Ruth Leon recommends. Blackbeats: Cubism Reimagined
Ruth Leon recommendsBlackbeats: Cubism Reimagined
This is a fascinating illustrated lecture from the Met Museum, given by Richard J. Powell, Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University as he rethinks the art of Cubism through the historical and aesthetic lens of African American art.
Artists such as Dudley Murphy, Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, Mickalene Thomas, and Nina Chanel Abney use angular and fractured forms that resonate with the cultural effects of ragtime, jazz, hip-hop, and other Black performing arts traditions.
They plumb Cubism’s strategies and theoretical formations, weighing the value of universal signs and imaging systems and probing art’s contested identities.Read more
Now cubism is being woked.
Cubism has always been mainly a decorative, thus abstract, non-sensual art form, and its ‘rhythms’ may indeed seem to relate to ‘black music rhythm’ but that is merely because of the structure of the visual and aural perceptive systems embedded in the human mind in general. The ‘rhythms’ of ‘black music’ have a function very different from visual cubism: the latter wants to withdraw from sensualist representation, while the former wants the opposite: there, they are stimulants.
Somehow it seems patronizing to drag cubism into the subject.
Firstly , I don’t think you are aware that there have been many exponents of cubism besides Picasso & Braque. Also you seem to NEED to displace the sexual from creativity in general and even more oddly & untrue subjugate its tendencues in relation to cubism in general. Most upsetting for me as a black gay composer,novelist,visual artist is Your use of the word “merely” in relation REALLY (I think)to your notion of black feeling told on you. Conservatism might be the scariest limiting system on our Earth as Foucault knew.I think a good look at demoiselles d’Avignon showsthat from the very beginning and ALWAYS in Picasso”s work the sexual is a central artery bleeding into everything. Every serious artist knows this general primacy. Im very afraid of those who deny this or see it as a defect. Please read Mimesis. Creativity feeds of itself because the life force supplies it!