David Ebony

Once upon a time, serious artists were expected to take a firm political stand. Through their works and activities they addressed social injustices, problems of hunger, unemployment, economic inequity, and racial, ethnic and sexual prejudices that permeated everyday life in America. Art for art’s sake was regarded as merely a bourgeois conceit; artists were “culture workers” and the most important of them willingly abandoned their ivory tower to better serve the proletariat.

Cubism shattered the conventions of virtually all art that came before it. Rebelling against the forms of Romanticism, Realism and Symbolism and rejecting the empty sentimentality of late 19th century art, this revolutionary movement, led by Picasso and Braque and launched in 1908, sought to reinvent the way everyday reality is perceived.