Appreciating Cubism

2022 New Year's Resolution Fulfillment

As long-time readers will know, my annual new year’s resolution is to find a way to change my mind on something.

This past year I accomplished this while listening to Penn’s Sunday School episode 801 Time Travel & Pornography. The episode is interesting throughout, but it really gets going at the 7:00 mark discussing how starting about 100 years ago we can “time travel”. I appreciate but do not necessarily agree with all of it. Then around 29:21 he transitions into a discussion Cubism that quite simply caused me to reconsider how I viewed that art.

Formally, I changed my mind that Cubism, etc. is not just some goofy style of art that I should dismiss. It is actually a perhaps better depiction of how people actually see the world.

As Penn Jillette puts it, the way we really perceive the world is much closer to how Cubism depicts it rather than how forced/taught vanishing-point perspective portrays it. Painting, photography, etc. from the point of view of the lens is not how we actually see, experience, or remember things.

This is why the vanishing point technique in art must be taught. This new appreciation of Cubism shouldn’t have been a surprise for me as learning the vanishing point perspective was very difficult for me as a child. I really didn’t see the railroad tracks disappearing into a single point or all the buildings in a cityscape descending at angles not actually possessed by them—a simple rectangular building only has right angles, but you actually never see them as 90 degrees even straight on and especially not in peripheral profile. Yet that is how I always saw them in my mind’s eye.

The episode concludes with an argument that we are as ghosts today. Another interesting perspective that I don’t entirely agree with but do appreciate.

P.S. On a related note, you should take an opportunity to watch Tim’s Vermeer. Produced by Penn & Teller it is a mind-blowing documentary that attempts (successfully I believe) to solve the centuries' old mystery of how Johannes Vermeer created his stunningly life-like works.