The Body after Cubism

While the relationship of the body and Cubism has often been posed as one of opposition, one in which the return of the body is described as a lapse back into figuration and realism that takes place after Cubism, George Baker argues that Francis Picabia's Cubist works, those like Dances at the Spring from 1912, are evidence of the intense coupling—as opposed to dissolution—of the terms. Baker asserts that the bodily intensity of Picabia's Orphism represents a long overlooked countermodel for post-Cubist painting, with the physical movement and spatial disorientation of these works extending to their phenomenological interaction with the viewer, and it requires a revision of our understanding of Cubism itself.