DEFINITION OF SHAPE

Shapes are limited to two dimensions: length and width. Geometric shapes -- circles, rectangles, squares, triangles and so on -- have the clear edges one achieves when using tools to create them. Organic shapes have natural, less well-defined edges

SHAPE ON CUBISM Picasso's Woman with Mandolin (1910) further illustrates the groundwork that was being laid by these two artists. Picasso, always the sculptor, fragments the girl's body into facets that are modeled to simulate their projection out of the flat picture plane toward the viewer and that portray her in movement as she strums her mandolin. What Picasso is trying to depict here is the fourth dimension, the space/time continuum. In his Introduction to Metaphysics of 1903, Henri Bergson argues that human consciousness experiences space and time as ever-changing and heterogeneous. With the passage of time, an observer accumulates in his memory a store of perceptual information about a given object in the external visible world, and this accumulated experience becomes the basis for the observer’s conceptual knowledge of that object. By contrast, the intellect or reasoning faculty always represents time and space as homogenous. Bergson argued that intellectual perception led to a fundamentally false representation of the nature of things, that in nature nothing is ever absolutely still. Instead the universe is in a constant state of change or flux. An observer views an object and its surrounding environment as a continuum, fusing into one another. The task of metaphysics, according to Bergson, is to find ways to capture this flux, especially as it is expressed in consciousness. To represent this flux of reality, Picasso began to make references to the fourth dimension by "sticking together" several three-dimensional spaces in a row.

Girl with Mandolin (1910)