Life — December 25, 1913 — page 7: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "A Cubist Christmas" by Kate Masterson This page satirizes modernist "Cubist" art through a Christmas dinner scene. The cartoon above shows a family meal where a child asks why mother doesn't use her "finger bowl" while eating jam—she responds by asking why he can't lick his fingers instead. The accompanying poem parodies Cubist art's fragmented, abstract style by describing Christmas imagery in deliberately disjointed, nonsensical terms: "the herring bone in the pickle jar," candles of "pink yellow and green and blue," and moon imagery in "oilcloth glow." The satire mocks Cubism as incomprehensible and impractical—suggesting modernist art abandons sense and beauty for pretentious abstraction. The comparison to a chaotic, illogical Christmas dinner emphasizes the joke that Cubism makes "living" experiences confusing and unrecognizable.