PICASSO · CUBISM · SEVERAL HONEST ANSWERS
A SINGLE POINT OF VIEWWOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ENOUGH.
A face from the front with a nose in profile and an eye that belongs to both at once. Cubism took the image apart with its bare hands and asked a very simple question: can one single point of view really say everything about anything?
For centuries and a day, Western painting chased a beautiful illusion: making us forget we were looking at a flat surface, giving it depth and making us believe we were looking through a window instead of paint.
Then Picasso and Braque showed up and slammed the window shut.
The subjects were still there. But the rules trapping them together had gone out that window too. A boring point of view was no longer enough. Objects were broken apart into planes, space flattened. Several sides of the same thing landed on the canvas at once, and nobody told them to wait their turn.
The first time you see Cubism, you assume someone slept through art class. That’s when you start questioning your own perspective, since the messed-up picture is hanging in a museum with its own special lighting and security guards.
Except nobody messed up.
BUT WHAT THE HELL IS CUBISM?
You look at a Cubist face and your first instinct is to grab it by the shoulders and ask what happened to it. The eyes don't line up and the nose points somewhere it has no business pointing. Then one side of the face looks you right in the eyes while the other side is looking for something else way over on the left.
But wait a minute. Imagine someone sitting across from you as you see their face from the front. Lean over a little and something else appears: a cheekbone or the line of an ear. If you stand up and walk around them, the shape changes completely. Every angle gives a different part of the truth, and none of them are lying to you.
Classical painting picks one view and stays faithful to it forever. Cubism looked at that faithfulness and asked: why the hell not, exactly?
Picasso and Georges Braque built this new language together in Paris, in the years right after their meeting in 1907. They were tired of the same old blasé blah art that tried to make a flat canvas look like a photo. Instead they broke objects down into geometric planes and compressed the space. Multiple points of view coexist in the same image, even where that reveals a total contradiction.
That's Cubism, no art history degree or obligatory beret required: you take an object apart with your eyes, expose several ways of seeing it, then put the pieces back together again. There's no question of all perspectives coming from the same angle because that would be boring. And Picasso doesn’t do boring.
Then painting stops asking the easy question. It's no longer what does it look like.
The question gets realer than a photo, and above all impossible to ignore:
How much human expression can a picture hold?
A FACE COULD LOOK AT YOU AND TURN AWAY AT THE SAME TIME.
Sounds impossible, doesn't it? Our eyes can't manage that in a single instant. Unlike the paintings, we only have two eyes, and both usually point the same direction. Questionable design, if you ask me. But in real life we do this constantly. People move and remember. Our attention runs in every possible direction. We know the back of a chair exists even when only the front is visible. To take it a step further, what we knew a second ago stays with us in what we see now.
With its multiple points of view, Cubism offers us clues about an object that a standardized realistic image can’t. Realism only gives you one view; so you can’t even move on to the next view. That’s not doing much unless you think looking identical is enough to be considered fantastic art. But Cubism wants the image to do a lot more than look the same as something. Is that so strange? Excusez-moi, realistic paintings lost the whole game when the photograph drew a chance card that said “Advance to Free Parking. If you pass GO, collect $200.” Meanwhile, Cubism says what’s so real about photos? A photograph can’t bring you different viewpoints and feelings.
02 · CUBISM CHANGES THE GAME
It stops pretending to be a photo.
Around 1910, Picasso and Braque pushed the idea so far that they could make you say “hmmm, what the hell was I looking at again?” And yet here we are a century later, still buying tickets.
Welcome to Analytical Cubism. Even color gets stripped down. Browns, grays and muddy ochres crowd into a space with almost no air left to breathe. A guitar survives as a curve and not much else. An unidentified figure appears and disappears like a memory chased down with tequila.
Standing in front of these paintings feels like digging for gold. You don't just appreciate the image the way you'd appreciate a Hawaiian sunset. You have to go searching for it. A line eventually becomes the edge of a bottle and the eye keeps looking until the picture appears, before immediately evacuating the canvas.
That confusion is the whole point. Often, not seeing the point right away feels like failure. Here, it's precisely when looking starts to work. Recognising the subject is only half of it. The other half slows you down until you catch yourself assembling meaning out of puzzle pieces, live, and watching your own brain at it.
The painting keeps happening while you stand in front of it. Literally, not metaphorically.
Then around 1912, Picasso and Braque try another crazy idea. After years of breaking painted reality into puzzle pieces, they turn around and start gluing real pieces of life into their artwork. Newspaper and wallpaper or whatever. Tiny fragments of the real world, from the street to the canvas.
Collage enters Cubism and gives birth to Synthetic Cubism: cleaner shapes with whole compositions built by mixing all kinds of materials, in what turned out to be an elegant and outrageously expensive collage project.
And that creates a problem I love. Paint a newspaper and the paint is only pretending to be a newspaper. Nice try, but nobody's really fooled. Glue an actual piece of newspaper onto the canvas and this time it really is newspaper. Except it also becomes a shape with texture. Maybe a table or something that hasn’t ever existed anywhere else except in this art.
Reality comes back into the picture, and in that moment, it stops being reality. Cubism didn't resolve the relationship between reality and its image. It made it so much stranger, and in a way more honest about what strange even means. After all, who defines what’s strange?
03 · THE EYE KEEPS MOVING
Recognising is only the beginning.
This is where Cubism stops being the old joke about Picasso flunking art class, and starts earning our respect. You know the joke. Everyone does. Your uncle probably has his version ready for the next family dinner. Why did Picasso style his hair with geometry tools? Because he wanted to look sharp from every possible angle. What did the bartender say when Picasso walked into the pub? "Hey buddy, why the square face?"
Seriously, maybe all of those fragments aren't pieces of something broken. Could they be pieces of something else happening at the same time? From the front and side, here and over there, one moment stacked directly on top of the next without waiting?
We have a preconceived idea of what a "complete" image is supposed to look like. Everything has to agree. The perspective resolves and the space stays still. Every element finds its place within one coherent view, like the Taj Mahal or an orchid garden.
Cubism lets truths that seem incompatible live on the same canvas, side by side. And here's the part that baffles everyone: the more we try to show, the harder the whole becomes to recognise. Strange, when you think about it. We're taught to trust the clarity of a clean image. That’s obviously the true view, isn’t it? Well, not quite. An image becomes clear precisely because it leaves things out. That's the bargain it makes with the viewer, whether you know it or not.
SOMETIMES, THE TRUTH BECOMES HARDER TO SEE AT THE VERY MOMENT WE TRY TO FIT MORE OF IT IN.
04 · STILL HUMAN
Break the image.
Keep the imagination.
And this is where Cubism follows you out of the museum and into your life.
Because we do to people exactly what old paintings did to our headspace: we flatten them until only one neat angle remains, and fit them into a picture frame.
She’s so nice.
He’s really rude.
I’m strong-willed.
She’s such a bitch.
He’s the one who hurt me.
I’m not that person any more.
Those labels aren't always false, which is exactly why we adore them. The danger starts when one angle of a person passes itself off as the one true view.
A person can be generous and selfish in the same week, brave and scared stiff in the same hour. Gentle with one person, impossible with another. The self we are alone is not necessarily the self we are with family, at work, under pressure, or this morning before coffee.
We'd like all these versions to line up into a single answer. Which one is really me? Cubism offers a stranger answer, and probably a truer one: what if several of them were real at once, with no need to delete one in the edit?
That doesn't mean every contradiction gets a pass, and we might as well say so plainly. It's not a license to behave like an idiot. Some contradictions matter enormously. People lie. People really do hurt each other, and one truth can perfectly well cancel out another. Pretending otherwise helps nobody, least of all the person standing in front of you.
But a human being has never been a neat sentence with a period carefully placed at the end. We're made of history, moods, failures and versions of ourselves that don't always sit comfortably at the same table, that would practically fight over the last piece of bread. Maybe being whole never meant being smooth. Maybe a contradiction isn't a crack that needs repairing.
Sometimes two truths that seem to have nothing to do with each other are just two pieces of the same whole, exactly as a nose can work from the front and in profile at once, without anyone in the room calling the police.
A SINGLE POINT OF VIEW
WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ENOUGH.
PICASSO · CUBISM
EASTOKYO · ISSUE 01