Synthetic Cubism at War: New Necessities, New Challenges. Concerning the Consequences of the Great War in the Elaboration of a Synthetic-Cubist Syntax

Belén Atencia Conde-Pumpido

Abstract
When we talk about the Synthetic Cubism period, what exactly are we referring to? What aesthetic possibilities and considerations define it insofar as its origin and later evolution are concerned? To what extent did the disorder that the Great War unleashed, with all its political, sociological and moral demands, influence the reformulation of a purely synthetic syntax? This article attempts to answer these and other questions relating to the sociological-aesthetic interferences that would influence the Parisian Cubist style of the war years, and in particular the works of Juan Gris, María Blanchard, Jacques Lipchitz and Jean Metzinger during the spring and summer that they shared with one another in 1918, until it consolidated into what we now know as Crystal Cubism.

Cubism and war. The beginning of the end or infinite renewal?

[1] The exhibition "Cubism and War: the Crystal in the Flame", held in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona in 2016,¹ highlighted the renewed production undertaken in Paris during the war years by a small circle of artists who succeeded in taking Synthetic Cubism to its ultimate consequences.

[2] Linking the concepts of war and the avant-garde, or rather, the effects that the former had on the latter, is by no means novel. Undoubtedly a pioneering work on this issue, Kenneth Silver’s well-known publication² laid the foundations for a deeper understanding of the dismemberment of the very idea of a Parisian avant-garde in those years. Silver’s work examined how the avant-garde was undermined by the disruption of the conditions that had made it possible, namely the cosmopolitanism and artistic-cultural liberalism that the French capital had boasted from the end of the 19th century; these had allowed impressionists and post-impressionists to disassociate themselves from the established art circuit, and had opened the doors to the avid – and for the most part, destitute – foreign bohemians who gradually began congregating in the area between the Bateau Lavoir of Montmartre and the Ruche of Montparnasse.

[3] Silver’s initial contribution was subsequently followed by others which have delved into the consequences of the First World War insofar as the arts are concerned. It is an idea that is always present in the texts of Christopher Green,³ the curator of the exhibition at the Picasso Museum; his in-depth exploration of certain particularly relevant questions in that exhibition deserves further consideration.

[4] The first and most obvious one is the title of the exhibition and what it alludes to. The metaphor of the crystalline to refer to certain Cubist works is by no means novel; Maurice Raynal, Amedée Ozenfant and Jeanneret – Le Corbusier – made use of it to allude to the work of Braque and Picasso in 1912, which seemed to shatter into small shards of glass.⁴ Green however, ever since his early texts and following in the footsteps of Maurice Raynal and Albert Gleizes, has recycled the term in order to refer to the very specific production of Cubist art by a group of artists in Paris during the war years, whose coming together is an intrinsic result and consequence of the armed conflict.⁵ On one hand, the term refers to the perception of their works as having "a sharp clarity and the serene balance of a crystalline structure".⁶ At the same time, the title "crystal in the flame" refers to a Cubism scorched by the war disaster, and looking for a new starting point.

[5] I cannot agree more. In previous texts I have already defended the idea that Cubism did not end with Picasso leaving for Avignon and Braque marching off to the front, and that the production of Cubist art before the war was not something unique to Kahnweiler's four inescapable artists. I have also maintained – and I believe that this is the most important point – that Synthetic Cubism can in no way be limited to the meagre production created by Braque, Picasso and Gris in 1913 and 1914, which by and large involved transferring to the canvas what they had learned from collages and papiers collés.⁷ Not only did Cubism have a second life, but it was during that second life that Cubism went from being apparent to fully synthetic; that it took on this crystalline appearance, as discussed below.

[6] This claim, which grants Synthetic Cubism a greater depth and sophistication than is apparent at first glance, requires taking into account another paramount issue, without which it is unlikely that this development would ever have occurred. With the outbreak of the First World War, the groups of artists who were apparently consolidated around a dealer, a movement or a gallery, dissolved, obliging those who remained in what was by now a sadly dilapidated Paris, to reorganise. And that is what happened to Cubism. On the eve of the war, Braque’s and Picasso’s absence from the Parisian art scene had made their work less questioned in the art press, as happenned also with Gris and Léger after their alliance with Kahnweiler. The art critics close to them, like Salmon and Allard, championed them as leaders of Cubism, while the Salon Cubists, generally reviled by the press, were considered to be of lower rank. In truth, the press did not take into account that Gris was in many ways closer to the premises of the Salon Cubists than he was to Braque and Picasso, while it labelled Léger a Cubist even though his work did not necessarily have much to do with that of his peers in the gallery.⁸ But suddenly, overnight, Braque and Léger are enlisted, Kahnweiler exiled and the galleries and salons closed. Whatever separated their alleged respective camps disappeared and, as Aeschylus would say, the force of necessity became irresistible.

[7] Someone whom the Cubists who stayed in Paris found irresistible, plagued as they were by the necessities of having to live, work and sell, was the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg. Having followed developments in Cubism for a number of years, Rosenberg took advantage of Kahnweiler’s departure to set himself up as the leader of the movement. His intention was to inaugurate an exclusively Cubist gallery at the end of the war, which would be proudly called L'Effort Moderne; he did not hesitate to sign contracts as early as 1916 with those artists whom Picasso and Gris suggested to him, and with others whose work appeared to have a certain Cubist air.⁹ His bench, as he liked to call it, consisted of those previously hired by Kahnweiler, namely, Gris, Léger, Braque and Picasso – the latter without a contract with the dealer – and a few more names such as Jean Metzinger, Diego Rivera, Auguste Herbin, Gino Severini, María Blanchard, Jacques Lipchitz and Henri Laurens. The war, however, did not end as quickly as some voices had predicted, and the dealer's plans had to be delayed for some time yet. Enlisted at the front, like some of the artists in his future gallery, and distant from those who had fled Paris during these years, he had no choice but to maintain an epistolary relationship¹⁰ with them, pending the long-awaited inauguration of the Galerie de l'Effort Moderne, which would only happen in March 1918. Denying all of them the chance to participate in the extremely few exhibitions that were held in Paris during those years,¹¹ with the excuse of preserving the impact, that a battery of personal Cubist exhibitions would generate, for after the war,¹² Rosenberg and his circle saw clearly from the very outset that this new Cubism, which sought to rid itself of the flames of war, would have to be reformulated from head to toe.

[8] And this brings us to the other fundamental issue addressed by Green in Barcelona, intended to be the central premise of this article. The issue of how Synthetic Cubism struggled to position itself in the face of two very strong poles of attraction generated during the war: on the one hand, the rappel à l'ordre, a consequence of the natural yet no less frightening conviction that the road to salvation was to be found in multidisciplinary protectionism and in a return to traditional and deeply patriotic values rather than in strange and incomprehensible modernity; on the other hand, abstraction, a result of the simultaneous rejection of realism and reality, of the dehumanizing nature of war. The temptation of both roads opened up to the Cubists in the following years, causing them to oscillate between them. Of all the members of Rosenberg’s gallery, only a few would ever manage to shrewdly implement these two possibilities, in what we might consider a fully synthetic Cubism, a Crystal Cubism. And even in these cases, assertion was not immediate.

At a crossroads: tradition, figuration, synthesis and abstraction

[9] What became obvious to the Cubists, almost contemporaneously with the outbreak of war, was that the collages of the pre-war period – altogether too chaotic and extra-pictorial for a society that was demanding a return to French tradition –, were no longer satisfactory.¹³ The combination of avant-garde and tradition was making its presence felt with increasing and ever greater lucidity as the only plausible alternative to the theoretical organ of the future gallery. With the skilful and resourceful Pierre Reverdy and his newly released magazine Nord Sud to the fore, they would strive to fervently defend the syncretism between Cubism and tradition, based not so much on the final appearance of the work, unequivocally avant-garde, as on its creative process.¹⁴ And this idea is in itself already revealing when we observe the emphasis that the Cubists placed on the modern effort to build, in the face of the palpable destruction that was asphyxiating them. For Reverdy, the "purification of forms" involved selecting from nature only those forms that were immutable, avoiding the accidental. With the help of these immutable forms, the artists would be able to build a new pictorial language. The construction of this new pictorial syntax would be progressively translated by those artists into the construction of a series of pre-conceived abstract forms that could be used in their canvases, like puzzle pieces, regardless of the object to be represented. But let us see how these ideas 'crystallized', from a practical point of view.

[10] The first and most obvious solution for artists at the beginning of the war was to transpose the possibilities of collages and papiers peints to oil, that is to say, 'to paint the collages'. This resource had already been used by Gris in 1914 in works such as Verre et paquet de tabac (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris),¹⁵ or Tabac, journal et bouteille de vin rosé (private collection),¹⁶ whose final compositions, as was the case with the collages, underscore the two-dimensional nature of the canvas, thus diminishing the sense of volume. In this device, quite a few authors have perceived relationships analogous to those found in the Baroque art of Zurbarán.¹⁷

[11] Though most of the historiography that places the end of Cubism in 1914 has considered this procedure to be justifiably synthetic, Cubism would actually still need some time to become fully so, to be not simply a search for a synthetic result, but rather the materialization of a synthetic conception and implementation. Crucially, as argued by Reverdy,¹⁸ this would not necessarily entail the free and indistinct manipulation of the abstract drawings that structured the compositions. This approach would justify the capacity, allegedly immanent to the Cubism of those years, to configure, to create a new artistic language, thereby simultaneously dissociating itself from the denial and the mere imitation of reality.

[12] Taking as an example Gris’ representation of the wine glasses that are to be found in his works in 1915 and 1916, we will see how most of them, albeit fragmented and made up of various planes, do nevertheless maintain their individual corporeal entity. In Compotier sur un tapis, 1916 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm),¹⁹ the inner fragmentation of the glass, which combines views of the same from the front, the side and the top, is framed by the actual contour of the glass, represented in a more or less realistic way. This device becomes even more evident in other examples such as Compotier, verre et citron (Phillips Collection, Washington, DC)²⁰ or Compotier, verre et journal (private collection), both from the same year. In these, the inner fragmentation of the object, and even the multiplicity of perspectives, are practically cancelled out, making it therefore possible to individualize – even to eliminate, metaphorically speaking – the object-glass from the rest of the composition without prejudice to the latter. Even when the interior structure and the multiplicity of planes of these works becomes complicated, as is the case in Le paquet de tabac, 1916 (private collection), Gris’ wine glasses continue to have an identity of their own.

[13] But let us not focus our attention on Gris alone; other artists such as María Blanchard, Jean Metzinger and Jacques Lipchitz explored similar possibilities around this same time. And they were not the only ones. Diego Rivera, Henri Laurens and Gino Severini, fellow gallery colleagues and Cubists, were also interested in these matters. However, as we shall see, from these opening years of the war, and more precisely between 1917 and 1918, the solutions that the former arrived at share specific similarities.

[14] If we analyse the works by Blanchard from the same period and compare them to the above-mentioned works by Gris, such as Composition cubiste. Nature morte verte à la lampe (LL-A Collection, Madrid)²¹ or Nature morte (private collection), both from 1916, we will see how the conceptual procedure she developed to represent her wine glasses is similar to that of Gris. In both cases, the facetation and multiplicity of inner points of view of the glass are not called into doubt; however it would appear that they are all enclosed within the interior of the now defined silhouette of the wine glass.

[15] Metzinger, having been conscripted to serve in a telegraph station where he spent all of 1914 and 1915, was discharged after he developed a heart condition that returned him to civilian life, but not before having spent quite some time in a hospital during 1916.²² In the meagre output that such a situation allowed him, one can appreciate the gradual abandonment of decorative models, textured surfaces, geometric shapes, and rectilinear grids that had marked his work in previous years, all of which gave way to a more simplified and synthetic form of Cubism.

[16] The evolution produced in three of his 1916 works confirms these advances.²³ In L’Été (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen),²⁴ the presence of decorative elements is more than evident in the botanical backgrounds and in the details of the protagonist’s costume. At the same time, an interesting analogy is created between object and plane, very much akin to what Gris and Blanchard were doing that same year, for example in the representation of the fruit in the bowl, whose frontal and manifestly naturalist vision is framed within a single plane.

[17] In my opinion, Fruits et pichet sur une table (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)²⁵ and Nature morte à la lampe (Museum of Modern Art, New York), both painted that same year, mark an indisputable progress with respect to L’Été. Although in many cases they still maintain the object-plane affinity, and although they resort to such decorative elements as tablecloths and wallpapers,²⁶ the possibilities offered by conceding one single abstract plane to different elements simultaneously constitute a gigantic step in their own right. The glass of wine, the bottle of Banyuls, and the fruit bowl in Fruits et pichet sur une table, which not only share the same plane but in fact confuse realities – particularly evident in the coinciding representation of the neck of the bottle and the foot of the fruit bowl –, already anticipate the subsequent development of Cubism in 1917 and 1918.

[18] Lipchitz was also immersed in similar issues. The possibility of starting off from indistinct abstract forms to arrive at the representation of a specific object had seduced him from the outbreak of war. Sculpture (Tate Modern, London)²⁷ arises precisely from these problems. Also known as Tête, it is a work that would end up being irreversibly included in the Cubist movement and would successfully bring to fruition a large part of the cabals that had troubled him in sculptural matters, related to the creation of a genuinely sculptural formula, that owed nothing whatsoever to painting.²⁸ Paradoxically, it also plunged the artist into a major crisis.

[19] The genius of Sculpture lies in the fact that, as Lipchitz himself said, it was entirely conceived from purely abstract forms which, when combined, created something that we might well identify with a head without such a thing being actually all that clear. In other words, compared to other Cubist working methods, which started from abstract forms to become recognizable forms, in the case of Sculpture this possibility did not exist, so the subsequent anatomical similarity was something of a surprise for the artist himself.²⁹ However, Sculpture did contain within itself an irresolvable problem: despite the great formal, conceptual and material achievements,³⁰ Lipchitz saw how he was hopelessly distancing himself from the subject and was in fact entering the realm of pure abstraction.

[20] The possibilities raised by a work created just a little later, Homme à la guitare, 1916 (Museum of Modern Art, New York),³¹ represent a new step forward for Lipchitz. With a more complicated structure than the removable figures of 1915 and early 1916,³² this work consists of varied and intricate rectangular planes, complex shapes that suggest, as did its predecessors, the human form. The key factor of this piece lies in the importance that negative space acquires in it, framed as it is in the very centre of the figure, clarifying it, giving it unity, but above all rendering it independent of nature.³³ From a structural point of view, the ploy between the representative and the abstract is becoming increasingly mature.

[21] Therefore, by 1916 Metzinger, Blanchard, Gris and Lipchitz had already set off down that road. Their 1913 and 1914 works had been based on the mere transposition to canvas of the possibilities of collages and papiers peints, giving the appearance of synthesis, as opposed to the profound decay of the planes that made up works prior to these years. Now, these artists, grouped together more or less haphazardly in the promise of a future gallery following the signing of the armistice, delved into similar issues around the idea of re-conceiving the concepts of abstraction, figuration and synthesis. The possibilities suggested by the creation of a new reality, configured through abstract drawings that evoke a figurative element in the mind of the spectator, began to seduce these artists. And it was even more the case for the defenders of the renovated Cubism of wartime, who now, more than ever before, had to align themselves with the ideas of order and tradition. However, the process had not yet reached its zenith. For this, we must wait until the spring of 1918, when Gris, Blanchard, Metzinger and Lipchitz met in Beaulieu-près-Loches, fleeing from 'Big Bertha', as a German howitzer gun type was referred to at the time.

The Beaulieu group, the purification of shape and the crystallization of Cubism in 1918 and 1919

[22] If throughout 1916, Gris, Blanchard, Metzinger and Lipchitz had been exploring the possibilities offered by the manipulation of abstract planes for the configuration of their works, still in many cases maintaining the equivalences between object-plane, a change began however to take root in Gris’ work in early 1917.³⁴ In Compotier et fruits sur un guéridon, of January of that year (private collection), the corporeality of the glass in the lower right corner slowly begins to fade. However, even though we come across elements that were still in debt to a figurative conception – for example, the pears on the left side of the canvas –, the configuration of some of them, as is the case of the glass of wine in question, reveals a change with respect to his 1916 work. The object cannot now be removed from the composition without prejudice to other compositional planes that allude in turn to other objects.

[23] Other works by Gris, from September of that same year, confirm that the process of purification of the forms referred to by Reverdy in his texts,³⁵ was not immediate. Although in works such as Nature morte: le verre (Philadelphia Museum of Art), or Verre et as de trèfle (private collection), he once again identifies the abstract plane with the figurative, in Bouteille et verre (private collection) he yet again questions himself about the inverse ploy. By November he is making rather bolder proposals similar to those of Violon et journal (Alicia Koplowitz Collection, Bilbao), where the planes are now virtually indivisible.

[24] The possibilities suggested by the creation of a single reality, by means of several abstract planes, do however persuade Gris, particularly so as of the spring of 1918, when he and his wife Josette flee to Beaulieu-près-Loches to escape the explosions generated by the German howitzer shells, which were terrifying Paris. The two Le Verre, created in April (Glasgow Art Gallery and Richard S. Zeisler Collection, New York City), Carafe, verre et pipe, from June (Art Gallery of Toronto), and above all, Pipe et blague à tabac, probably from July (private collection), reveal the compositional and purely synthetic process that we would be perfectly right to call Crystal Cubism.

[25] In Beaulieu-près-Loches, Gris is visited by Metzinger,³⁶ Lipchitz and Blanchard, and, accompanying them all, Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro.³⁷ While each one of them had simultaneously managed to arrive at similar solutions, the discussions, exchanges and borrowings they shared during those months would mark a turning point in their works. Once the previous meditations had been overcome, the plane was finally the protagonist, the element that shaped the final object, which made it possible to use it indefinitely regardless of the object being represented. Gris himself realized this; he writes to Rosenberg: "Without being happy with what I am doing, at least I think that these two things mark a quite remarkable advance over what I have done before."³⁸ Based on the catalogue raisonné by Cooper,³⁹ Gris is probably referring to Harlequin (Telefónica Collection, Madrid) and Le Meunier (Louise Leiris Gallery, Paris), both from May 1918. If we compare Harlequin with Maisons de Beaulieu (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo), finished just a month earlier, we will see how certain abstract planes appear in both works. This formal elasticity is total from the point and moment when the theme ceases to have a dominant role; the exchange of forms is made indiscriminately possible between landscapes, still lifes or figures.

[26] As far as Lipchitz was concerned, from the outset, the primary issue had revolved around the elaboration of an autonomous and sensitive sculptural-artistic language, able at the same time to enter into a dialogue between the figurative and the abstract. This road had already been opened by Homme à la mandoline, 1916 (private collection), and its use of negative space, but it would be after 1917, when his relationship with Gris had grown more intense,⁴⁰ and more particularly in 1918, during his stay in Beaulieu, that his syntax would achieve greater maturity. In 1917, the Lithuanian artist resorted to combining techniques akin to those of Cézanne, reinterpreted from new constructive and spatial perspectives, with iconographic sources borrowed from such masters of French art as Ingrès or Poussin;⁴¹ this reached its culmination in his famous series of Bathers. While in Homme à la mandoline his desire to configure this new sculptural language complicated the identification of the subject, the Bathers would make a 180 degree turn to recover it.

[27] A good example of this is Bather III, 1917 (Tate Modern, London): though conceived through non-representational forms, when taken as a whole, these suggest the figure of a bather drying herself. This is a decisive breakthrough in Lipchitz’s work: if on the one hand it combined the achievements of the manipulation of abstract drawings without renouncing the subject, on the other hand the result, even apparently more abstract than Homme à la mandoline, proclaimed itself to be profoundly naturalist and classic. The achievement, therefore, of the manipulation of abstract planes that suggest a concrete subject was already a reality in Lipchitz’s work from 1917. Moreover, in works such as Bas relief I (National Gallery of Art, Washington),⁴² from the period spent in Beaulieu, we can see the recovery of the same representative plane of the head and shoulders of Baigneuse assise (private collection)⁴³ and the bottle of Bas relief I. This reveals the possibility, available from then on, of interchanging the planes of his works,⁴⁴ which is just what Gris was doing.

[28] In Green’s opinion, Metzinger began working in a manner akin to that of Gris and Lipchitz toward the end of 1917.⁴⁵ The new method translated into the visible management of geometric frames that would take structural integrations to the limit and would imbue the exchange of forms with great flexibility. The progress is confirmed by the artist himself in his correspondence of that same year. Thus in February, he announced to his dealer that he had just "finished a series of paintings that mark a real progress, at least this is the opinion of my comrades",⁴⁶ and in March, he assured him that he was endeavouring to "paint in an increasingly simple and aesthetic manner".⁴⁷ Previously, Metzinger had told Gleizes that his painting was "more complicated than ever before, even though it looked simpler",⁴⁸ an impression that he would go on to ratify to Rosenberg: "I try to cast aside certain accidental minutiae and an excessive use of colour that had previously ruined the greatness and unity of my paintings. I am trying to paint in a simpler and more solid way."⁴⁹

[29] The exchange of abstract forms is also evident in his work in 1918, despite the fact that his stay in Beaulieu was brief in comparison to that of his companions. If we take Homme assis devant une table as an example (private collection), we will see how the plane of the figure in the top left corner is very similar to the right side of the face of the main character, if this is turned around. And not only that, it is also similar to the one used to represent the bottle on the table. The plane itself is recurrent in Metzinger, who uses it again in Nature morte à la bouteille et poires (private collection)⁵⁰ from the same year. That the manipulation of abstract planes is analogous to what Gris and Lipchitz were doing is a fact, but there is more to it than that. All these abstract planes, very similar in the works of Metzinger in 1918, are also very similar to those used by Lipchitz in his works, and more specifically to those found in Homme à la mandoline from 1916. It is not the only allusion that Metzinger makes; clearly aware of how to use circular shapes to recreate the mouths of glasses and bottles, this device was in turn used by Laurens, also a member of L'Effort Moderne and with whom Metzinger would play with the ambiguity between the shape of an eye and an olive on more than one occasion.⁵¹ He also exchanged with Gris, with whom he would go on to explore the possibilities of playing with space through the representation of mirrors and windows, present in the works of both between 1917 and 1918, and indeed the basis of Gris’ later work.

[30] Metzinger was not the only one involved in these ploys and exchanges. If we look at such works as Nature morte cubiste by María Blanchard, dated 1918 (Guillermo de Osma Collection, Madrid), we will see how her representation of the wine glass, as was the case with Gris’ wine glasses around the same time, loses corporeality. The now fuller abstract lines become independent of the figurative, and the plastic language becomes more versatile. In addition to this, Blanchard uses similar permutations to those of Metzinger, for example, in the light blue plane that forms part of the wine glass and which is very similar to that used for the same purpose by Lipchitz in Bas Relief I.

Epilogue

[31] In light of the above, it seems clear that much of what Cubism meant during these years would not have had any raison d’être without the war. Without it, many of the artists that formed the second wave of Cubism would not have worked together around Rosenberg, forced by their need to be commercially protected by a dealer. Without the war, the imperatives of returning to tradition – thematic, stylistic and material – would not have coerced the avant-garde movements in such a way; neither would artists have been obliged to dissociate themselves from reality, from representation itself, to immerse themselves in a coma of the senses that would protect them from everything that surrounded them.

[32] The commitment of the second wave of Cubism not to give up their avant-garde essence was unwavering. In the central point of Reverdy’s passionate defences lies the key to understanding their eagerness to attach themselves to tradition without betraying themselves. Their limitless passion for the chattels of their everyday lives – the desk, the bottle and the wine glass, the packet of tobacco, the pipe – prevented them from turning toward non-figuration. Instead, they preferred integrating the possibilities of abstraction through the purification of shapes, which once they had been abstractly recycled, were used in the preparation of their works. In the face of war, their commitment to the creation of a new language was their modern effort to transcend the conflict.

[33] All these efforts, which they had all cultivated from the beginning of the war, with greater or lesser fortune, would very probably not have reached the climax that Crystal Cubism entailed – or that climax would have been reached in different ways –, if the German howitzer shells had not tormented Paris between March and August 1918, forcing Gris, Metzinger, Blanchard and Lipchitz to take refuge in Beaulieu. Not only did these artists manage to develop a language all of their own, they actually developed a common, collective language.

[34] I emphasize the concept of collective art because the idea of the collective was clearly present in the Cubist proposal during the war years. Are not the search for a common language and the apparent perception of family protection a consequence of the war?⁵² Rosenberg in particular had sought to highlight this idea in his texts, and Dermée, Reverdy and Raynal had also alluded to it. It was also the opinion of certain Parisian critics when personal exhibitions finally took place in L'Effort Moderne after the war. Yet, I believe that the work carried out during these years by all of them was at first independent, comparable and similar, a result of their meetings, exchanges and personal friendships. Then, between those who shared the experience of Beaulieu, it evolved into an appreciation of identical plastic communication, which we now know as Crystal Cubism. And all of this, regrettably, would not have been possible without the war.

Reviewers
Joana Cunha Leal, Instituto de História da Arte, FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Nicholas Sawicki, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA

Local Editor
Begoña Farré Torras, Instituto de História da Arte, FCSH-Universidade Nova de Lisboa

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The text of this article is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0