“The nineteenth century had witnessed the beginning and development of a long challenge to academic practice across the whole gamut of its commitments: from its ideological complicity with bourgeois values and taste to the technical features with which it conveyed those values. The development of a largely independent avant-garde subculture laid the ground for art that by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century was not merely hard to understand from within the central value system of the culture, but was an explicit and intentional critique of the presumptions of ‘normal’ representations of the world.”
Art & Visual Culture 1850-2010: Modernity to Globalisation: Modernity to Globalisation, edited by Steve Edwards, and Paul Woods, Tate Enterprises Ltd, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
How was this “critique of the presumptions of ‘normal’ representations of the world” staged in cubism? How did it contribute to abstraction? These are difficult questions. Your job is to try to process the reading and arrive at some tentative answers and questions.
