Gleizes (in Du "Cubisme", 1912), "reflects the viewer's personality back upon his understanding, pictorial space may be defined as a sensible passage between two subjective spaces." The forms situated within this space, they continue, "spring from a dynamism which we profess to command. In order that our intelligence may possess it, let us first exercise our sensibility."There are two methods of regarding the division of the canvas, according to Metzinger and Gleizes, (1) "all the parts are connected by a rhythmic convention", giving the painting a centre from which the gradations of colour proceed (or towards which they tend), creating spaces of maximum or minimum intensity. (2) "The spectator, himself free to establish unity, may apprehend all the elements in the order assigned to them by creative intuition, the properties of each portion must be left independent, and the plastic continuum must be broken into a thousand surprises of light and shade."There is nothing real outside ourselves; there is nothing real except the coincidence of a sensation and an individual mental direction. Far be it from us to throw any doubts upon the existence of the objects which strike our senses; but, rationally speaking, we can only have certitude with regard to the images which they produce in the mind.
According to the founders of Cubist theory, objects possess no absolute or essential form. "There are as many images of an object as there are eyes which look at it; there are as many essential images of it as there are minds which comprehend it."
Georges Braque Eadweard Muybridge Cubist Cubism Pablo Picasso Du "Cubisme" Robert Delaunay Henri Le Fauconnier left