Proto-Cubism cubes": In light of the headway made by Cézanne, the multiple use of the word "cube" with reference to diverse works by diverse artists, and the other factors involved (political, social, cultural), it has been suggested that Cubism, with its proto-phase, would have emerged regardless of Picasso's intervention. The art historian and collector Douglas Cooper viewed Cubist painting to have been the beginning of a stylistic revolution which was inevitable. The American art scholar and MoMA curator William Rubin argued that Braque, with his commitment to a Cézannist syntax, would have created early Cubism had Picasso never existed. Pablo Picasso's
Crystal Cubism clearest and most intelligible definition of Cubism. At the outset of the First World War many artists were mobilized: Metzinger, Gleizes, Braque, Léger, de La Fresnaye, and Duchamp-Villon. Despite the brutal interruption, each found the time to continue making art, sustaining differing types of Cubism. Yet they discovered a ubiquitous link between the Cubist syntax (beyond pre-war attitudes) and that of the anonymity and novelty of mechanized warfare. Cubism evolved as much a result of an "evasion" of the inconceivable atrocities of war as of nationalistic pressures. Along with the evasion came the need to diverge further and further away