The Concupiscence of
Cubism
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| Fernand Leger, "The Typographer" |
As The New York Times announced last year in its review of this superlative
exhibition, the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Cubist Painting—recently
donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art—fills a conspicuous gap in the Met’s
modern art collection, so much so that the museum has become a veritable rival to
MoMA and the Guggenheim in the field of modern painting. Aside from the long-term benefits of the gift
is the short-term one of this encompassing yet muscularly compact show, one
that helps us reconsider (yet ultimately reaffirm) the incomparable achievement
of the inventors of the form: Picasso,
Braque, Gris and Léger. As their works again
prove with undiminished bravura, these artists introduced some of the most
radical yet enduring changes to the cultural conception of what art is and how
it works. Beyond illusionism and the
representation of phenomenal reality, beyond structural abstraction and the
liberation of color and line from objects in space, painting was now first and
foremost a philosophic investigation of the relation between structure and
appearance, form and perception. The
rigor of this investigation ensured the work’s integrity as it oscillated
between representation and pure composition.
Art in the hands of the cubists had become both a metaphysical
discipline and a poetics of the sign.
Strangely,
while most reviewers are quick to celebrate the cubists’ creative destruction of
illusionistic space and the shift toward pure abstraction—a development the
movement certainly contributed to—its aesthetic essence remains this “reciprocity
of directions” between apparent depth and literal surface, as Leo Steinberg once
described it.
[1] In short, Cubism’s success still depends on an
assumption of illusionism, albeit an illusionism that is ingeniously curtailed
at virtually every turn, resulting in a “consistent self-contradiction,” as Ernest
Gombrich famously declared.
[2]
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| Picasso, "Nude in Armchair" |
The
first galleries of the exhibition recapitulate the achievements of Picasso and
Braque. But the collection suggests that
each of these artists arrived at an almost identical species of Cubism by
different paths, with Picasso concentrating on the human figure while Braque
focused on landscape. Inspired by tribal
African and primeval Iberian sculpture, Picasso drastically distorts the human face
and figure in many preliminary studies where he seems poised to make history
with the shock of
Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon (1907). Braque’s work is
obviously inspired by the landscapes of Paul Cézanne and their subtle shifts of perspective, the
push and pull of colored facets of paint against the literal surface of the
canvas.
Trees at L’Estaque (1908), for instance, seems to uproot the foregrounded
trees from a village landscape that envelopes them like a blanket despite its
being illusionistically “behind” the trees.
But look again, Picasso’s bathers
are no less Cézannesque in their effects and in the way the Spaniard almost
brutally unrolls his figures to conform to the two-dimensionality of the
picture plane (
Nude in an Armchair,
1909). Like Braque’s, Picasso’s landscapes
also reveal how responsive he was to Cézanne's analytic approach, as suggested
by the one painted in Paris in 1908, or by
The Old Mill, painted at Horta de Ebro in Spain in 1909.
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| Braque's "Duo pour flute" |
Despite
these early, if groping, experiments in different genres, Cubism, for most of
us, only fully achieves its aim in the context of still-life, and both artists
seem to have grasped this exemplarity right away. Indeed, it is in the still-life genre that Picasso’s
and Braque’s works become nearly indistinguishable, as if they had
instinctively understood that the art form they were inventing had a particular
essence from which neither could substantially deviate.
Unlike the painters, however, the curators of the exhibition seem keen
to make distinctions between the oeuvres readily apparent,
explaining, for instance, how Picasso’s paintings tend to cluster objects at
the center of his canvases while Braque’s work has a kind Greenbergian
“all-over” effect. Even within the
exhibition itself, viewers will find these rules of thumb contradicted at particular
moments, causing the visitor to ask just how typical these
individual tendencies might be. Take,
for example, Picasso’s
Chess (1911)
or
Fruit Dish (1912): in both pictures, the lines and diagonals seem
fairly evenly dispersed throughout the picture plane, though we have been led
to expect this trait in Braque’s work, not Picasso’s. Even the typographic elements in the latter painting that refer to
“Mazagran Armagnac Café” manage to break the boundaries
of the frame, spreading its objects beyond the scope of the picture itself. At the same time, Braque’s paintings
Violin and Sheet Music: “Petit Oiseau” (1913)
and
Still Life on Table: “Duo pour flute”
(1913 -14) condense their objects at the center insofar as the artist has
enveloped the composition in an empty, marginal boundary area between the subject
and its frame. So aside from learning
how to distinguish a Picasso from a Braque, much of the real pleasure of any cubist
exhibition is the surprise of not being able to—as if one had stumbled serendipitously
upon the pictorial truth that both men were seeking.
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| Braque's "Bottle, Glass and Pipe" |
Earlier,
I talked about a persistent “curtailment” of illusionism. One instance when this at first seems not to happen
is in a collage by Braque called
Bottle,
Glass and Pipe (Violette de Parme) (1914). In this work a pipe is one of the “real”
objects that is completely illusionistically depicted. Yet the depiction, obvious as it seems, quickly
becomes ironic the moment one notices that it has been negatively accomplished,
a shape cut out of a collaged piece of paper whilst some black paint or
charcoal has been used to shade the surface that is revealed—in the gap of
the cut-out—in order to give
the negative shape a belied volume. In
this way, even when illusionism is palpably deployed, it is done in a way that
suggests it somehow hasn’t happened. Rather,
its devices are laid bare and we see illusionism as the shallow trick it always
was. Yet it comes back again and again,
insistently, if mostly in fragments or flat signs: mustaches, bottlenecks, saucers, the rims of
cups, journal headlines, which bring me to the question of the “reality” of
signs, signs that require no illusionistic space—only a conceptual space, and
that of any size. In cubist paintings
the flatness and conceptual completeness of a typed letter or word is not
undermined whenever they happen to fall off the headline of an illusionistic
journal. Indeed, they seem to become
themselves on the surface of the painting as they fall out of depicted
space. Objects, too, begin to do as much,
like the mustache in Picasso’s Head of a
Man With a Mustache (1913): drawn in
charcoal on a newspaper page and suspended like a swinging pick head at the
bottom of the picture, the mustache becomes the sign of itself. Ironically, this painting, graphically
depicted on a full sheet of newspaper reverses the collage formula by
suggesting that traditional art media have invaded newsprint itself rather than
the other way around. Once again, we discover a kind of reciprocity
of directions between art and life, or art media and mass media. Both represent a kind of opportunity for and threat
against the integrity of the other.
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Picasso's "Head of a Man
With a Mustache" |
Picasso
and Braque were clearly equal partners in exploring the ambiguous terrain
between illusionism and literalism and their work consistently exhibits a high degree
of analytic seriousness. Despite their
semi-collaborative discovery of collage and their cultivation of a whole
repertoire of modern techniques to call attention to the medium, the sometimes
monotonous, earth-toned colors of the works suggest that the investigatory aspect
of their aesthetic was sapping the natural effusiveness of pure color from the medium
of paint. Though many of the works
undermine this claim, it is the painter Juan Gris who deliberately chose to
express his brand of Cubism with colorful exuberance while also demonstrating the
consummate craftsmanship of his art with its hard-edge lines, visual punning,
and sophisticated gamesmanship. He isn’t
searching for a new form or medium the way the other two were; he has already
found it and he takes the legacy of his predecessors to new heights. The exhibition makes much of the cunning
playfulness of Gris’ work, the visual punning and dramatic suspense often
integrated into his works (see the bull head in
Still Life with Checked Table Cloth (1915) or Gris’ doubled figures
on the tablecloth of
Book and Glass (1914)). Yet the ones that appeal most favorably in
this show are Gris’s early, more homogeneous cubist works: more graphic than painterly, more painterly
than collagist, like his blue painting of the Place Ravignan in Montmartre, or
the swirling, almost futuristic portrait of his mother.
 |
Gris" "Fruit Bowl" to accompany
Reverdy's poem |
Other works that
have special significance for me are Gris’ works on paper that were originally
part of a collaborative project with the poet Pierre Reverdy. Poet and painter fell out before the project
could be realized, but Reverdy, well after Gris’s death in 1927, managed to
complete the project with the publication of his book
Au Soleil du plafond using color lithographs of Gris’ original
works to accompany the poems. Critics have
made much of the fact that the poems Reverdy ultimately paired with Gris’s
images express a similarly “cubist” poetic but do not express a direct,
ekphrastic response to the paintings (or vice versa). While evidence exists that the poems Reverdy originally
wrote in the nineteen teens were directly responsive to Gris’s paintings, the
poet seems to have revised his works in the interval, perhaps to reflect
his contention that the two arts are autonomous and that, although they might parallel
each other, neither should refer to each other in any way that suggests
dependency or imitation.
[3] This sense of autonomy is clearly adhered to
in the case of Gris’
Fruit Bowl (
Compotier in French), originally
completed between 1915-16, and the poem Reverdy later paired with it for
publication in 1955. Viewers who
actually read the Reverdy poem that accompanies Gris’s exquisite gouache
painting on paper will be flummoxed by the rigor of the works’ insistent autonomy. Aside from the poem’s “arrangement
of fruit,” which seems to refer to the fruit bowl in the painting, where on earth
are the “bees”?, the “fingertips”?, the “drop of blood”?, or the conspicuous
“bowlful of lips” at the end? We might
see Gris’ conspicuous use of stippling in the painting as a possible source for
the bees, or even the drops of blood, but the sense of direct influence seems
strained. What
does seem parallel is the sense of desire provoked by the appearance of the fruit in the poem, its voluptuous plenitude in the painting, and the latter's rich, illusionistic softness or succulence--the sexuality of human
flesh. Once again, we find a “reciprocity
of directions” in cubist art, but this time it’s between poetry and painting, evoking
the restless movement of human desire, as Steinberg’s argument insinuates. In both the poem and the painting there is a
sexual shifting, as it were, between illusionistic explicitness and semiotic
connotation.
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| Leger's "Drawing for 'The Staircase'" |
Finally,
there is Léger. There is so much one
could say of Léger’s work, and yet one rarely does after saying all one can
about Picasso, Braque, and Gris. The
beauty of this show is the opportunity it occasions for studying Léger’s early
work, its strong ties to Cubism, and the unique qualities of Léger’s style—a
style that would soon take hold of and exaggerate the geometric character of
physical forms to create a provocative machinic art just shy of Dada’s
absurdist parodies of production. Though
Léger’s images are still painted, they nevertheless imply a brave new world of crowded,
automated bodies—an almost comic assemblage of cylinders, cones, and spheres in
a societal factory of dumb functionality.
See, for instance, his monumental “Typographer” (1918), or the “Aviator”
(1920). These heroic automatons are the
forerunners of our strutting businessmen, bursting with a kind of amoral
efficiency, fueled and buoyed on the banality of their vision of progress. Unlike the other cubists, Léger’s paintings
often step out of the intimacy of the studio to capture, with a futuristic
dynamism, the noise and flux of the town, as suggested by The Village (1914), or the reliable chugging of our commercial infrastructure,
as in The Tugboat (1918). But even in works with titles suggesting a
more traditional subject matter, one detects a Duchampian evocation of machinic
movement, as in Study for “Nude Model in
the Studio” (1912) or Drawing for
“The Staircase” (1913)—except that Léger’s staircase is bustling with
pedestrians. These last works remind us
of ourselves, pouring in droves through the Metropolitan Museum galleries and
down its monumental staircase, where we exit the palace of art onto the hideous, new, David Koch Plaza, feeling restored and nourished on the bread (or crumbs?) of culture and well-pleased with the benevolence of our decision-makers.
[1] Leo
Steinberg, “The Polemical Part” in
Art in
America (March/April, 1979): 121.
[2] E. H.
Gombrich,
Art and Illusion. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969: 281-282.
[3] See Rene
de Costa’s “Juan Gris and Poetry: From Illustration to Creation” in
Art in America 71.4 (December 1989):
679; and Andrew Rothwell’s “Cubism and the Avant-Garde Prose-Poem: Figural
Space in Pierre Reverdy’s
Au Soleil du
plafond” in
French Studies 42.3
(July 1988): 302.
