Excerpt from The Rise of Cubism Impressionism rejuvenated painting; it brightened the palette and broke with old super uous laws. Its goal, however, was too limited to suffice for more than one generation. With it, illusionism appeared as one last burst of color pyro technics, sputtered and extinguished itself. The period following Impressionism must be described as lyric, not lyric in the literary sense of mood, but lyric in the pain'terly sense of form. The purpose of recording history, which painting had fulfilled before Masaccio in a narrative fashion and after him in a dramatic fashion, had vanished. And for that reason painting in our time has become lyric, its stimulus the pure intense delight in the beauty of things. Lyric painting celebrates this beauty without epic or dramatic overtones. It strives to capture this beauty in the unity of the work of art. The nature of the new painting is clearly characterized as representational as well as structural: representational in that it tries to repro duce the formal beauty of things; structural in its attempt to grasp the meaning of this formal beauty in the painting. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."