a cubist romance / 'mong the cubes i'd love to ramble

Above Cubism predated WWI French Army camouflage, more or less. This still image is from Rigadin painter cubist [Rigadin the Cubist Painter] a film by Georges Monca (1912), Pathé. See online detail. 

•••

All Aboard, a musical comedy that opened June 5, 1913 at Lew Fields' 44th Street Roof Garden in New York, as reviewed in The Sun, July 27, 1913, p. 12—

It is Ralph Riggs and his wife Katherine Witchie, who do the Cubist dance. The scene is in a studio of a Cubist and a Futurist painter and the lyrics of the song are as follows:

Said the Futurist boy to the Cubist girl

As they met on a poster blue:

"I don't know who the dickens I am—

and who in the deuce are you?"

Said the Cubist girl to the Futurist boy:

"We both were born, I think,

On a dark and dismal night last week

When the cat tipped over the ink."

Said the girl, "You must agree

We're awful sights to see."

Said the boy, "You seem to be

The girl that's made for me."

CHORUS

Oh, you Cubist girl, in cubes that curl

You little, wiggy-waggy, riggy-raggy,

ziggy-zaggy maid—

Picture puzzle queen,

From what I've seen

I think my style will suit you.

In the future when I'm painted

in every shade, like a crazy quilt,

although you're built,

to find you in the scramble

'Mong the cubes I'd love to ramble

A while some future day you'll be

My jumble ju-ju bee

My riggy-raggy,

Ziggy-zaggy,

Cubist girl.

Caligari, distorted film sets and WWI ship camouflage

Above USS Nantahala in dazzle camouflage scheme (1918).

•••

Herman George Scheffauer, “The Vivifying of Space” in The New Vision in German Arts. London: Ernest Benn, 1924—

[his description of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari] Trees are resolved into conventionalized, constructed forms; foliage becomes a mass of light, dark and shaded crescents, rounds and silhouettes—brilliantly colored in the original scene. Floors and pavements are streaked, splashed and spotted, divided and decorated in bars, crosses, diagonals, serpentines and arrows. The walls become as banners or as transparencies, space fissued by age, or as slates upon which the lightning blazes strange hieroglyphs; or they become veils and vanish in a mosaic of scrambled forms and surfaces, like a liner in camouflage.

Gaunt chimneys rear and slant like masts in this city storm. Cunning lines of composition and the adroit use of diagonals drive the perspective into an invisible “vanishing point.”

For more on the Caligari film sets, forced perspective, and other early avant-garde cinema, see Part Three of my recently posted video trilogy on the Ames Demonstrations here.