Thursday, February 5, 2015

Cubist Painting of Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger


Review of “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection” at The Metropolitan Museum, October 20, 2014 – February 16, 2015


The Concupiscence of Cubism

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]    
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. 

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. 
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.  
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. 
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.  

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