Crystal Cubism

Beginnings: Cézanne , 1888, Mardi gras (Pierrot et Arlequin), oil on canvas, 102 x 81 cm, Pushkin Museum, Moscow Cubism, from its inception, stems from the dissatisfaction with the idea of form that had been in practice since the Renaissance. This dissatisfaction had already been seen in the works of the Romanticist Eugène Delacroix, in the Realism of Gustave Courbet, in passing through the Symbolists, Les Nabis, the Impressionists and the Neo-Impressionists. Paul Cézanne was instrumental, as his work marked a shift from a more representational art form to one that was increasingly abstract, with a strong emphasis on the simplification of geometric structure. In a letter addressed to Émile Bernard dated 15 April 1904, Cézanne writes: "Interpret nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone; put everything in perspective, so that each side of an object, of a plane, recedes toward a central point." Cézanne was preoccupied by the means of rendering volume and space, surface variations (or modulations) with overlapped shifting planes. Increasingly in his later works, Cézanne achieves a greater freedom. His work became bolder, more arbitrary, more dynamic and increasingly nonrepresentational. As his color planes acquired greater formal independence, defined objects and structures began to lose their identity. A reevaluation in their own work in relation to that of Cézanne had begun following a series of retrospective exhibitions of Cézanne's paintings held at the Salon d'Automne of 1904, the Salon d'Automne of 1905 and 1906, followed by two commemorative retrospectives after his death in 1907. By 1907, representational form gave way to a new complexity; subject matter progressively became dominated by a network of interconnected geometric planes, the distinction between foreground and background no longer sharply delineated, and the depth of field limited. From the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, an exhibition which officially introduced "Cubism" to the public as an organized group movement, and extending through 1913, the fine arts had evolved well beyond the teachings of Cézanne. Where before, the foundational pillars of academicism had been shaken, now they had been toppled. Pre-war: analysis and synthesis The Cubist method leading to 1912 has been considered 'analytical', entailing the decomposition of the subject matter (the study of things), while subsequently 'synthetic', built on geometric construction (free of such primary study). The terms Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism originated through this distinction. As Cubism would evolve pictorially, so too would the crystallization of its theoretical framework advance beyond the guidelines set out in the Cubist manifesto Du "Cubisme", written by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger in 1912; though Du "Cubisme" would remain the clearest and most intelligible definition of Cubism. File:Albert Gleizes, 1913, Les Bateaux de pêche (Fischerboote), oil on canvas, 165 x 111 cm, exhibited Salon d'Automne, Paris, 1913-14, no. 770, Manes Moderni Umeni, Vystava, Prague, 1914, no. 44.jpg|Albert Gleizes, 1913, Les Bateaux de pêche (Fischerboote), oil on canvas, 165 × 111 cm, Tel Aviv Museum of Art File:Fresnaye conquest of air.jpg|Roger de La Fresnaye, 1913, The Conquest of the Air, oil on canvas, 235.9 × 195.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art War years: 1914–1918 , 1914–15, Soldat jouant aux échecs (Soldier at a Game of Chess), oil on canvas, 81.3 × 61 cm, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago At the outset of the First World War many artists were mobilized: Metzinger, Gleizes, Braque, Léger, de La Fresnaye, and Duchamp-Villon. Despite the brutal interruption, each found the time to continue making art, sustaining differing types of Cubism. Yet they discovered a ubiquitous link between the Cubist syntax (beyond pre-war attitudes) and that of the anonymity and novelty of mechanized warfare. Cubism evolved as much a result of an evasion of the inconceivable atrocities of war as of nationalistic pressures. Along with the evasion came the need to diverge further and further away from the depiction of things. As the rift between art and life grew, so too came the burgeoning need for a process of distillation. This clarity and sense of order spread to almost all of the artists exhibiting at Léonce Rosenberg's gallery—including Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Auguste Herbin, Joseph Csaky, Gino Severini and Pablo Picasso—leading to the descriptive term 'Crystal Cubism', coined by Maurice Raynal, Raynal had been associated with Cubists since 1910 via the milieu of Le Bateau-Lavoir. Raynal, who would become one of the Cubists' most authoritative and articulate proponents, endorsed a wide range of Cubist activity and for those who produced it, but his highest esteem was directed toward two artists: Jean Metzinger, whose artistry Raynal equated with Renoir and who was 'perhaps the man who, in our epoch, knows best how to paint'. The other was Juan Gris, who was 'certainly the fiercest of the purists in the group'. Upon returning from the front line, Raynal served briefly as director for publications of Rosenberg's l'Effort moderne. For Raynal, research into art was based on an eternal truth, rather than on the ideal, on reality, or on certitude. Certitude was nothing more than based on a relative belief, while truth was in agreement with fact. The only belief was in the veracity of philosophical and scientific truths. (Lady at her Dressing Table)'', oil on canvas, 92.4 × 65.1 cm, private collection "Direct reference to observed reality" is present, but the emphasis is placed on the "self-sufficiency" of the artwork as objects unto themselves. The priority on "orderly qualities" and the "autonomous purity" of compositions are a prime concern, writes art historian Christopher Green. Another critic, Aurel, writing in ''L'Homme Enchaîné'' about the same December 1915 exhibition described Metzinger's entry as "a very erudite divagation of horizon blue and old red of glory, in the name of which I forgive him" [une divagation fort érudite en bleu horizon et vieux rouge de gloire, au nom de quoi je lui pardonne]. During the year 1916, Sunday discussions at the studio of Lipchitz, included Metzinger, Gris, Picasso, Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Reverdy, André Salmon, Max Jacob, and Blaise Cendrars. In a letter written in Paris by Metzinger to Albert Gleizes in Barcelona during the war, dated 4 July 1916, he writes: After two years of study I have succeeded in establishing the basis of this new perspective I have talked about so much. It is not the materialist perspective of Gris, nor the romantic perspective of Picasso. It is rather a metaphysical perspective—I take full responsibility for the word. You can't begin to imagine what I've found out since the beginning of the war, working outside painting but for painting. The geometry of the fourth space has no more secret for me. Previously I had only intuitions, now I have certainty. I have made a whole series of theorems on the laws of displacement [déplacement], of reversal [retournement] etc. I have read Schoute, Rieman (sic), Argand, Schlegel etc. The actual result? A new harmony. Don't take this word harmony in its ordinary [banal] everyday sense, take it in its original [primitif] sense. Everything is number. The mind [esprit] hates what cannot be measured: it must be reduced and made comprehensible. That is the secret. There in nothing more to it [''pas de reste à l'opération]. Painting, sculpture, music, architecture, lasting art is never anything more than a mathematical expression of the relations that exist between the internal and the external, the self [le moi''] and the world. (Metzinger, 4 July 1916) The 'new perspective' according to Daniel Robbins, "was a mathematical relationship between the ideas in his mind and the exterior world". but the existence of letters themselves remained unknown until the mid-1980s. For Metzinger, the Crystal period was synonymous with a return to "a simple, robust art". Crystal Cubism represented an opening up of possibilities. His belief was that technique should be simplified and that the "trickery" of chiaroscuro should abandoned, along with the "artifices of the palette". His entry at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, Hommage à Pablo Picasso, was also an homage to Metzinger's Le goûter (Tea Time). Le goûter persuaded Gris of the importance of mathematics (numbers) in painting. As art historian Peter Brooke points out, Gris started painting persistently in 1911 and first exhibited at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants (a painting entitled Hommage à Pablo Picasso). "He appears with two styles", writes Brooke, "In one of them a grid structure appears that is clearly reminiscent of the Goûter and of Metzinger's later work in 1912. In the other, the grid is still present but the lines are not stated and their continuity is broken". Art historian Christopher Green writes that the "deformations of lines" allowed by mobile perspective in the head of Metzinger's Tea-time and Gleizes's Portrait of Jacques Nayral "have seemed tentative to historians of Cubism. In 1911, as the key area of likeness and unlikeness, they more than anything released the laughter." Green continues, "This was the wider context of Gris's decision at the Indépendants of 1912 to make his debut with a Homage to Pablo Picasso, which was a portrait, and to do so with a portrait that responded to Picasso's portraits of 1910 through the intermediary of Metzinger's Tea-time. While Metzinger's distillation is noticeable during the latter half of 1915 and early 1916, this shift is signaled in the works of Gris and Lipchitz from the latter half of 1916, and particularly between 1917 and 1918. "Here is the man who has meditated on everything modern", writes Guillaume Apollinaire in his 1913 publication The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations, "here is the painter who paints to conceive only new structures, whose aim is to draw or paint nothing but materially pure forms". Apollinaire compares the work of Gris with the "scientific cubism" of Picasso... "Juan Gris is content with purity, scientifically conceived. The conceptions of Juan Gris are always pure, and from this purity parallels are sure to spring". And spring they did. In 1916, drawing from black and white postcards representing works by Corot, Velázquez and Cézanne, Gris created a series of classical (traditionalist) Cubist figure paintings, employing a purified range of pictorial and structural features. These works set the tone for his quest of an ideal unity for the next five years. coincided with his prominence among the Parisian avant-garde. Gris was presented to the public as one of the 'purest' and one of the most 'classical' of the leading Cubists. , Ohio Gris claimed to manipulate flat abstract planar surfaces first, and only in subsequent stages of his painting process would he 'qualify' them so that the subject-matter became readable. He worked 'deductively' on the global concept first, then consecrated on the perceptive details. Gris referred to this technique as 'synthetic', in contradistinction from the process of 'analysis' intrinsic to his earlier works. "We need a new name to designate them," wrote Picasso to Gertrude Stein: Maurice Raynal suggested "Crystal Cubism". These "little gems" may have been produced by Picasso in response to critics who had claimed his defection from the movement, through his experimentation with classicism within the so-called return to order. The scholar Edith Balas writes of Csaky's sculpture following the war years: "Csáky, more than anyone else working in sculpture, took Pierre Reverdy's theoretical writings on art and cubist doctrine to heart. "Cubism is an eminently plastic art; but an art of creation, not of reproduction and interpretation." The artist was to take no more than "elements" from the external world, and intuitively arrive at the "idea" of objects made up of what for him constant in value. Objects were not to be analyzed; neither were the experiences they evoked. They were to be re-created in the mind, and thereby purified. By some unexplained miracle the "pure" forms of the mind, an entirely autonomous vocabulary, of (usual geometric) forms, would make contact with the external world." (Balas, 1998, p. 27) Csaky's influences were drawn more from the art of ancient Egypt rather than from French Neoclassicism. , Céline Arnauld, reproduced in Tournevire, Edition de "L'Esprit nouveau", 1919 , 1920, Le Petit boxeur, 43 cm, reproduced in Život 2 (1922) Both Lipchitz and Henri Laurens—late adherents to Cubist sculpture, following Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Csaky, Umberto Boccioni, Otto Gutfreund and Picasso—began production in late 1914, and 1915 (respectively), taking Cubist paintings of 1913-14 as a starting point. Both Lipchitz and Laurens retained highly figurative and legible components in their works leading up to 1915-16, after which naturalist and descriptive elements were muted, dominated by a synthetic style of Cubism under the influence of Picasso and Gris. Between 1916 and 1918 Lipchitz and Laurens developed a breed of advanced wartime Cubism (primarily in sculpture) that represented a process of purification. With observed reality no longer the basis for the depiction of subject, model or motif, Lipchitz and Laurens created works that excluded any starting point, based predominantly on the imagination, and continued to do so during the transition from war to peace. In December 1918 Laurens, a close friend of both Picasso and Braque, inaugurated the series of Cubist exhibitions at L'Effort Moderne (Lipchitz showed in 1920), by which time his works had wholly approached the Cubist ''retour à l'ordre''. Rather than descriptive, these works were rooted in geometric abstraction; a species of architectural, polychromed multimedia Cubist constructions. ==Criticism==

From its first public exhibition in 1911, art critic Louis Vauxcelles had voiced his contempt for Cubism. In June 1918, Vauxcelles, writing under the pseudonym Pinturrichio, continued his attack: Integral Cubism is crumbling, vanishing, evaporating. Defections, every day, reach the headquarters of pure painting. Soon Metzinger will be the last of his species, representative of an abandoned doctrine. "And if one shall remain, he'll whisper painfully, I'll be the one". (Vauxcelles, 1918) With the fall came the end of the war, and in December, a series of exhibitions at Galerie l'Effort Moderne of Cubist works demonstrated that Cubism was still alive. Counter attacks , 1917, Guitare et verre (Guitar and Glass), oil on canvas, 60.1 × 91.5 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo The poet and theorist Pierre Reverdy had surpassed all rivals in his attacks on the anti-Cubist campaign between 1918 and 1919. He had been in close contact with the Cubists prior to the war, and in 1917 joined forces with two other poets who shared his points of view: Paul Dermée and Vicente Huidobro. In March of the same year Reverdy edited Nord-Sud. The title of the magazine was inspired by the Paris Metro line that extended from Montmartre to Montparnasse, linking these two focal points of artistic creativity. Reverdy began this project towards the end of 1916, with an art world still under the pressures of war, to show the parallels between the poetic theories of Guillaume Apollinaire of Max Jacob and himself in marking the burgeoning of a new era for poetry and artistic reflection. In Nord-Sud Reverdy, with the help of Dermée and Georges Braque, exposed his literary theories, and outlined a coherent theoretical stance on the latest developments in Cubism. His treatise On Cubism, published in the first issue of Nord-Sud, did so perhaps most influentially. With his characteristic preference for offense rather than defense, Reverdy launched an attack against Vauxcelles' anti-Cubist crusade: How many times has it been said that the art movement called Cubism is extinguished? Each time that a purge occurs the critics of the other side, who ask only that their desires be taken as facts, shout defection and howl for its death. This is nothing basically but a ruse, because Pinturrichichio [sic], of the Carnet de la Semaine and the others know very well that the serious artists of this group are extremely happy to see go... those opportunists who have taken over creations the significance of which they do not even comprehend, and were attracted only by the love of buzz and personal interest. It was predictable that these unrecommendable and compromising people would renounce their endeavors sooner or later. (Reverdy, 1918) Another vigorous supporter of Cubism was the art dealer and collector Léonce Rosenberg. By the end of 1918—filling in the vacuum left in the wake of D.-H. Kahnweiler's imposed exile—Rosenberg purchased works by almost all of the Cubists. His defense of Cubism would prove to be longer-lasting and wider-ranging than Reverdy's. His first tactical maneuver was to address a letter to Le Carnet de la Semaine denying the chimerical claim made by Vauxcelles that both Picasso and Gris had defected. Much more poignant and difficult to combat, however, was his second tactical maneuver: a succession of prominent Cubist exhibitions held at the Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, in Rosenber's Hôtel particulier, 19, rue de la Baume, located in the elegant and stylishly fashionable 8th arrondissement of Paris. This series of large exhibitions—including works created between 1914 and 1918 by almost all the major Cubists—began 18 December with Cubist sculptures by Henri Laurens, followed in January 1919 with an exhibition of Cubist paintings by Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger in February, Georges Braque in March, Juan Gris April, Gino Severini May, and Pablo Picasso in June, marking the climax of the campaign. This well-orchestrated program showed that Cubism was still very much alive, and it would remain so for at least a half-decade. Missing from this sequence of exhibitions were Jacques Lipchitz (who would exhibit in 1920), and those who had left France during the Great War: Robert Delaunay and Albert Gleizes most obviously. Nonetheless, according to Christopher Green, "this was an astonishingly complete demonstration that Cubism had not only continued between 1914 and 1917, having survived the war, but was still developing in 1918 and 1919 in its "new collective form" marked by "intellectual rigor". In the face of such a display of vigour, it really was difficult to maintain convincingly that Cubism was even close to extinction". File:Auguste Herbin, invitation, Galerie de L’Effort Moderne, March 1918.jpg|Auguste Herbin, Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, March 1918 File:Jean Metzinger, invitation card, Léonce Rosenberg, Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, January 1919.jpg|Jean Metzinger, Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, January 1919 File:Fernand Léger, invitation, Galerie de L’Effort Moderne, February 1919.jpg|Fernand Léger, Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, February 1919 File:Georges Braque, invitation, Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, March 1919.jpg|Georges Braque, Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, March 1919 File:Juan Gris, invitation, galerie L'Effort Moderne, Léonce Rosenberg, April 1919.jpg|Juan Gris, Galerie L'Effort Moderne, April 1919 File:Léopold Survage, invitation, Galerie de L’Effort Moderne, November 1920.jpg|Léopold Survage, Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, November 1920 File:Joseph Csaky, Exhibition poster, Galerie Léonce Rosenberg, 1920.jpg|Joseph Csaky, Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, December 1920 File:Georges Valmier, invitation, Galerie de L’Effort Moderne, January 1921.jpg|Georges Valmier, Galerie de L'Effort Moderne, January 1921 ==Towards the crystal==

, c.1915, ''L'infirmière (The Nurse), reproduced in L'Élan'', Number 9, 12 February 1916 Further evidence to bolster the prediction made by Vauxcelles could have been found in a small exhibition at the Galerie Thomas (in a space owned by a sister of Paul Poiret, ). The first exhibition of Purist Art opened on 21 December 1918, with works by Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (later called Le Corbusier), who claimed to be successors of pre-war Cubism. The beginnings of a Purist manifesto in book-form had been published to coincided with the exhibition, titled Après le cubisme (After Cubism): The War over, everything organizes, everything is clarified and purified; factories rise, already nothing remains as it was before the War: the great Competition has tested everything and everyone, it has gotten rid of the aging methods and imposed in their place others that the struggle has proven their betters... toward rigor, toward precision, toward the best utilization of forces and materials, with the least waste, in sum a tendency toward purity. , 1920–21, Nature morte (Still Life), oil on canvas, 81.28 cm × 100.65 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Ozenfant and Jeanneret felt that Cubism had become too decorative, practiced by so many individuals that it lacked unity, it had become too fashionable. Their clarity of subject matter (more figurative, less abstract than the Cubists) had been welcomed by members of the anti-Cubist camp. They showed works that were a direct result of observation; perspectival space only slightly distorted. Ozenfant and Jeanneret, like Lhote, remained faithful to the Cubist idiom that form should not be abandoned. Some of the works exhibited related directly to the Cubism practiced during the war (such as Ozenfant's Bottle, Pipe and Books, 1918), with flattened planar structures and varying degrees of multiple perspective. In 1915, in collaboration with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, Ozenfant founded the magazine ''L'Élan'', which he edited until late 1916. In 1917 he met Jeanneret, with whom he would join forces between 1918 and 1925 on a venture called Purism: a variation of Cubism in both painting and architecture. In collaboration with the pro-Cubist writer, poet, and critique Paul Dermée, Ozenfant and Jeanneret founded the avant-garde journal ''L'Esprit Nouveau, published from 1920 to 1925. In the last issue, Jeanneret, under the pseudonym Paul Boulard, writes of how the laws of nature were manifested in the shape of crystals; the properties of which were hermetically coherent, both interiorly and exteriorly. In La peinture moderne, under the title Vers le crystal'', Ozenfant and Jeanneret liken the properties of crystals with the true Cubist, whose œuvre tends toward the crystal. Certain Cubists have created paintings that can be said to tend toward the perfection of the crystal. These works seem to approach our current needs. The crystal is, in nature, a phenomenon that affects us most because it clearly shows the path to geometric organization. Nature sometimes shows us how forms are built through a reciprocal interplay of internal and external forces ... following the theoretical forms of geometry; and man delights in these arrangements because he finds in them justification for his abstract conceptions of geometry: the spirit of man and nature find a factor of common ground, in the crystal. ... In true Cubism, there something organic that proceeds from the inside to the outside. ... The universality of the work depends on its plastic purity. (Ozenfant and Jeanneret, 1923–25) Ozenfant and Le Corbusier wrote La Peinture moderne in 1925. And in La peinture moderne, 1923–25, with Cubism visibly still alive and in highly crystalline form, Ozenfant and Jeanneret write: We see the real cubists continue their work, imperturbable; they are also seen to continue their influence on spirits. ... They will arrive more or less strongly depending on the oscillations of their nature, their tenacity or their concessions and analysis [tâtonnement] that are characteristic of artistic creation, to search for a state of clarification, condensation, firmness, intensity, synthesis; they will arrive at a true virtuosity of the game of shapes and colors, as well as a highly developed science of the composition. Overall and despite the personal coefficients, one can discern a tendency towards what might be imaged in saying: tendency toward the crystal. The Crystal Cubists embraced the stability of everyday life, the enduring and the pure, but too the classical, with all that it signified respecting art and ideal. Order and clarity, right to the core of its Latin roots, was a dominant factor within the circle of Rosenberg's L'Effort moderne. While Lhote, Rivera, Ozenfant and Le Corbusier attempted to attain a compromise between the abstract and nature in their search for another Cubism, all of the Cubists shared common goals. The first, writes Green: "that art should not be concerned with the description of nature. ... The rejection of Naturalism was intimately bound up with the second basic principle shared by them all: that the work of art, being not an interpretation of anything else, was something in its own right with its own laws". These same sentiments observable from the outset of Cubism were now essential and prevailing to an extent never before seen. There was a third principle that followed from the former that came to light during the Crystal period, again according to Green: "the principle that nature should be approached as no more than the supplier of 'elements' to be pictorially or sculpturally developed and then freely manipulated according to the laws of the medium alone". ==Gleizes==

, 1914–15, ''Portrait of an Army Doctor (Portrait d'un médecin militaire), oil on canvas, 119.8 × 95.1 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Reproduced in Ozenfant, Jeanneret, La peinture moderne Musician (Florent Schmitt), 1915 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum); and with a much more ambitious subject matter: Le Port de New York'', 1917 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum). Gleizes' mobilization was not a major obstacle to his production of artwork, though, working primarily on small scale, he did produce one relatively large piece: Portrait of an Army Doctor. An admirer of his work, his commanding officer—the regimental surgeon portrayed by Gleizes in this painting—made arrangements so that Gleizes could continue to paint while mobilized at Toul. This work, a precursor to Crystal Cubism, consists of broad, overlapping planes of brilliant color, dynamically intersecting vertical, diagonal, horizontal lines coupled with circular movements. These two works, according to Gleizes, represented a break from 'Cubism of analysis', from the representation of volume of the first period of Cubism. He had now undertaken a path that lead to 'synthesis', with its starting point in 'unity'. (Purchased from the artist in 1951. Dépôt du Centre Pompidou, 1998). The 1920 version, reproduced in Ozenfant, Jeanneret, La peinture moderne, In his 1920 publication, Du Cubisme et les moyens de le comprendre, Gleizes explained that Cubism was now at a stage of development in which fundamental principles could be deduced from particular facts, applicable to a defined class of phenomena, drawn and taught to students. These basic theoretical postulates could be as productive for future developments of the fine arts as the mathematically based principles of three-dimensional perspective had been since the Renaissance. Painting and its Laws Albert Gleizes undertook the task of writing the characterizations of these principles in Painting and its Laws (La Peinture et ses lois), published by gallery owner Jacques Povolozky in the journal La Vie des lettres et des arts, 1922-3, and as a book in 1924. In La Peinture et ses lois Gleizes deduces the fundamental laws of painting from the picture plane, its proportions, the movement of the human eye and the physical laws. This theory, subsequently referred to as translation-rotation, "ranks with the writings of Mondrian and Malevich", writes art historian Daniel Robbins, "as one of the most thorough expositions of the principles of abstract art, which in his case entailed the rejection not only of representation but also of geometric forms". , front cover of ''Action, Cahiers Individualistes de philosophie et d'art'', Volume 1, No. 1, February 1920 The approach: Gleizes bases these laws both on truisms inherent throughout the history of art, and especially on his own experience since 1912, such as: "The primary goal of art has never been exterior imitation" (p. 31); "Artworks come from emotion... the product of individual sensibility and taste" (p. 42); "The artist is always in a state of emotion, sentimental exaltation [ivresse]" (p. 43); "The painting in which the idea of abstract creation is realized is no longer an anecdote, but a concrete fact" (p. 56); "Creating a painted artwork is not the emission of an opinion" (p. 59); "The plastic dynamism will be born out of rhythmic relations between objects... establishing novel plastic liaisons between purely objective elements that compose the painting" (p. 22). Continuing, Gleizes states that the 'reality' of a painting is not that of a mirror, but of the object... issue of imminent logic (p. 62). "The subject-pretext tending toward numeration, inscribed following the nature of the plane, attains a tangent intersections between known images of the natural world and unknown images that reside within intuition" (p. 63). Defining the laws: Rhythm and space are for Gleizes the two vital conditions. Rhythm is a consequence of the continuity of certain phenomena, variable or invariable, following from mathematical relations. Space is a conception of the human psyche that follows from quantitative comparisons (pp. 35, 38, 51). This mechanism is the foundation for artistic expression. It is therefore both a philosophical and scientific synthesis. For Gleizes, Cubism was a means to arrive not only at a new mode of expression but above all a new way of thinking. This was, according to art historian , the foundation of both a new species of painting and an alternative relationship with the world; hence another principle of civilization. The problem set out by Gleizes was to replace anecdote as a starting point for the work of art, by the sole means of using the elements of the painting itself: line, form and color. Beginning with a central rectangle, taken as an example of elementary form, Gleizes points out two mechanical ways of juxtaposing form to create a painting: (1) either by reproducing the initial form (employing various symmetries such as reflectional, rotational or translational), or by modifying (or not) its dimensions. (2) By displacement of the initial form; pivoting around an imaginary axis in one direction or another. The choice of position (through translation and/or rotation), though based on the inspiration of the artist, is no longer attributed to the anecdotal. An objective and rigorous method, independent of the painter, replaces emotion or sensibility in the determination the placement of form, that is through translation and rotation. Schematic illustrations: Space and rhythm, according to Gleizes, are perceptible by the extent of movement (displacement) of planar surfaces. These elemental transformations modify the position and importance of the initial plane, whether they converge or diverge ('recede' or 'advance') from the eye, creating a series of new and separate spatial planes appreciable physiologically by the observer. Another movement is added to the first movement of translation of the plane to one side: Rotation of the plane. Fig. I shows the resulting formation that follows from simultaneous movements of rotation and translation of the initial plane produced on the axis. Fig II and Fig. III represent the simultaneous movements of rotation and translation of the rectangle, inclined to the right and to the left. The axis point at which movement is realized is established by the observer. Fig. IV represents the simultaneous movements of rotation and translation of the rectangle plane, with the position of the eye of the observed displaced left of the axis. Displacement toward the right (though not represented) is straightforward enough to imagine. With these figures Gleizes attempts to present, under the most simple conditions possible (simultaneous movements of rotation and translation of the plane), the creation of a spatial and rhythmic organism (Fig. VIII), with practically no initiative taken on the part of the artist who controls the evolutionary process. The planar surfaces of Fig. VIII are filled with hatching espousing the 'direction' of the planes. What emerges in the inert plane, according to Gleizes, through the movement followed by the eye of the observer, is "a visible imprint of successive stages of which the initial rhythmic cadence coordinated a succession of differing states". These successive stages permit the perception of space. The initial state, by consequence of the transformation, has become a spatial and rhythmic organism. Fig. I and Fig. II obtain mechanically, Gleizes writes; with minimal personal initiative, a "plastic spatial and rhythmic system", by the conjugation of simultaneous movements of rotation and translation of the plane and from the movements of translation of the plane to one side. The result is a spatial and rhythmic organism more complex than shown in Fig. VIII; demonstrating through mechanical, purely plastic means, the realization of a material universe independent of intentional intervention by the artist. This is sufficient to demonstrate, according to Gleizes, the possibilities of the plane to serve spatially and rhythmically by its own power. [''L'exposé hâtif de cette mécanique purement plastique aboutissant à la réalisation d'un univers matériel en dehors de l'intervention particulière intentionnelle, suffit à démontrer la possibilité du plan de signifier spatialement et rythmiquement par sa seule puissance'']. ==The end-product==

Throughout the war, to Armistice of 11 November 1918 and the series of exhibitions at Galerie de L'Effort Moderne that followed, the rift between art and life—and the overt distillation that came with it—had become the canon of Cubist orthodoxy; and it would persist despite its antagonists through the 1920s: ==Artists==

List of artists including those associated with Crystal Cubism to varying degrees between 1914 and the mid-1920s: • Alexander Archipenko • María Blanchard • Georges Braque • Joseph Csaky • Theo van Doesburg • Roger de La Fresnaye • Albert Gleizes • Juan Gris • Henri Hayden • Auguste Herbin • Henri Laurens • Fernand Léger • André Lhote • Jacques Lipchitz • Louis Marcoussis • Jean Metzinger • Piet Mondrian • Pablo Picasso • Diego Rivera • Gino Severini • Léopold Survage • Georges Valmier • Jacques Villon Related works These works, or works by these artists created during the same period, according to Christopher Green, are associated with Crystal Cubism, or were precursors in varying degrees to the style. File:Albert Gleizes, 1914, Woman with Animals, oil on canvas, 196.4 x 114.1 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection.jpg|Albert Gleizes, 1914, Woman with animals (La dame aux bêtes) Madame Raymond Duchamp-Villon, oil on canvas, 196.4 × 114.1 cm, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice File:Juan Gris, September 1915, Jeu d'échecs (The Checkerboard), oil on canvas, 92.1 x 73 cm, Art Institute of Chicago.jpg|Juan Gris, September 1915, ''Jeu d'échecs (The Checkerboard''), oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73 cm, Art Institute of Chicago File:Jean Metzinger, 1916, Fruit and a Jug on a Table, oil and sand on canvas, 115.9 x 81 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston..jpeg|Jean Metzinger, 1916, Fruit and a Jug on a Table, oil and sand on canvas, 115.9 × 81 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston File:Diego Rivera, c.1916, Maternidad, Angelina y el niño Diego, oil on canvas, 134.5 x 88.5 cm, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil.jpg|Diego Rivera, after August 1916, Maternidad, Angelina y et niño Diego (Motherhood, Angelina and the Child Diego), oil on canvas, 134.5 × 88.5 cm, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City File:Diego Rivera - Seated Woman (Women with the Body of a Guitar) - Google Art Project.jpg|Diego Rivera, 1916, Seated Woman (Woman with the Body of a Guitar), Frida Kahlo Museum File:Juan Gris - Glass and Water Bottle - Google Art Project.jpg|Juan Gris, 1917, Glass and Water Bottle, oil on panel, 54.8 × 32.7 cm, Ohara Museum of Art File:María Blanchard, 1916-18, Still Life with Red Lamp, oil on canvas, 115.6 × 73 cm.jpg|María Blanchard, 1916–18, Still Life with Red Lamp, oil on canvas, 115.6 × 73 cm File:Georges Braque, 1917, La Joueuse de mandoline, oil on canvas, 92 × 65 cm, Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art.jpg|Georges Braque, 1917, La Joueuse de mandoline, oil on canvas, 92 × 65 cm, Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art File:Gino Severini, 1919, Bohémien Jouant de L'Accordéon (The Accordion Player).jpg|Gino Severini, 1919, ''Bohémien Jouant de L'Accordéon (The Accordion Player)'', Museo del Novecento, Milan File:Louis Marcoussis Violon bouteilles de Marc et cartes 1919.jpg|Louis Marcoussis, 1919, Violon, bouteilles de Marc et cartes (Violin, Marc bottles and cards), gouache and watercolor over charcoal on paper, 45.8 × 24.5 cm File:Alexander Archipenko, c.1920, Femme assise (Composition), 31.1 x 23.2 cm, gouache on paper.jpg|Alexander Archipenko, c.1920, Femme assise (Composition), 31.1 × 23.2 cm, gouache on paper File:Albert Gleizes, 1920, Figure, gouache on canvas, 91.4 x 76.2 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.jpg|Albert Gleizes, 1920, Figure, gouache on canvas, 91.4 × 76.2 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA ==See also==