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Zurich, Munich and Paris. About the same time he had also been introduced
to the work of the Danish painters William Scharff, Olaf Rude and Vilhelm
Lundstroem who worked in a proto-cubist style and were exhibited
periodically in Copenhagen. And later, during visits to Paris in 1937 and 1938, he had again seen more samples
of Cubism at various exhibitions.
During his first
phase as an artist, however, Skov had found Cubism neither visually
appealing nor aesthetically compelling. That would change only after more
than fifteen years of dedicated work and artistic experience. Only then did
he come to understand the internal aesthetic necessity of the Cubist vision
and realize the revolutionary character, and the extent of the fundamental
breakthrough, that Cubism represented for Western art. And this in turn
made him appreciate the overall importance of Cubism in the emergence of
the contemporary art forms.
With the hindsight
of time, now a full generation later, there is, of course, general
agreement among art historians and critics concerning the historic
importance of Cubism and its immense influence on Western art. A few
examples from several noted authors will serve to illustrate this point:
“Cubism has proved to be probably the
most potent generative force in twentieth-century art and has transformed
our western ideas concerning the purpose and possibilities of pictorial
representation” [Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, 1970, Phaidon Press
Ltd.].
“The evolution of painting, and of
cubism in particular, shared with science the common characteristic of
drawing upon late nineteenth-century achievements, but, in so doing, of
intensifying and transforming them. The result was the overthrow of much of
the heritage of the nineteenth and earlier centuries. In certain respects
cubism brought to an end artistic traditions that had begun as early as the
fifteenth century. At the same time, the cubists created a new artistic
tradition that is still alive, for they originated attitudes and ideas that
spread rapidly to other areas of culture and that to an important degree
underlie artistic thought even today”, [Edward F. Fry, 1966, Oxford
University Press].
“It is almost impossible to exaggerate the
importance of Cubism. It was a revolution in the visual arts as great as
that which took place in the early Renaissance. Its effects on later art,
on film, and on architecture are already so numerous that we hardly notice
them”, [John Berger, Success and Failure of Picasso, 1965, Penguin Books
Ltd.].
“The outlook of the Cubists, it has been
seen, was intensely realistic, and a true appreciation of their painting
depends ultimately on the spectator’s ability to reconstruct its
subject-matter. [....] There can be no doubt that to the historian of the
future, Cubism will appear as one of the major turning points in the
evolution of western art, a revolution comparable in its effects to any of
those which have altered the course of European art, and which has
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