What was Cubism? How did this strange new way of making paintings and sculptures enable artists so decisively to change the trajectory of ‘Modern Art’? In responding to these questions, distinguished art historian Christopher Green presents a bold new interpretation of Cubism and three of its key protagonists. Stemming from a critical re-evaluation of the author’s own first responses to Cubist artworks, as a student of the late artist and critic John Golding, Cubism and Reality challenges the commonly-held view of Cubism as either a retreat from reality into abstraction, or an invitation to convert the real into the ‘surreal’, arguing instead that Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Juan Gris wanted, above all, to find ways of intensifying and expanding painting’s capacity to give viewers more, not less, of their lived experience of the world. Lavishly illustrated and filled with rich new insights and approaches to the artwork that are the product of decades’ worth of research, Green argues that, for the three artists, ‘reality’ was not objectively always there, but was created by their own perceptions, and could be transformed by their imaginations.
