Figure 6. Abraham Bosse, from Desargues’s Universal Method, 1643
This chapter will establish how, in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, a radically different, ‘modern’, vision of humanity emerged in Western culture. This emergent figure gave rise to a new imagination and representation of the human subject within the European avant-garde. This chapter will consider Cubism in particular by considering the context for its emergence and the significance of the challenge it issued for overturning existing models of representation such as perspective. Cubism, however, certainly did not exist in a cultural vacuum. In response to reactionary claims in the early 1920s that writers no longer engaged in traditional mimetic conventions, Virginia Woolf suggested that ‘on or about December, 1910, human character changed’.1 Regarding architectural concepts of space Siegfried Giedion later wrote: ‘Around 1910 an event of decisive importance occurred: the discovery of a new space conception in the arts.’2 Reflecting upon modernism, Henri Lefebvre claimed: ‘The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered’,3 whilst Michael Baxandall contends: ‘The extraordinary thing that happened in 1906–12 was an abrupt internalisation of a represented narrative matter into the representational medium of forms and colours visually perceived.’4 We have already noted Charles Péguy’s suggestion that the world had transformed more in the 30 years prior to 1913 – even without the knowledge that World War I was fast approaching. Although Hubert Damisch offers a wry ‘smile’ at the supposed sudden ‘fall of the reigning paradigm’,5 he nevertheless admits that a profound change occurred. Damisch identifies a shift from nineteenth-century pictorial structure, reflecting a transformation in the ordering of human knowledge. All these writers, whether within Modernism or considering it retrospectively, contribute to a sense of a profound shift in ‘human character’ and a concept of subjectivity imagined through how it constructs, and is constructed by, the environment in which it exists. Indeed, this ‘new’ figure emerged from instability in the nineteenth-century culture, whereby Foucault writes that ‘man’ became a new object of knowledge.6 A simultaneous and massive change affected both the human subject and its environment through technological, socio-political, philosophical and scientific shifts. It is through representation that a shift in cultural thinking – specifically here the interrelation between subject and world – can be identified at an historical moment. This chapter will proceed to consider a number of cubist works to illustrate this modern reconfiguration of the subject.
In modernity, the imagination of ‘time’ is increasingly important to representation and the urgent concern of artists. Embedding time within the canvas’s space to represent modernity’s new conditions had ideological implications. For example, the dynamic relation of a person to time was crucial for a philosopher such as Henri Bergson. However, this consideration of time had been consistently omitted from Western thought. Space and time are two concepts that have been forcibly cleaved from their experiential ontological relation within representation, just as human subjectivity has been imagined independent of its environment. Accordingly, Lefebvre argues that the Western production of a particular ‘classical’ space – both conceptual, abstract, philosophical and representational – was ‘shattered’ by the arrival of dynamic temporality within spatial representation. This section observes a transformation that allowed the formation of a radical concept of the self as simultaneous with the environment.
For Woolf and Lefebvre, ‘time’ intersects the traditional relationship between subject and space. Neil Cox sees Bergson’s philosophy of Being and temporality as having ‘a profound effect on modernist literature and the creation of the “stream of consciousness” novel developed by Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf’.7 Literature placed a new emphasis on narrative temporality and simultaneity, whilst in the plastic arts, representation underwent a shattering, or rather a ‘reimagination’, of traditional perspectival and geometric space. Such a static pictorial regime occluded the modern condition of temporal dynamism and simultaneity. Lefebvre explains that ‘[t]he pictorial avant-garde … were busily detaching the meaningful from the expressive’, and therefore developing ‘the beginnings of the “crisis of the subject” in the modern world’.8 Representing the subject in crisis meant a confrontation with classical representation and its perpetuation of an inherent pictorial regime. The modernist challenge to existing forms of knowledge through representation was nowhere more fervently articulated than in France, where Cubism emerged as a coherent force.
Cubism’s challenge to established visual conventions engaged it in the cultural storm that surrounded the ‘crisis of the subject’. The canvases of the salon modernists, including those of Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger, Léger and Gleizes, became caught up in streams of political turbulence, as art participated in cultural transformation through the re-imagination of the subject. However, whilst Lefebvre’s characterisation of the shattering of space specifically referred to Picasso, neither he nor indeed Braque had any significant relationship to the wider public. Their work, under the patronage of Daniel Kahnweiler, was largely confined to a hermetic, studio-based, painter-dealer-collector relationship. Cubism, as the French public knew it, largely belonged to those salon artists emerging out of Impressionism, post-Impressionism and Fauvism, influenced by the work of Gauguin, Courbet, Matisse and Cézanne.9 It emerged from literary influences, in particular Symbolism, and engaged, if tangentially and inaccurately at times, with Bergson’s thought.
Cubism’s unfolding from public Salon exhibition became a cultural phenomenon. As such, it was subjected to political debate regarding ‘social order’. It represented figuration after an epistemic transformation regarding the relations of experiential perception and representation that profoundly offended reactionary politicians. Even though the cubists submitted for exhibition through a process of gallery submission in which, as Baxandall argues, the ‘Black’ galleries ‘had much the same structural and institutional character as the official Salon [and] were concerned to point to their long pedigree’,10 they had provoked outrage in previous exhibitions in 1911. In 1912 the Salon d’Automne exhibition caused debate in the Chambre des Députés regarding the appropriateness of the public exhibition of cubist work:
I hope that you will leave the place as disgusted as many people whom I know … do I really have the right to give the use of a public monument to a band of crooks [malfaiteurs] who behave in the world of arts in the way that gangsters [apaches] behave in ordinary life.11
M. Lampué, a Parisian municipal councillor and ‘elder statesman’,12 addressed the issue of allowing public exhibition of such works to Léon Bérard, the Under-Secretary of State responsible for the arts: ‘It is absolutely inadmissible that our national palaces should be used for manifestations of such an obviously anti-artistic and anti-national kind.’13 However, it was not only conservative factions that objected to the apparent threat to national integrity. The socialist Jules-Louis Breton remarked that cubist paintings consisted of ‘jokes in very bad taste’, painted by a large proportion of foreign artists. He subsequently requested the political censorship of work that evinced the ‘anti-artistic’ and ‘anti-nationalistic’.
Following Marcel Sembat’s defence of Cubism, believing that it was not the Chambre’s place to dictate over artistic freedom, Bérard agreed to the principle of non-intervention, though he later attempted to exert his influence on Frantz Jourdain, President of the Salon d’Automne, to eliminate foreign, and especially cubist, painting. Gleizes later recalled that
It was against these painters – and against them exclusively – that the attacks of the public authorities, provoked by the Parisian press and by pressure from the academies, were aimed. The Conseil Municipal de Paris threatened the Salon des Indépendants, where Cubism had begun, with its thunderbolts.14
Gleizes notes that, in defence of Cubism,
Marcel Sembat spoke: ‘The Salon d’Automne this year [1912] has had the glory of becoming an object of scandal, and this glory it owes to the Cubist painters!!!’ That was how Sembat’s speech began, and this speech is an important event in modern history. For the first time in a parliament a question concerning the moral order, free of any material interest, a question of concern to the needs of the spirit, was raised. For the first time, the legitimacy and superiority of the appearances of unofficial art were openly proclaimed.15
By placing cubist paintings ‘in a dingy room and a cluttered display’,16 the Salon sought to control any controversy. Despite Francis Picabia’s election as an associate member to the Salon, the committee limited the visibility of the work. Nevertheless, it was the little side room, rather than grandiose public display, that produced the furore. Gleizes commented that Frantz Jourdain had tried to quell the rising debate by including more traditional portraiture from the Société des Artistes Français in the adjacent room. However, this gallery effectively became a waiting room for visitors queuing to see cubist canvases. A matter of representation erupted into political argument, public spectacle and media sensation. In response to the attacks upon them, the initially rather diffuse group of painters associated themselves under the initially derisory, and conceptually otiose, term ‘Cubism’.
Gleizes’s paintings, however, were already embroiled in controversy. 1911 had been the year Cubism first attained international notoriety, and the public storm of 1912 had continued this first response. In the Salon d’Automne of 1911, Gleizes remembered:
The opening-day crowds quickly condenses into this square room and becomes a mob … they interrupt one another, protest, lose their tempers, provoke contradictions; unbridled abuse comes up against equally intemperate expressions of admiration; it is a tumult of cries, shouts, bursts of laughter, protests.17
John Golding observes: ‘for the general public, who did not know the achievements of Picasso and Braque, the work of Delaunay, Léger, Gleizes and Le Fauconnier represented cubism in its most advanced and developed form.’18 Indeed, Cox comments that they were the ‘only Cubists’.19 That the painters occupied room eight in 1911 was partly due to the organised presentation of their canvases. Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s and Roger La Fresnaye’s influence on the hanging committee furthered their position. The exhibition in Room 8 exceeded the sensation of the cubist presence in Room 41 at the Salon des Indépendants, as it ‘generated more scandal and ribald mockery’.20 The critic Armand Fourreau complained of the ‘unquenchable thirst for noise and publicity: basically that is the true evil which rages violently at this moment above all amongst young painters’.21 In some ways, the art market had facilitated this ‘outrage’, for these painters were without institutional or dealer security, and their ‘evil’ was in part self-promotion. With the decline in direct state influence, the rise of the private art market, the dealer-critic system and Salon exhibitions,22 avant-garde painters had courted publicity since the mid-nineteenth-century, and Cubism’s shock was a consequence of those conditions. Gleizes reflected that Cubism’s notoriety perhaps spread even more rapidly as a consequence of the ‘violence’ of its enemies’ preventative efforts: ‘Public opinion throughout the world was occupied with Cubism … excited by the new appearances that were being assumed by painting.’23
Cubism’s challenge, and its contribution to modernity’s ‘crisis of the subject’, lay in its radicalisation of visual form. Although its subject matter was often unremarkable, even banal, this only highlighted the profound effects of its form. Like Realism, the ‘everyday’ became the object of attention. Cubist experiments extended to even the most mundane cultural object through its re-presentation. It investigated the embedded, spatial visual codes and conventions upon which systems of Western knowledge were based. To undermine these was to undermine culture itself with the proposal of a new, modern visuality based on time, simultaneity and instability of perception. Cubism’s critique of cherished, stable systems of visual knowledge makes the inflamed outrage of its critics a more understandable response.
We might argue that Cubism made an earlier mode of radical thought accessible to an increasingly democratic age. For example, in many ways, its challenge was inherited, indirectly, from John Locke’s work on the relationship between seeing and knowing, the limits of visual language, and the notion that human vision is not ontologically veridical. Indeed, as Baxandall writes, ‘the issue of what a picture represents did not originate in 1906’.24 Baxandall cites Newton’s idea that colour exists as ‘sensations in the mind’ alongside Locke’s thought that visual perception is not inherent or axiomatic, but must be learnt according to rules. For Baxandall, Locke and Newton symbolise a divergence of thought in the seventeenth-century: ‘a series of shifts in thinking about perception in general that directed many people’s minds towards the subject in perception, towards the perceiver’.25 Indeed, William Molyneux’s letter of 1688 to Locke, written after having read an extract of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in some ways initiated the questions Cubism later visually introduced to a wider culture. Molyneux’s conundrum subsequently preoccupied such thinkers as Berkeley, Leibniz, Voltaire, Diderot, Helmholtz and William James. The question posed was whether a man born blind who learned to recognise a sphere and a cube by touch would be able to recognise them if suddenly given sight.26
Locke’s work concerned empirical ideas on the processes of knowledge.27 Rather than the classical understanding of meaning as something innate, or ‘rational’, as in the work of René Descartes, here knowledge is produced from sensory experience. Contrary to rationalism’s positing of geometric axioms or innate categories as the fundamental principles of knowledge, Locke proposed an understanding of the mind as a tabula rasa upon which experience forms the subject. He and Molyneux agreed that a person suddenly given sight could not distinguish objects, as the conceptual models needed for cognitive recognition would not have been developed. The chaos of sense impressions therefore could not be decoded into a coherent three-dimensional model that constituted visual perception and symbolic language. The newly sighted subject may therefore receive sensation but not the conceptual framework to order, code and understand it; Locke recognised that opticality is not direct conscious knowledge. George Berkeley arrived at Locke and Molyneux’s conclusion at much the same time, arguing that a blind man given sight could not even tell up or down through optical means alone. William Cheselden also acknowledged this idea, as a physiological occurrence, after curing cataracts in a boy of 14: ‘He knew not the shape of anything, nor any one thing from another, however different in shape of magnitude’, having only considered the ‘objects’ as ‘partly-coloured planes, or surfaces diversified with paint; but even then he was no less supriz’d expecting the pictures would feel like the things they represent … and asked which was the lying sense, feeling, or seeing?’28
In early modernity, therefore, vision was crucially being aligned to what was actually experienced. Locke argued conceptual knowledge was not axiomatic: it was neither ‘God given’ nor deducible by mathematics and logic. Yet just as continental rationalism’s roots derived from the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato, so it constructed Western relations between pseudo-axiomatic systems of perception and knowledge within a particular mathematical model of space and time. The work of Pythagoras and Euclid developed through Western culture as ‘classical’ models of geometric, spatial ordering. From Abraham Bosse’s configuration of the body in space (Fig. 6) in the Renaissance, to Muybridge’s photography, to contemporary computer virtual motion capture, these are all predicated upon a hypothetical model of time and space that derives from the technological realisation of the spatio-temporal linearity of classical space. Challenges to this order continue to remain peripheral to this dominant configuration of visual encoding.
As Cubism drew attention to the process of painting, it questioned existing, culturally embedded representational practices of ordering space and time. Whilst a history of Western visual coding is too immense to be considered here, some consideration must be given in order to understand Cubism’s radical proposition. A few examples and a brief look at perspective demonstrate the notion of a picture as an ideologically encoded surface. Jesse Prinz writes:
Pictures play an integral role in the way we communicate, the way we learn, and, more generally, in the way we represent the world. Indeed, most cultures make wide use of pictures, inculcating their young with a preferred mode of pictorial representation.29
A child must be taught how to think and represent in order to participate within its culture. One acquires the ability to participate in culture by learning and enacting its codes, regardless of their ‘truth’. Likewise, referring to non-Western cultures: ‘Some anthropologists observed that pictorially innocent people cannot interpret pictures at all (prior to some kind of training)’,30 Prinz notes that the Me’en tribe in Ethiopia, when shown two pictures of familiar animals, recognised these representations, ‘but that identifications never came immediately. They usually recognized particular elements of an image (a tail, a foot, horns, etc.) before piecing together the whole.’31 When shown something more complex, such as a hunting scene with pictorial depth, the Me’en, in common with other ‘pictorially innocent’ subjects, could not interpret the image.32 Western representation is not an inherent truth, but a regime of pictorial codes. Indeed, it has no axiomatic status, for indeed, to refer to the Kantian notion, no representation can ever adequately portray the totality of the existence of the ‘thing-in-itself’. It can only be spoken through language as a phenomenon.33 Prinz tells the story of another tribe: when presented with a picture of a horse, they could not understand what it represented. However, they made the link when the referent, a real horse, was brought to them. Sense was made through a cognitive relation between the horse and the representation, by decoding the image. This was also the beginning of the tribe’s inculcation into the Western pictorial tradition. Even recently, perspectival pictures of birds – therefore not simultaneously displaying all their limbs – disturbed Australian aborigines, who interpreted them as mutilated.34 Anthropology suggests that culture configures knowledge and inscribes representation – it is neither inherent nor intuitive.
In Art and Illusion Ernst Gombrich explored the production of visual codes by initially referring to the West’s inability to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. He suggested that the Egyptians actually ‘shunned’ the use of three-dimensional representation ‘because recession and foreshortening would have introduced a subjective element’.35 Likewise, Erwin Panofsky in Perspective as Symbolic Form claimed the ‘ancients’: ‘more or less completely rejected perspective, for it seemed to introduce an individualistic and accidental factor into an extra- or supersubjective world’.36 Perspective inherently configures space for a privileged subjectivity by providing a point from which the world is issued. The Egyptians produced ‘pictograms’ for differently privileged subjects, which proved intractable to Western modes of interpretation. For example, the dead are represented among the living without apparent difference. Such content belongs to a drastically different belief in existence and knowledge, and therefore representation. Also, what we know of Egyptian ideas about time suggests they greatly differed from Western models with teleological principles. Instead, time eternally recurs. Egyptian coding is too conceptually different for a Western subject, whose codes have been constructed around linear space and time, to understand. The Egyptian picture becomes a ‘cryptogram’ – an object of knowledge for decipherment. Gombrich repeats the term ‘cryptogram’ throughout, concluding: ‘The coding process of which Sir Winston Churchill speaks begins while en route between the retina and our conscious mind.’37 Whilst Gombrich’s explanation is simplified (for example, cognitive ‘pre-conception’ and early and late levels of object recognition in cognitive process occur), the idea persists of representation as crypto-gram – or the encoded drawing of the hidden (kryptos-gramma). A significant part of a subject’s cognitive processing is culturally produced, and Gombrich concludes, ‘primitive tribes that have never seen such images are not necessarily able to read them’.38 In a typically post-Kantian statement he writes: ‘There is no neutral naturalism. The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a “copy” of reality.’39 The West understands the representations of other cultures as cryptograms whilst reciprocally the Me’en tribe, for example, attempt to decode the West’s kryptos through its gramma.
According to Gombrich, Western art has derived from ‘Greek art of the classical period concentrated in the image of man almost to the exclusion of other motifs’.40 Anthropocentric content occurred as the Greeks ‘developed the cryptograms for the rounded form as distinct from the silhouette, that is, the three-tone code for “modelling” in light and shade which remained basic to all later developments in Western art’.41 Together with mathematics – and specifically geometry as a technology of configuring bodies in space – Greek philosophies constitute a set of visual codes that are intrinsic to the Western episteme. With specific reference to the Renaissance, Martin Kemp surveys this trajectory of mathematical integration of vision and knowledge within representation. Inherited from parts of Greek writings, linear perspective ‘was invented in the form we know it, during the early part of the fifteenth-century in Florence’.42 Kemp is referring to the Renaissance engagement with, and popularisation of, fragments of Greek and Latin works, particularly those concerned with geometry. Renaissance theorists were ‘engaged in the search for the “true” Euclid, in order to understand and amplify his exact science’.43 Subsequently, a system of drawing developed by the Florentine elite from ancient Greek fragments permeated Western culture. For some Renaissance intellectuals, representation was less concerned with pure mathematics than it was a means to develop their own Platonic ideologies and to discover the essence of elements, pure forms and solids. For others, linear perspective served as a convenient language to promote religious beliefs.
Kemp proposes that ‘[f]or almost four hundred years from 1500 it [perspective] served as the standard technique for any painter who wished to create a systematic illusion of receding forms behind the flat surface of a panel, canvas, wall or ceiling’.44 Perspective as a ‘standard technique’ has now endured for more than 500 years, and survived its limitation to plastic representation. The dissemination of perspectival vision-machines continues to reproduce its tradition with every photograph. For Jean-François Lyotard, the camera is an industrialised, even cybernetic, embodiment of perspective within culture, but crucially it cannot reconstitute the experiential continuity of the body. This production of vision can be linked with his notion of disembodied intelligence, producing a genderless, inhuman episteme that fractures the inseparability of body and thought: ‘a poor binarized ghost of what it was beforehand.’45 The perspectival configuration of time and space is simultaneously pictorial and conceptual, and the camera is perhaps today the most ubiquitous, accessible and ‘democratic’ of mediums. As an ‘invented’ system, mathematical geometry informs the Western construction and organisation of knowledge. Yet despite the striving for a ‘mirror of nature’, as Kant writes, ‘our representation of things, as they are given, does not conform to these things as they are in themselves, but … these objects as appearance conform to our mode of representation’.46
The establishment of geometry, as a form of representation, therefore configures the code upon which a subject has an imagined relation to an exterior time-space. In the Origin of Geometry, Husserl examined how geometry, symbolic of ‘all disciplines that deal with shapes existing mathematically in pure space-time’,47 came to constitute culture. He understood it as hypothetical concept, an invention embedded to order knowledge, although contrary to conscious ‘psychic existence’.48 (Although cognitive existence at a cultural level of visual decoding in turn supplements the notion of what a ‘psychic’ existence is, though Husserl’s point remains, geometry is not innate.) Its success, as Husserl sees it, lies in its condition as a ‘supertemporal’49 language; it remains outside of time whilst ordering it. For example, the linearity of time and space is both concept (episteme) and system (ontology). This condition allows it to become an ‘“ideal” objectivity’.50
Husserl’s enquiry takes a Kantian approach. Kant had himself been influenced by English empiricism in Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786). In the former, Kant concluded that human knowledge could only know phenomena of its own sensations; it cannot know ‘things’, noumena, outside of language’s internal rhetoric. What is understandable – something that Foucault argues is reflective of the post-Renaissance classical era – are empirical conclusions. An a priori condition may be concluded from a posteriori research. In Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant argued that a priori concepts can relate to empirical information, but that human conceptual understanding transforms the noumenon, in a process characterised by concepts of force and energy, of ‘ether’. Anticipating Husserl, Kant believed the argument for the axiomatic position afforded to mathematics to be problematic, insofar as mathematics, whilst an incredibly useful system, fundamentally distorts the noumena. He complained that mathematics ‘only bases its cognition on the construction of conceptions, by means of the presentation of the object in an à priori [sic] intuition’.51 Whilst philosophy and metaphysics are concerned with epistemic frameworks on which to base reason, mathematics is constructed upon prior metaphysical assumptions. (This is why Husserl questioned its axiomatic status.) It functions according to its internal rhetoric: it is a construction within a construction. Science, for Kant – as with geometry for Husserl – was premised upon an abstracted, metaphysical assumption. Consequently, ‘there may be as many natural sciences as there are specifically different things (for each must contain the inner principle special to the determinations pertaining to its existence)’.52 As no singular truth of reality exists, partial truths may build a body of knowledge. Nietzsche later used this idea in his philosophy of perspectivism, commenting: ‘There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will be our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity”.’53 By accommodating an infinite number of approaches, the thing-in-itself can be more fully considered. Again, Kant anticipated later thinkers such as Bergson, William James and Husserl:
mathematics is inapplicable to the phenomena of the internal sense and its laws, unless we consider merely the law of permanence in the flow of its internal changes; but this would be an extension of cognition, bearing much the same relation to that procured by mathematics of corporal knowledge, as the doctrine of the properties of the straight line does do the whole of geometry; for the pure internal intuition in which psychical phenomena are constructed is time … the observation itself, alters and distorts the state of the object observed. It can never therefore be anything more than an historical … internal sense.54
For Kant, mathematics is profoundly limited in articulating change. Instead it distorts ephemeral and unstable phenomena into objects of permanence. He proposed that the metaphysical foundation for natural science should instead be based upon ‘Phoronomy’ (motion and kinetics), Dynamics (the ‘quality’ of matter as force), Mechanics (the relation between motion) and Phenomenology (the phenomena of the senses). The investigation of these fields would constitute a foundation of science, harmonising the relationship of energy with subjective phenomena. This was a radical departure from existing regimes of knowledge and mathematical expression.
Writing after modernity’s challenge to classical systems of thought and (perspectival) representation, Husserl’s philosophical problem therefore was how geometry became an ‘ideal object’ when it was ‘anything but a real psychic object’.55 Its first appearance could not have been objective existence, yet it came to attain that position in culture. Firstly, its possibility as a language provides self-evidence. Secondly, as language, it can be accessed through time and space (such as the example of Renaissance perspective drawn from Greek texts). Thus, Husserl writes, ‘what perhaps emerges with greater and greater clarity there belongs the possible activity of a recollection in which the past experiencing [Erleben] is lived through in a quasi-new and quasi-active way’.56 As a ‘supertemporal’ language, its framework reconfigures the past and structures the future through linear, and teleological, claims on time in a way that ‘can be actively understood by others’.57 Consequently, it becomes ‘self-evident’,58 disseminated throughout culture as ‘identically repeatable’.59 On this condition Husserl argues that ‘there is a passive taking-over of ontic validity’60 as geometry becomes axiomatic and separated from the contextual meaning of its historical invention. Husserl observed how, within modernity, geometry was a ‘ready-made concept’ within textbooks.61 Human knowledge therefore consisted of applying an internal structure of the language rather than perceiving the necessity and use of the structure in ‘overlook[ing] the genuine problem, the internal-historical problem, the epistemological problem’.62 Therefore the reduction of representation to linear perspective, what Panofsky termed as ‘a rational and repeatable procedure’,63 conforms precisely to Husserl’s model. Perspective is a communicable, ‘supra-temporal’ language, though one that fails to express its own historical and epistemological problems. For example, Damisch’s study of Piero della Francesca reveals his system ‘holds for countless perspectival sketches and studies: each is reducible to a principle of construction that can vary within certain parameters but that nonetheless conforms to a single design principle’.64
Perspective, as a mechanism of projection conceived over five hundred years prior to Husserl, continued to dominate cultural representation within modernity. After its Florentine reconstruction from Ancient Greek fragments, perspective achieved axiomatic status throughout Europe, its ‘transparency’ embedded in painting’s appeal to naturalism and veracity. We may usefully link Husserl’s concern here with Foucault’s later attention to the supposed transparency of the signifier’s relation with the signified in Renaissance art. Foucault elucidated some of Husserl’s problems, referring to language in the Husserlian sense as having ‘laws of a certain code of knowledge’,65 observing that order ‘is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language’.66 Whilst Husserl warned of perpetuating a certain regime of time and space, Foucault realised these are ‘the fundamental codes of a culture’67 governing subjectivity and experience, through the ‘already “encoded” eye’.68
In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault discussed the cultural development of language since the sixteenth-century in terms of historical modes of existence. To put Foucault’s thesis simply, three epistemic shifts in Western history arose from the transformation of the relation between language and experience. The Renaissance was characterised by a transparent relation between the signifier and signified, whilst the Classical period (from the mid seventeenth-century) observed the conceptual difference between them. Lastly, the Modern, beginning in the 1800s, critiqued the relation of the signifier to the signified and consequent claims of knowledge through the relationship between form and content. During the Renaissance, the transparency of the sign in perspective was understood as the faithful reconciliation of the human with a divine ordering. According to Foucault the signifier and signified were united here through ‘resemblance’, before God’s dethronement in increasingly secular Classical and Modern periods. Foucault argued that Renaissance models of knowledge understood the universe as ‘folded in on itself’.69 He states that ‘[p]ainting imitated space. And representation – whether in the service of pleasure or of knowledge – was posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language.’70 Representation conceived as a ‘mirror of nature’ is particularly important here, as geometry became a ‘Divine’ architecture for structuring the world through perspective. Indeed, the term ‘mirror of nature’ is conflated with the commonly recognised ‘inventor’ of perspective, Filippo Brunelleschi. His experiments exemplify Foucault’s notion of language and the world as ‘a uniform and unbroken entity in which things could be reflected one by one, as in a mirror, and so express their particular truths … language is not an arbitrary system; it has been set down in the world and forms a part of it’.71
Brunelleschi’s tavoletta, a proto-photographic device, was described by Antonio Manetti as ‘seeing truth itself’.72 For Damisch, Brunelleschi’s demonstration ‘implies a process of duplication, of repetition, of doubling whose agent is the mirror’.73 Damisch draws upon the same notions as Foucault and Husserl (synthesising the positions articulated in the former’s use of ‘similitude’ and the latter’s ‘ideality’) in his own statement regarding perspective: ‘The first experiment already appealed to a properly geometric idea of similitude, itself based upon a work of idealization.’74 Accordingly, Alberti’s On Painting (1435) – one of the fundamental texts of Western visual culture – ‘is an entirely mathematical book’,75 part of a mode of idealising ‘pure limit-shapes’,76 that sought to codify reality. The ‘truth’ of representation is simultaneously geometric and idealised, a divine ‘mirror of nature’.
Geometry accounts for the apparently transparent relationship between the observer and the painting. The subject is positioned at a specific point within a perspective ‘governed by a system of rectangular Cartesian coordinates distributed across three axes’.77 The surface and subject are calculated within a ‘visual pyramid’ emanating from the static eye (Fig. 7). Here, one’s point of view is precisely constructed at the geometric intersection of subject and canvas. The vanishing point corresponds to ‘the centric ray’, emanating from the eye to ‘“pierce” the real object’.78 Within painting, the position of the spectator, reduced to a disembodied optic, is assigned a precise site. As we shall see, such a conception of the eye is anathematic to the modernism of both Gleizes and Delaunay, albeit in very different ways. Nevertheless, the eye conceiving of space defined by Euclidean laws consisting of planes, intersections and triangles is perpetuated throughout Western classical discourse. This is the classical cultural production of the relation between body, time and space.
The production of coded representation and the disembodied subject is a prior condition of Renaissance epistemology that is necessary for ‘similitude’. Yet this ‘reality’ is premised upon inhibited vision, manipulated into a single, static viewpoint for which the illusion of reality is created. Damisch’s notion of the perspectival ‘mirror stage’ occurs as the subject is forced into a viewing position whereby the reflection is the mirror of reality, like Foucault’s notion of the transparent resemblance between signs. For Brunelleschi’s tavoletta, I suggest this depends on a prior vacuity, the hole, into which the subject is inserted to complete the punctured surface through its intercalation within the viewing position. The subject is aware that it completes the apparatus of vision through its participation. However, the transparency of the ‘mirror’ of reality provides a point that betrays its illusion as the subject observes itself in the process of looking. Therefore whilst Manetti exclaimed he was looking at ‘truth itself’, the illusion contains an implicit critique of itself through its puncture: this is the simultaneous invisibility and intercalation of the subject, its conscious act of looking, and the force by which the system demands subjection to its perceptual regime. Indeed, whilst perspective is normally seen as privileging the epistemic superiority of the viewer, on the contrary, it envelops the subject in the established process of viewing. The viewer is subject to the physical positioning and illusory configuration, its intercalation in the vision-machine means it is ‘elided as subject of the geometral plane’.79 (This is in contrast to Cubism’s later incorporation of both subjective presence and viewing process.) This example is consistent with Foucault’s belief that ‘man’ as a subject did not exist before the eighteenth-century, as no place is assigned the subject other than an immobile viewing position. As we shall consider, the human subject in the nineteenth-century – as a new site of knowledge – began to overturn this optical stasis. Given that the mobility of vision is crucial to Cubism, this certainly suggests a radical shift away from the (im)mobility of the eye required by the Renaissance’s encoding of the static visual field and order of knowledge.
The incorporation of the immobile eye within the perspectival vision-machine is crucial to Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Betrothal (1434). Like Brunelleschi’s tavoletta, there is a mirror at the vanishing point, but it reflects not the observer as captive spectator, but two men, one of whom may well be the artist. As with Brunelleschi’s invention, the painting elides the subject by enforcing their shared position with the artist, who is not in the process of painting, but witness in the focal point of the mirror. Whilst Damisch suggests that the viewer must take up a voyeuristic position because no view accommodates them, the viewer is nevertheless able to assume someone else’s point of view. Western pictorial construction has depended on the fantasy of vision from the site of another, a conflation of viewer and author. And, as Brunelleschi’s experiment inadvertently demonstrates, in its revelation of the point from which the subject is looking, the subject may indeed find itself as ‘other’ in the process of observing, but also as the creator of meaning. Whilst not necessarily satisfying Foucault’s model of uncritical observation in the Renaissance, it remains true that initially the tavoletta was constructed as a literal rendering of pictorial surface as ‘mirror of nature’, whereby one was supposed unable to tell whether one was observing the real thing or its simulacrum. It obeys Husserl’s model of procedural reification as both self-evident and repeatable. The subject of painting is simultaneously the object of knowledge, in which culture is mathematically configured, and therefore, to quote Damisch, anticipates a ‘positivist’ philosophical position ‘prepared to ignore the role of the subject in instituting a truth’.80 The world can be constructed, measured and observed through an objective procedure independent of the human subject.81
Perspective is therefore not ‘natural’ but a cultural construct with its own history. Its form may have evolved mathematically, but it also belongs to specific sets of cultural beliefs at particular historical moments. Neither its ‘invention’ nor its subsequent popularity and dissemination occurred in isolation. As Damisch claims, people ‘learn to see an image in perspective, instead of seeing’.82 Perspective was disseminated under the auspices of religious institutions, exporting an ideology premised on divinity to other cultures. Linear perspective became the visual realisation of the divinity of mathematics, its ‘perfection’ as a language mirroring the ‘perfection’ of God. This reflection corresponds with Foucault’s idea of representation as the literal reproduction, or resemblance, of ‘the invisible form of that which, from the depths of the world, made things visible’.83 For Kemp, such representation proposed ‘all figures in the whole universe can be drawn together’.84 Masaccio’s Trinity (c.1425–6) obeys the emergent spatial architecture of Brunelleschi’s model in its representation of the divine. The connection between the two subsequently became convention. Throughout the Italian Renaissance, perspectival composition for religious institution was concerned with centrality and the convergence of lines to a single point, namely the point of truth: God. The mathematical harmony of space and time was equated with a universal theological order, embedding spatial geometry within religious belief whilst eliding subjectivity and time. (Even an empiricist like Berkeley argued the ‘other’ was created by God and was therefore a stable principle from which to derive knowledge.) Late-Medieval and Renaissance Italy found in perspective a mirror for the laws of a divine universe and a truth of space. As such, there is a direct relation between God, the cosmos and human language. Foucault termed this ‘a non-distinction between what is seen and what is read, between observation and relation, which results in the constitution of a single, unbroken surface in which observation and language intersect to infinity’.85 Despite today’s desanctification of perspective in the proliferation of optical technology, the ideology of its inception remains as omnipotent, universal and objective.
Yet the model of space emerged from a set of cultural conditions that formed the basis of Western visuality. As Kemp notes, the phenomenon which was to become ‘classical space’ was not inevitable, but possible because of the context of Florentine culture, in particular the practical use of mathematics in a mercantile society, with revived fragments of Greek and Roman science, and an impulse for rational, humanist laws. Therefore, ‘Brunelleschi’s measured representation … was deeply locked into the system of political, religious and intellectual values’.86 Linear perspective became popular because of receptive conditions at a specific historical moment rather than any inherent axiomatic properties. Political, religious and intellectual values were therefore crucial to perspective’s emergence and dominance. The attribution of perspective to Brunelleschi even originates, perhaps, in a desire by writers such as Vasari to construct its history. (For example, Giotto had conceived of three-dimensional space and form in the fourteenth-century, whilst Gombrich and Kemp both point to its conceptual origins in Ancient Greece’s ‘mirror’ or ‘imitiation’ of nature.)87 Damisch writes: ‘Such was the prototype of perspective to which is attached, like a brand name, like a certification of pedigree, the name of Brunelleschi.’88 Perspective was not invented so much as produced from cultural conditions that allowed for the development of certain pre-existing procedures.
Brunelleschi’s work can nonetheless be understood by his production as a cultural subject. Employed as a sculptor, his preoccupation with mathematics converged into architecture, neatly synthesising the three-dimensional concerns of the three disciplines. Whilst Brunelleschi is credited for experiments on perspective, it was Alberti who fixed such an imagination of space within a documented treatise. Indeed, Kemp notes it is significant that the first written explanation of perspective comes not from a practising artist, who may have conceived of it as an artistic tool, but from a polymath, influenced by logic and classical architecture, who ‘unquestionably saw the geometric construction of space as a prerequisite for proper painting’.89 But just as Alberti formalised Brunelleschi’s experiments, so others built upon Alberti’s work as perspectival technique soon became widely practised. Kemp remarks that no artistic technique had ever been so successful, and that by 1650 every major country naturalised this system within its own culture.90 For example, Albrecht Dürer, having access to Piero’s and Leonardo’s works, and having within his notebooks a translation of Euclid’s Elements, incorporated the research and beliefs of the perspectivists into his own work. Those mathematical principles extended to conceptualising the body within space. Eventually published in 1528, Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion configured a geometrically rigid bodily architectonic (Fig. 8). His work, derived from extracts of Greek texts filtering through Renaissance Florence into Central Europe, marks Nuremberg’s establishment as a centre for the European Renaissance with a flourishing artistic culture specialising in the production of perspectivally derived objects within geometric space.
As geometric perspective was disseminated throughout Europe, so it became secularised, alongside culture. The divine status afforded to it and the human body declined and scientific interest increased. The story of Galileo in the seventeenth-century marks a traumatic collision between religion and science in their respective imaginations of the purpose in representing ‘bodies’ accurately. Mathematics no longer complemented theology as Galileo undermined geocentric religious ideas through the ‘divine’ language of mathematics. We see here an early rupture between two epistemic modes – new scientific reason and established religious dogma. The French adoption of linear perspective also demonstrated a shift from ‘cosmological’ concerns to a more ‘modern’ representation of spatial architecture. Architects dominated perspectival research in France, and consequently linear perspective was conceived perhaps less theologically but more practically through architectonic demonstrations and examples. Perspective, freed from theology, entered into ‘the golden age of the perspective treatise’ after 1630.91 Panofsky writes that ‘these very forms … belong to the moment when space as the image of a worldview is finally purified of all subjective admixtures … replacing for the first time the simple Euclidean “visual cone” with the universal “geometrical beam”.’92 Mathematics and physics, with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth-century, moved perspective into the more ‘practical’ domains of science, engineering and architecture, and into cultural consciousness. The notion that perspective constructed vision rather than was constructed by vision parallels Foucault’s argument that the Classical period breaks with the theological ‘mirror of nature’. Indeed, Locke and Molyneux would demonstrate this rupture through their probing of the axiomatic status of objective vision at the end of the seventeenth-century.
Foucault identified the establishment of ‘man’ as an object for knowledge once subjectivity became the internal principle of first epistemic, and then governmental, organisation.93 Representation shifted from the objectively known to the subjective (as demonstrated in J.M.W. Turner’s treatment of perspective, for example). The epistemic emphasis shifted from the overcoding of human experience by mathematical abstraction to process, the production of knowledge by the body that demanded interpretation and regulation. The Classical episteme ‘presupposes a general ordering of nature [… through] entire systems of grids which analyse the sequence of representations … and redistributing it in a permanent table’;94 this, for Foucault, was because ‘man’ as a concept did not exist until the end of the eighteenth-century.95 If the Renaissance encoded similitude, the Classical era, faced with the denigration of such an approach, constructed an encyclopaedic archive to categorise and classify knowledge. This included inserting the body within a panoptic regime, just as other cultural bodies were displayed within ‘curious’ cabinets. The modern era broke from these regimes as preoccupation with the relation of the human body to knowledge ruptured prior forms of knowledge. As Foucault observed, with modernity’s constitution of man:
knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within the structures of the body … there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its forms and that can at the same time be made manifest to it in its own empirical contents.96
This epistemic shift is critical to understanding the profound challenges that nineteenth-century works presented to visual representation. Impressionist canvases therefore ‘played on a tension between an openly dabbed-on plane surface and a rendering of sense-impressions of seen objects’.97 The importance of the dynamic between process and surface is profoundly important in anticipating Cubism’s ‘challenge’ to figurative representation. An avant-garde emerged – however marginalised in comparison to the culturally embedded classical perceptual model and its mechanical reproduction in modern technologies such as photography and film – whose inspiration derived from exploring the world through subjective phenomena as the new principle of reality, and therefore, representation. The establishment of the human sciences developed a new figure to accompany their transformed episteme: a subject of embodied perception as the producer of knowledge and meaning. Following Foucault’s identification of two types of knowledge yielded from the body, Crary writes:
By the 1840s there had been both (1) the gradual transferral of the holistic study of subjective experience or mental life to an empirical and quantitative plane, and (2) the division and fragmentation of the physical subject into increasingly specific organic and mechanical systems.98
Yet despite the socio-political implications of new modes of bodily knowledge producing greater technologies of control and regulation of human subjects, the process of reimagining the human being was of profound importance scientifically, philosophically and artistically, in undermining the ‘axiomatic’ laws pertaining to an ‘external’ reality. However, as I will argue, modern ways of thinking about the subject, through its embodiment, contained forms of biopolitical control. Not only was the subject transformed into the new object of knowledge, but also the new object of power through new disciplinary techniques upon the subject through its body. (It is from this context that the ‘cubist grid’ would contain the possibility of emancipating, and controlling, the subject.)
Crary suggests that the Modern era ‘collapsed’ the Cartesian optic and the camera obscura as the model for conceptualising visual experience (Fig. 9): ‘For over two hundred years it subsisted as a philosophical metaphor, a model in the science of physical optics.’99 ‘Collapse’ is perhaps misleading, as the disembodied, geometric optic still dominates Western culture through the mass dissemination and accessibility of lens-based media. Nevertheless, in the Classical era, a critique of Cartesian optics was established, proposed by Locke, Molyneux and Berkeley, and in the 1820s and 1830s new models of the observing subject became increasingly clear. Rather than ‘collapse’, we might suggest an epistemological ‘divergence’ for these alternatives, yet it is within the nineteenth-century that Crary locates the demise of the existing configuration of the static optic, fundamentally incompatible with a regime of knowledge consisting of dynamism and flux.
Both Crary and Baxandall refer to Jean-Simeon Chardin’s paintings as typifying this shift. For Crary, Chardin’s works are ‘a last great presentation of the classical object in all its plenitude’.100 However, the difference in the thought of each is evident when Baxandall argues that Chardin’s A Lady Taking Tea (1735) distorts perspective to create an uncomfortable viewing position, suggesting the teapot is ahead of its time, as ‘rather 1910’.102 It appears overly flattened, whilst the lighting and colour scheme seem deliberately unreal. This, Baxandall suggests, implies Lockean ideas, received especially through Diderot, who wrote on both Chardin and Locke’s Letter of the Blind (1749). Baxandall also argues that proto-scientific investigations inform Chardin’s painting, and concludes that these ‘Lockean’ paintings ‘represent, in the guise of sensation, perception or complex ideas of substance, not substance itself’.103 Even though his argument is somewhat attenuated, Baxandall nevertheless draws attention to the critical importance of a development in visual science regarding knowledge concerning the human subject.104 This research undermined the notion of the disembodied, geometric optic as a universal model of comprehensive vision.
After the eighteenth-century, research became increasingly sophisticated as the shift of location in the production of reality to ‘man’ as the transformed object of knowledge signified new epistemological discourses. Clark and Jacyna observe that the first half of the nineteenth-century saw a ‘revolution’ in neuroscientific concepts that overturned ideas of Classical Antiquity105 These neuroscientific foundations were dependent upon technological, but also conceptual developments, particularly relating to the emergence of romantic philosophies, especially in Germany, that influenced biology through ideas that universal laws connected organic nature and the human, in contrast to Cartesian discourses on the ‘mechanical’ body. Clark and Jacyna argue that proto-neuroscientific research was influenced by Kantian philosophy and a Romantic emphasis on subjectivism, inspiring a proto-neuroscience through an ‘intimate association with the phenomena of the mind’.106 The Naturphilosophen of neurophysiology, according to Blustein, occupied ‘a pivotal position at the intersection of philosophy, biology, psychology, and medicine.’107 This epistemic shift nevertheless created cultural discord as the Académie des Sciences defended the traditional view that the spinal cord grew from the brain, whilst Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Christoph Spurzheim showed, as it is now believed, the brain instead develops from the spinal cord.
The emergence of visual physiology was concurrent with investigations into the ontology of light. Renaissance accounts of vision upon direct ‘rays’ still ranged from Alberti to Newton, ‘demonstrated’ by the camera obscura, emitted by the observer or entered the observer’s optic. However, the ‘science’ of ‘reality’ rapidly undermined existing beliefs about the world. The idea of the electromagnetic spectrum developed after Augustin Jean Fresnel’s demonstrations in 1821 of transverse light vibration and refraction. His theories were soon incorporated within James Clerk Maxwell’s work in electric and magnetic fields that demonstrated that light was constituted by waves, not linear rays.108 Reality was no longer geometric and mechanical, but understood as continuous and fluid, as physics and physiology bifurcated the once unified model of vision into diverging fields of the human sciences. Not only was light itself mobile but so was sensation. For example, Johannes Müller contributed to a specifically modern episteme by chemically and electrically manipulating bodily sensations, proving perceptual experience was not purely created from a stable external ‘reality’. Crary suggests that Müller’s research was as important for the nineteenth-century as Molyneux’s was in the eighteenth, especially as it inspired Helmholtz’s Optics. Indeed, these advances anticipate Ernst Mach’s characteristically modern ideas regarding knowledge as sensation that occurs exclusively within the human subject:
In mentally separating a body from the changeable environment in which it moves, what we really do is to extricate a group of sensations on which our thoughts are fastened and which is of relatively greater stability than the others, from the stream of all our sensations … it would be much better to say that bodies or things are compendious mental symbols for groups of sensations – symbols that do not exist outside thought.109
Similarly, Henri Poincaré wrote that ‘our perception of space is the product of an internal coordination of our various sensory faculties into a spatial gestalt we mistakenly identify as external to us’.110 In relocating meaning within embodied sensation, a fundamental transformation occurred concerning notions of truth and knowledge. In many ways, scientific knowledge about human relation to the world exemplified Kant’s established philosophical position: the ‘thing-in-itself’ cannot be known, only known through representation. Human knowledge is restricted by perceptual limitations and the internal conceptual principles of knowledge regarding the object of enquiry. The demolition of an anthropocentric universal view occurs with the ‘crisis of man’ as humanity realised its limitations: modernity’s epistemic rupture profoundly severed any direct relation to the noumenon, the ‘thing-in-itself’.
Paul Cézanne’s canvases unfolded from a historical moment when, from very different fields, Ruskin and Helmholtz converged in their understanding that perception was based upon a perpetually changing chaos of coloured sensation. The former referred to vision as an ‘arrangement of patches of different colours variously shaded’,111 whilst the latter commented that ‘[e]verything our eye sees it sees as an aggregate of coloured surfaces in the visual field’.112 William James continued the empiricist approach to vision and knowledge, inaugurated by Locke and Molyneux, hypothesising that a newborn baby’s environment appears without structure, as ‘a blooming, buzzing construction’.113 Karmel also shows how Hippolyte Taine’s empirical philosophy on psychophysics and linguistics within France is of contextual importance to understanding Cubism.114 Therefore, cross-disciplinary and trans-European research understood perception as not merely the transparent translation of ‘reality’, but a complex, mediated and encoded process. Vision was a psychophysical process, reconfiguring environmental energy into optical, cognitive information. Even at early level cognitive entry, energy is believed to turn into ‘part objects’ that are later coded into coherent objects with edges, relations, patterns and colour.115 Human perception, and therefore knowledge, is now understood as premised upon a process of alienation and difference between forms within the environment’s energistic continuum. Whilst the environment consists of dynamic, interpenetrating energy, psychophysical perception misrecognises the fundamentally interconnected condition of the world.
Cézanne helped rearrange pictorial order according to sensation and energy as the principle of representation. He configured the environment according to the experience of embodied phenomena, as argued by Ruskin, Helmholtz and James. The intercalation of the Western subject into geometric perspective and objective figuration was challenged as Cézanne expressed matter as energy and flow, rather than through form, deforming objects into intensities of coloured brush-strokes in a profound meditation on the limits of perception. For example, a rock, or even a mountain, is commonly a metaphor of stability and constancy within Western spatio-temporal models of vision. However, it is still energy, vibrations in continuous transition through constant atomic migration. This is the condition of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire (Fig. 10). The rock’s inertia is constructed by spatial thinking; human perception does not perceive the rock’s fluxive state because of its own internal construction. A perceptual regime with greater emphasis on temporality could even think the rock fluid. Humans, on the other hand, organise visual information into a specifically contrived set of object coordinates that constitute its relation to space. Vision is psychophysical, even though the ‘truth’ of reality has been conflated with the veridicality of seeing. Cézanne explained to Joachim Gasquet, using his interlocking fingers:
That’s what you have to do. If I move too high or too low, it’s all wrong. Not one part must be out of true; there must be no chink through which arousal, light, truth can penetrate. I work the whole picture uniformly, you see, as a whole. I bring everything that tends to move apart into one rhythm and one conviction.116
Everything exists here as relativised relations, never fragmented into a linear schema; Cézanne’s elaboration of colour created the impression of a writhing mass of interpenetrating intensities. In the later paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, he used a technique labelled passage, whereby hitherto rigid objects within perspectival planes interpenetrate, moving beyond their supposed boundaries as they merge into each other. Cubist painters adopted the technique to appeal to a modern conception of human visuality rather than use Albertian perspective, with all that it implied for the coding of space and time. Gleizes later wrote with Metzinger:
From [Cézanne] we have learned that to alter the coloration of a body is to corrupt its structure. He prophesies that the study of primordial volume will open unknown horizons to us. His work, a homogenous mass, shifts under the glance, contracts, expands, fades or illuminates itself.117
Baxandall comments that whilst Cézanne influenced many younger painters, they all drew upon different aspects of the work.118 His paintings helped open perceptual representation as an investigation into the derivation and production of knowledge. Thus Cubism’s challenge to the embedded status of classical vision, and its encoding of the body, was also an attack on the observer since it undermined culturally inculcated visual process of organisation and knowledge. Indeed, Gleizes believed the anger directed towards his work was a consequence of refiguring the sitter – the ‘anecdotal subject’ – as a set of interlocking planes. Whilst this challenge had begun in the nineteenth-century, cubism crucially provided a quasi-coherent force through its radicalising of pictorial form through everyday objects. The modernists of ‘1910’ do not institute a sudden rupture; they are, rather, part of a historical unfolding. Nor is the significance of modern thought evenly disseminated (we do not live in a non-Euclidean culture, even if non-Euclidean mathematics has long been established). Cubism was radical because its conceptualisation of an epistemological rupture was made in a visually and publically accessible form.
Gleizes exhibited La Femme aux Phlox (Fig. 11) at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911. Daniel Robbins suggests it was the Salon, rather than the more hermetic Cubism of Picasso and Braque, that effectively launched ‘Cubism’ as a public and international movement, making the five artists famous overnight.119 Robbins supports Gleizes’s claim that the Salon’s impact reverberated throughout Europe, and quotes his remark:
Painting which until then had been touched only by a small number of amateurs, passed into the public domain, and each and everyone wanted to be informed, let into the secret of these paintings which represented – it seemed – nothing at all. It was necessary to press, as in a rebus, what they signified.120
The Salon was divided between the established Neo-Impressionists who occupied a central position, whilst Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Léger, Robert Delaunay, Metzinger and Marie Laurencin were marginalised in Room 41. The success and scandal provoked by the Cubists was in part due to their self-promotion, fuelled by a belief in their social importance and cultural significance. Closely aligned to literary figures such as Apollinaire, André Salmon and Roger Allard, the painters believed – after the Salon d’Automne of October 1910 – that they needed to be shown as a group. It was here they first recognised a convergence in styles. Gleizes had already been acquainted with Metzinger and Delaunay, but had apparently not realised the importance of their works for his, despite their having been hung nearby. The painters formed a small group, joined by Apollinaire, at the Closerie des Lilas. At these meetings they decided their individual work needed to be promoted collectively to enhance the impact of their work.
By hijacking the Salon’s AGM weeks before the opening, the painters replaced unsympathetic Salon members with more open-minded, progressive figures. (Metzinger’s application was so successful that it ironically received 500 votes out of a possible 350.) Le Fauconnier was chosen as President and he, Gleizes, Léger, Delaunay and Metzinger chose ‘Salle 41’ to show their work. On opening day, perhaps because of the painters’ increased profile, the crowds around Room 41 made entry difficult. Golding writes that ‘a violent storm of criticism and derision was let loose in the press’,121 whilst Peter Brooke notes that ‘[t]he painters had hoped to make an impact by being exhibited together, but they were not prepared for a riot … culminating in a raging battle in the room itself’.122 Gleizes referred to the ‘“involuntary scandal” out of which Cubism really emerged and spread in Paris, in France and through the world’.123 He proposes that
Room 41 of the Salon des Indépendants was a revelation for everyone … It was from that moment on that the word Cubism began to be widely used. Never had a crowd been seen thrown into such a turmoil by works of the spirit [appearing] as a threat to an order that everyone thought had been established forever.124
It seems surprising that such ‘turmoil’ was largely generated by one work: Le Fauconnier’s L’Abondance of 1910. The painting does not appear pictorially radical, despite its monumental size. Thematically, it was perhaps even conservatively Bergsonian in its rural nostalgia and ‘organic’ depiction of the female body. It maintained perspective, and hardly seems cubist in its superficial Neo-Impressionism. However, this ‘accessibility’ of style and content may also account for its success. It was influential for those salon cubists, such as Gleizes, whose own work developed rapidly after seeing it. David Cottington suggests the painting was ‘perhaps the best-known cubist picture in Europe before 1914’125 and Le Fauconnier was generally, if briefly, regarded as the principal innovator behind Cubism. Offering subjective representation as the internal criteria for portraiture, Le Fauconnier’s Portrait de P.J. Jouve (1909) had already made a ‘profound impression’126 on Gleizes. L’Abondance influenced a wider circle: Metzinger, the Delaunays and Léger, and the writers Merchand, Allard, Apollinaire and Salmon all visited Le Fauconnier’s studio during its painting. It derived from a proto-cubist literary background, especially that of the earlier Abbaye de Créteil commune, which had been concerned with collectivity and preserving the relations of ‘man’ and environment against technological and economic modernity.
Gleizes was deeply influenced by Léger, whose La Couseuse (1909) informed his La Femme aux Phlox, whilst Portrait de Jacques Nayral (Fig. 15) reflected the planar synthesis of body and space within Léger’s Nues dans la forêt (Fig. 12). The synthetic reconciliation of environment and figure was fundamental to Gleizes’s work. It had already been demonstrated in Léger’s painting, which Metzinger observed was ‘a living body whose trees and figures are the organs’.127 Gleizes commented of the painting that ‘the volumes were treated according to the process of progressively diminishing zones employed in architecture or mechanical models’.128 Indeed, Le Fauconnier and Léger had a mutual influence on each other, as well as on Gleizes.129 Léger had participated in the Abbaye de Créteil commune, as had Gleizes, though he was concerned with Cézannian visual strategies ‘disarticulating the figures and landscape’130 rather than having an interest in their more literary discussions. Following Cézanne, Léger’s painting interconnected form through the reorganisation of matter. Suffused by a green hue across the canvas, the classical pictorial convention of composing discrete objects within three-dimensional space from a static viewpoint was decomposed into angled planes, interlocking bodies with space.
Léger took Cézanne literally, fragmenting the world into component parts of the cylinder, sphere and cone.131 This became the compositional basis for rejecting perspectival codes, as Léger premised his painting on the importance of sensation. His work followed the ideas of Ruskin, James and Cézanne.132 In this way the world is constructed through pre-established cognitive structures with memory. As mentioned, Cheselden’s cataracts patient had no prior conception of object formation and therefore, without the principles of organisation, could only see ‘partly coloured planes’. Virginia Spate writes that for Léger, ‘changes in contemporary life had so transformed perception that reality lay in sensation rather than in comprehension of specific objects’.133 Metzinger gives an insight into Léger’s synthesis of human and environmental bodies, recoded into interconnected matter, reflecting the world composed of energy within his desire ‘to dislocate the body.’134
Léger’s work therefore existed within, and helped constitute, Cubism’s response to the transformation of culture. Following Cézanne, Léger expressed energistic flows, interfaces and multiple connections since perception no longer was bound to the optical-epistemological mirror of a hypothesised external reality. He subverted pictorial convention by applying Cézanne’s model of geometric shapes in the construction of a world consisting of matter, whereby sensation is privileged at the expense of the anthropocentric organisation of rigid objects in Euclidean space. Similarly, Gleizes’s La Femme aux Phlox undermined existing pictorial encoding through reconstructing form according to temporal rhythm. (In fact, Gleizes later wrote regarding painting: ‘all the parts are connected by a rhythmic convention’.)135 Object boundaries are displaced, and are deliberately obfuscated in drawing attention to the process of seeing. As with Léger’s painting, Gleizes’s planar technique provoked a different visually cognitive response. Like Helmholtz’s ‘surfaces in the visual field’, objects are parsed and partitioned into regions of matter rather than alienated objects in space. The viewer’s pre-established cognitive model for compositional decoding, to parse the surface before recombining those parts into the geometric whole, is frustrated by the disruption of classical techniques for representing bodies in space. And they anticipate the principles of camouflage developed in World War I that Picasso famously commented were derived from Cubism. Recognition is possible, but form is no longer the instantaneous and static condition it had become through photography as a perspectival vision-machine.
Gleizes’s painting belongs to a reflexive turn on vision, and therefore on the processes of knowledge and experience. Disrupting the spectator’s visual expectations means an increase in time spent interpreting the scene. Gleizes employed a compositional rhythm, which manipulated the spectator’s visual processes in attempting to distinguish figure from environment by leading the eye in a circular motion following the upper arm, down through the body, along the figure’s right arm and up through the lines towards the originating arm. This circularity is supported by the use of colour, texture and luminosity – properties that are vital to immediate object recognition – which obscures the discrete relations between objects and space. Indeed, the relatively uniform application of colour and light intercalates the figure with the space it occupies. Gleizes would have seen this subversion of figure-ground relations used by Cézanne and Léger. However, perhaps it was most famously employed in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907). Here body and space were refigured into planes whilst single point perspective was rejected for a process of figural rotation and condensation of perspective upon a facet. As single-point perspective confines the observer to a rational position within mathematical laws, Picasso’s painting represented a palimpsest of spaces condensed upon a single plane rather than using that plane to figure depth relations. Whilst anticipating cubist works that erase traditional object-space relationships, his striking use of colour here nevertheless maintains spatial distinction between figures. Later works such as Femme nue assise (1909–10) were almost monochromatic, facilitating the body’s fading into space. Gleizes and Léger, among others, would suspend dominant regimes of spatial representation and figural visibility through their nearly monochromatic canvases. Yet Gleizes had never seen Picasso’s work, and according to Apollinaire and others, did not meet him until after 1911 (Apollinaire was eager to connect the two cubist groups, whilst Kahnweiler was not). However, Gleizes was no doubt aware of Picasso’s canvases through Metzinger, Léger and Delaunay. Whilst ‘Cubism’ became a term for a heterogeneous mix of painters and styles, there was a shared concern with rethinking the compositional structure of painting since an external objective ‘reality’ no longer existed, whilst change and process were now understood as fundamental to perception. This shared aesthetic is precisely what Gleizes felt was being attacked in his work in 1911. Cubism reflected a crisis concerning the loss of the subject. Picasso’s subject in Les Demoiselles was profoundly re-imagined, and used by Lefebvre to illustrate his statement regarding the radical transformation of space in the early twentieth-century, whilst Gleizes’s camouflaged subject dissolves into space, in a manner akin to Femme nue assise. Brooke reports that even Gleizes’s friends found the painting hard to understand: ‘The visual convention that had baffled them was the apparent disappearance of the subject in its surroundings.’136
Although there is a perpetually unfolding relation between the individual and environment, a high proportion of perceptual attention is given to differentiating figure and environment. Before La Femme aux Phlox Gleizes’s paintings had maintained this traditional distinction between figure and world, for example in his earlier portraits of Robert Gleizes and René Arcos.137 However, La Femme aux Phlox overcame these limitations through mobilising the eye through the canvas, a technique important in Gleizes’s career. In an unpublished notebook,138 Gleizes discussed the cubist technique of perceptual flânerie throughout the canvas, and his intercalation of form achieves precisely that effect as the spectator’s visual expectation is subverted.
Edgar Rubin’s pioneering research on the ‘phenomenological analysis’ of the visual experience of figure and space was contemporary with Gleizes’s painting.139 Rubin concluded that a figure is consistently perceived in front of space, but never within or part of it. He noted that the two-dimensional distinction of figure from space occurs if one region is completely surrounded by another, whereby ‘space’ encloses ‘figure’. Although human perception has developed according to object recognition, the imposition of a cognitive framework upon the ‘chaos’ of sensation causes the misrecognition of complex or ambiguous optical information. Rubin developed the ‘Rubin Vase’ around 1915, though earlier examples of ‘multi-stable perception’, such as Louis Albert Necker’s ‘Necker Cube’ of 1832 and the 1899 duck/rabbit by Joseph Jastrow, demonstrate the impossibility of simultaneous perception of bodies in perspectival space. However, whilst these depend on the singular viewing point of perspective, Cubism would also challenge the ‘impossibility’ of simultaneous perception by multiplying the spectator’s perspectival point of view to the object projected upon the canvas. Whilst Gleizes’s painting remains concerned with volume rather than the multiple perspectives, Léger and Metzinger were developing under the influence of Picasso’s and Braque’s work. More specifically in Léger’s and Gleizes’s painting, the ambiguity of interlocking bodies, with techniques of planar rotation condensing spaces upon a plane, provided multiple visual interpretations of matter before the spectator’s reconciliation of objective forms.
Gleizes merged his figures within the environment and consequently required a greater sustained attention by the spectator to resolve the spatial ambiguity. Figuration – traditionally understood in the West as the object of painting – is not possible unless distinct form can be discerned from its environment. However, for Gleizes, the figure is continuous with its world. Whilst cognition prevents simultaneous forms, as visual logic precludes multiple interpretations of reality at a given moment,140 in La Femme aux Phlox the figure harmonises with the environment, although the topoi of face and hands resist total immersion. These are afforded greater detail as the location of human agency, and its identification as such by others. Therefore, whilst not dissolving the subject into space completely, Gleizes represents it imagined as interlocking form and space. Whilst he drew attention to the ‘loss’ of the figure by overturning classical spatial codes, Wittgenstein similarly used examples of multi-stable perception to critique naive realism – the belief external reality exists exactly as perceived – to argue that reality is constructed by the cognitive and symbolic processes of the subject. These examples of multi-stable figures accord with Foucault’s claim for the modern overthrow of the Renaissance episteme, by demonstrating perception as the internal construction of a projected external reality. As Bergson wrote, suggesting how the viewing subject imposes a cognitive model upon the world, ‘we perceive nothing but the outward display of our mental state.’141 Indeed, Bergson’s popular book Creative Evolution (1907) may have had a direct influence on Gleizes, proposing:
matter has a tendency to constitute isolable systems that can be treated geometrically … The distinct outlines which we see in an object, and which give it its individuality, are only the design of a certain kind of influence that we might exert on a point in space … Suppress this action, and with it consequently those main directions which by perception are traced out for it in the entanglement of the real, and the individuality of the body is re-absorbed in the universal interaction which, without doubt, is reality itself.142
Prior to this, in Matter and Memory, Bergson had discussed the perception of reality as a consequence of the ‘utilitarian origin of our perception of things’.143 The construction of reality therefore fragments the continuum of existence that is based on a projective schema which constructs ‘surfaces and edges of things’ in relation to a utilitarian consciousness. Gleizes’s painting provokes a specific conceptual sense of existence, space and time whilst undermining the apparent verisimilitude of perspectival representation. Indeed, shortly afterwards Gleizes reproduced Bergson’s argument very closely in Du ‘Cubisme’, arguing: ‘There is nothing real outside ourselves; there is nothing real except the coincidence of a sensation and an individual mental tendency.’144
After the Salon d’Automne of 1910 Apollinaire announced ‘Cubism’ as a movement in the journal Poésie. Initially, however, in adopting a term previously used to derogate vanguard art, his appellation was not positive. Leaving aside André Derain and Marie Laurencin, he declared it a ‘bizarre manifestation’ which he compared unfavourably with Picasso’s paintings: ‘The Cubism at the Salon d’Automne is only the jackdaw in borrowed feathers.’145 Although references to ‘cubes’ were already in print, Robbins proposes that this was the first time ‘Cubism’ was used to describe a group movement rather than the work of Picasso.146 Gleizes later identified 1910 as a critical year in his artistic development. He exhibited his first works as a painter in the Salon des Indépendants, and was placed alongside Le Fauconnier and Metzinger, possibly through the hanging committee’s recognition of similarities in their work. Gleizes became friendly with Metzinger147 and Robert Delaunay. He was particularly influenced by the former’s ‘Notes on Painting’, through which, Robbins writes, Metzinger discovered ‘what later came to be known as Cubism’.148 It argued that a ‘fundamental liberation’ of pictorial order was occurring through the battle against ‘the deceptiveness of vision’, through which ‘they [Picasso, Braque, Delaunay and Le Fauconnier] momentarily impose their domination on the external world’.149 Metzinger wrote of Picasso’s incorporation of physiology and tactility within vision as well as the creation of a system for a ‘free, mobile perspective’.150 He knew of Picasso’s work, but also referred to succession and simultaneity in Braque, Delaunay’s concerns with the epoch and Le Fauconnier’s creation of a modern art that was both historical and epic.
Gleizes was particularly attracted to Metzinger’s notion of ‘the total image [that] radiates in time’.151 Gleizes’s painting developed dramatically in this period. He later wrote: ‘1910 was the year when, in the last months, there joined together a kind of coherent group [of painters and writers] that represented certain precise tendencies for our generation.’152 His artistic achievements paralleled those of his fellow painters, yet his earlier intellectual development was necessary for his particular contribution to Cubism. Gleizes’s expression of a subject continuous with the time and space of its environment was crucial here. It was a concept that developed through strong modernist literary, political, philosophical and social influences directly arising from the nineteenth-century. Gleizes was involved with socialist organisations, such as the Association Ernest Renan, in response to his growing concern with state ‘militarism’ (war understood as a consequence of military desire and – as he later argued – capitalist economic ambition) and attempted to forge links between students and workers for the eventual realisation of proletarian power within ‘democratic socialism’.153 Renan had died in 1892, but remained a potent symbol of democracy and fraternity.154 Gleizes spent mornings working for his father in a furniture fabric workshop in Courbevoie with the poet René Arcos; afternoons were spent painting and evenings devoted to the Association. Through Arcos he met Charles Vildrac, Alexandre Mercereau and Georges Duhamel, and became acquainted with Jules Romains through theatrical projects in working class areas of Paris. Gleizes’s interest in Cubism might suggest that he considered it a force for cultural reform, whereby human subjectivity could be transformed through vision. Indeed, Gleizes’s commitment to Cubism lay in its radical articulation of an implicit conceptual relationship between the subject and world.
A wave of young artists, writers and intellectuals had become dissatisfied with the direction of industrial and economic modernity. The notion that the artist or writer should be tied to the service of ‘the people’, for which the growth of ‘little magazines’ provided a mouthpiece, gained currency. The idea for communal living came from Charles Vildrac and the Abbaye de Créteil was established as a collective in a large country house in the village outside Paris. It was a concerted effort at living out a romantic ideal involving the individual’s production of work, removed from the commercialism inherent in a market economy that decided success or failure.155 Therefore the commune was not just an escape from economic pressures, but also from political and social interventions (even if such conditions create interesting counter-cultural responses). Cox writes that the commune became an ‘anarchistic and utopian attempt to found a genuine creative community.’156 To this end, the Abbaye supported itself through a recently installed printing press, together with farming, with the work, in theory, shared amongst the members.
The initial finance came from Henri-Martin Barzun, a former political activist who became interested in ‘promoting a kind of artistic youth culture’.157 On Christmas Day 1906 Gleizes was the first to move in, and was later joined by Arcos, Vildrac and Georges Duhamel. The Abbaye was, as the Association Ernest Renan had been, ‘determinedly secular’.158 Whilst Gleizes valued the importance of spirituality – he was later influenced by early Christian art – he was suspicious of organised religion, seeing it as the cause of oppression and ignorance. Instead, the commune was based on François Rabelais’s fiction of the Abbaye de Théléma: ‘a refuge of honest, idealistic thinkers against a hostile world’.159 Its idealism, however, was compromised, as certain individuals remained keen to advance their own careers. (Gleizes later mentioned his dislike of Duhamel for his careerism.) Furthermore, the withdrawal from social practice to concentrate on work contained an inherent danger in privileging artistic subjectivity over engagement with mass culture. Nevertheless, the work made within the Abbaye demonstrates its commitment to left-wing ideology. Paul Adam’s L’Art et la Nation was the first work produced, criticising the state for its support of conventional, conformist art when it should instead ‘encourage its true artist’.160 Barzun’s La Terrestre Tragédie, printed in 1907, provided a synthetic vision of modernity, imbricating humanity and industrial technology within the city. In her discussion of the importance of simultaneist thought to orphism, Spate refers to Barzun’s work, together with Romains’s ‘La vie unanime’, as part of a desire ‘to embody the relationship of the individual to the collective and to the universal: the way the single “I” is absorbed in the rhythms of the city or the vast energies of the universe’.161 Mercereau’s L’Abbaye et le Bolshevisme discussed the inspiration of Russian revolutionaries as an influence upon the commune, whilst Cottington notes the significance of Mécislas Golberg’s writings, especially his acerbic attacks on capitalist and elitist values and urging of the unification of cultural forces to resolve the energy of the masses.162 The Abbaye later published Golberg’s Cahiers Mensuels and writers such as Mercereau and Barzun were indebted to his ideas.
Although the collective dissolved in 1908, the beliefs of its members were maintained, with the writings of Arcos, Vildrac, Mercereau, Duhamel and Gleizes later appearing in postwar socialist journals.163 It was these former Abbayeists who were subsequently denounced for undermining the French nation and encouraging Bolshevism. Within this context Brooke convincingly defends claims characterising Gleizes as a nationalist, right-wing figure.164 Indeed, Brooke’s and Robbins’s consideration of Gleizes includes an important literary context, referring to the influence of the poetry of Whitman, Verhaeren and Romains, and an association with Barzun and the Abbaye writers. Brooke describes Gleizes as ‘an enthusiast for the adventure of modern life, with left-wing and internationalist sympathies’.165 Whilst assigning a stable ideological position to anyone is usually reductionist, and often fraught with contradiction, Brooke’s and Robbins’s positions appear more evidentially justified, whilst claims of Cottington and Silver, for example, incorporate elements of doubt and even contradictory evidence.166 Gleizes’s career developed from the ‘anarchistic and utopian’ commune towards Cubism. He was published in left-wing journals, and with Raymond Lefebvre and Paul Vaillant-Couturier (who later founded the Parti Communiste Française), became involved in the journal Clarté. Gleizes left France during the war, and publicly denounced France’s part in it, as well as its later treatment of Germany, whilst expressing loathing for war as a symptom of capitalist economics. This is in stark contrast both to Silver’s description of him as ‘patriotic artist-soldier’,167 and indeed the behaviour of most French vanguard artists in 1914, who volunteered for the conflict or consented to conscription, and fought until the Armistice. Those artists would subsequently vilify Gleizes, along with Robert Delaunay, Picabia and Duchamp, for their evasions and criticisms of the war. Christopher Green argues that Gleizes was perhaps the only cubist artist to resist the reactionary effects of the postwar ‘return to order’ whilst maintaining a notion of an art whose status and function ‘fused aesthetic metaphysical, moral and social priorities’.168 As Green writes, ‘he can hardly be associated, except superficially, with the ideology of the French Right’.169 Furthermore, Brooke argues: ‘It is totally misleading to see Gleizes’s painting … as the simple expression of a racist or nationalist ideology of any sort.’170
Gleizes’s contribution to the ‘cubist’ movement was important even if his works were not as ‘outrageous’ as those of Delaunay and Léger. Robbins even suggests that Gleizes chose not to submit his more radical work to the Salons, one reason perhaps being his investment in a nascent cubist direction that could contribute towards social change (indeed, Freud enforced strict control over his nascent radical psychoanalytic movement so that it might gain cultural acceptability). Gleizes’s reaction to the violent uproar against Cubism was apparently one of surprise.171 More radical work might rather provoke public outcry and alienation rather than outcry and debate. The initial success of Le Fauconnier’s less ‘difficult’ painting L’Abondance might confirm this notion. Gleizes’s participation within small, politically motivated groups such as the Association Ernest Renan and the Abbaye de Créteil demonstrates his belief in the importance of structured organisations for producing social transformation. His large canvases lent a monumental aspect to his work – indeed he later became concerned with mural painting – but were also a consequence of his concern with the declining social importance of art, manifested, as he saw it, by ‘trivial’, small easel paintings for the bourgeoisie.172 Robbins argues:
Gleizes did not follow in the footsteps of Picasso and Braque, not because he was untalented or incompetent, not even because he was unfamiliar with their painting, but because he saw cubism as a means of giving expression to ideas and feelings of a highly serious, metaphysical and visionary nature.173
Robbins’s argument has close synergies with Green’s understanding of Gleizes’s art as metaphysical, moral and social, and predominantly responsible for Cubism’s image as ‘collectivist’.174
In 1918 Gleizes was proud to reflect upon the Abbaye as ‘a communistic experience’175 despite the reactionary, nationalistic turn within French culture. Whilst individual conflicts marred the commune, there were undoubted conceptual affinities among its members. Much of the work produced reconsidered human relation to modern culture. Gleizes was closest to Mercereau, who later introduced him to Le Fauconnier and Metzinger. Whilst working for the publisher Eugène Figuière, Mercereau also facilitated the publishing of Abbaye writers, in addition to producing Gleizes and Metzinger’s Du ‘Cubisme’ and Apollinaire’s Les Peintres Cubistes. However, it was perhaps Jules Romains who became the most famous literary Abbayist. Brooke writes that although ‘Gleizes, Duhamel and Mercereau deny that there was a collective philosophy behind the Abbaye de Créteil, they are denying that it subscribed to Romains’ philosophy of “Unanimisme”.’176 Gleizes directly mentioned his ‘admiration’ for Romains’s poetry, whilst his wife later referred to the Abbaye as Unanimist.177 In 1907 Romains had sent the Abbaye (specifically to Arcos, Duhamel and Vildrac) the manuscript of La Vie unanime, a collection of his poems. Gleizes was excited by this work, and Brooke confirms it was ‘by far the most influential book published by the Abbaye, so influential that … the Abbaye writers themselves began to be regarded as followers of Romains’.178 Elsewhere, Robbins notes that Arcos’s La Tragedie des Espaces and Mercereau’s Genide Là et d’Auilleurs were inspired by Romains’s unanimist vision in their ‘simultaneous concern for the close and distant, both in geography and memory’.179
Romains claimed to have had, at 18, an epiphanic experience whereby everything and everyone in the world simultaneously formed part of a single, harmonious mass. He perceived that individual consciousness merges with the ‘dominant energy’ of the group or place.180 The subject was both the essence and the product of their world. Romains was especially interested in the formation of consciousness within modernity, and sought to reveal the unity he discerned. His Les Hommes de bonne volonté, first published by the Abbaye press in 1908, began what became by 1933 a 27-volume reflection. In this sense, Gleizes’s art can be understood as a synthesis of Cézanne’s artistic and Romains’s literary visions of modernity. The transformation of the environment into harmonious planes within La Femme aux Phlox, and later La Cuisine (Fig. 13), developed from Gleizes’s post-Abbaye thought regarding simultaneity, intersubjectivity and anti-individualism. In addition, Gleizes became fascinated by the writings of Charles Henry, who was influenced by Helmholtz in conceiving of the universe as continuous energy. Henry wrote: ‘Everything is vibration … the Universe is a curve, is finite; time and extension dispute with each other, what is relative and what is absolute.’181 He similarly argued for the psychophysical production of reality, between ‘vibration on the resonator and also the effect of the resonator on the vibration’.182 Although Henry’s writing specifically affected Gleizes’s postwar art, Helmholtz’s work on harmonic vibrations had also influenced him through René Ghil who, according to Brooke, was even more important to Gleizes than was Bergson. Ghil applied Helmholtz’s research to poetry, arguing that energy was a totality in which all participated and were subjected to as flux; as form did not exist as energy, art was ‘movements of thought’.183 Through the interpenetration of figure and environment Gleizes challenged the figurative gestalt that Rubin identified as occurring in figure-ground perception, and attended instead to what Bergson perceived as the ‘harmonious whole’.184 Space was no longer a container for bodies, but incorporated in a rhythmic arrangement of planes. Rejecting the anthropocentric figure, Gleizes proposed an ‘ecological’ body. Although he has been considered a conservative painter, I would argue this proposal assumes a prior privileging of the ‘progress’ within technological modernity. Rather, Gleizes criticised capitalistic and industrial modernity in his imagination of the bionomic (Greek bio – life, nomos – law) of the organism and environment that, rather than being traditionally conservative, was a radical rejection of Western anthropocentricism and its ‘progress’ within modernity. I shall shortly discuss this in more detail with reference to Gleizes’s painting Dépiquage des moissons of 1912 (Fig. 14).
Alongside his reconstruction of form, Gleizes’s use of colour articulated metaphysical interests. I have already mentioned the use of monochromaticism in harmonising figure with environment, but this also established ‘equality’ of vision, distributing light across the surface with relative uniformity, rather than privileging of bodies over space through chiaroscuro. Indeed, at much the same time, Braque and Picasso were dissecting quotidian objects such as bottles, reorganising them on the plane, but with a similar tonality given to each part. It is possible Gleizes heard of their experiments through Léger and Delaunay, who had been advised by Apollinaire and Max Jacob to visit Kahnweiler’s gallery. Léger recalled: ‘Delaunay, surprised to see their grey canvases, cried, “But they paint cobwebs these guys!”’185 However, these ‘cobwebs’ represent an important issue. Through relatively even illumination, equal significance is granted to each part of the composition. Within ‘reality’ all surfaces, except those that are completely black or transparent, reflect light. Therefore light is reflected in virtually every direction from every surface, as secondary light sources. Classical representation depends on the use of relative light values to create tone and construct objects within space; within a three-dimensional schema, assumptions are made regarding occluded surfaces by the static subject. For example, perception of a cube may only be of half of the shape, whilst projective, cognitive modelling ‘completes’ it within a three-dimensional order. In La Femme aux Phlox, Gleizes gives equal importance across the environment. Instead of lighting for single point perspective, cubist painting, through a synthesis of multiple viewpoints, creates a ganzfeld (‘whole field’) whereby equal lighting from every direction creates the impression of a grey fog,186 or, Delaunay’s ‘cobwebs’. Although Gleizes did not use multiple perspectives, like Léger he cast a relatively even distribution of light across the composition’s planes. La Femme aux Phlox anticipated the suggestion within Du ‘Cubisme’ that ‘the plastic continuum must be broken into a thousand surprises of light and shade.’187 Also, Gleizes and Metzinger wrote, echoing notions proposed by both Nietzsche and Proust: ‘If so many eyes contemplate an object, there are so many images of that object; if so many minds comprehend it, there are so many essential images.’188 The tonality of Gleizes’s work accords with the imagination of the environment as a collective space where equal value is given to the figure and space: ‘A thousand little touches of pure colour analyse white light, and the synthesis thereof should be accomplished in the eye of the spectator … the result of the sum of complementaries is a dingy grey, not a luminous white.’189
The principle of harmonising the body with space informs not just the form and colour of Gleizes’s painting, but its content as well. La Femme aux Phlox contains several narratives. At its simplest, the painting portrays a rhythmic, cyclical relationship between humanity and the environment. Robbins writes: ‘Exterior nature – a distant vista – is brought in to the interior as a reminder of how inside fits outside.’190 Gleizes repeated this motif in La Cuisine; by framing an apple tree through the doorway, he emphasised the seasonal relation between the environment and human sustenance. La Femme aux Phlox also framed a river, which, like the tree, we might understand as a compositional symbol for painting time. Gleizes was well versed in philosophies of time, and often cited Augustinian thought.191 Gleizes must have read Augustine’s Confessions previous to referring his students to the text after World War I. Whether he had done so when he came to paint in 1911 is unknown, though there are similarities between Augustine’s ideas and Bergsonian concepts of time that Gleizes would have known. Indeed, it is possible that Augustine’s writing was read and discussed with reference to Bergson within Gleizes’s intellectual milieu. Augustine proposed that since God created time and space they are therefore infinite, but human relations to them are finite. Augustine rejected the quantification of time through measuring the movement of bodies through space, since movement has a different quality to calculation. He argued that ‘[i]t is in my own mind, then, that I measure time’,192 and that time was bound to memory as movements preceding each other into the past. Only in the present does anything exist: ‘For if, wherever they are, they are future, they do not yet exist; if past, they no longer exist. So wherever they are and whatever they are, it is only by being present that they are.’193
Whilst William James would make comparable claims within modernity, Augustine proposed that the present was without time, as time comes ‘out of what does not yet exist, passing through what has no duration, and moving into what no longer exists’.194 James similarly rejected arbitrary divisions of time, arguing that the present exists only as past, referring to the consciousness, and existence, as akin to the movement of ‘a river or a stream’.195 Within the fluid dynamic of consciousness, past, present and future converge in a continuum of becoming. James wrote: ‘Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits … it flows.’196 Bergson repeatedly used this metaphor. In Time and Free Will he refers to the ‘flow of our sensations’197 and the ‘flow of time’,198 and in Matter and Memory speaks of images that ‘flow into consciousness’.199 Here, there is a ‘continuous flow of things … the past into present, because our action will dispose of the future in the exact proportion in which our perception, enlarged by memory, has contracted the past’.200 Later, in Creative Evolution Bergson wrote of ‘an endless flow’,201 a ‘flow of time … the entire past, present, and future of material objects or of isolated systems might be spread out all at once in space’.202 He commented that life ‘seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels’.203 He also directly uses the metaphor of the river to suggest that ‘souls are continually being created, which, nevertheless, in a certain sense pre-existed. They are nothing else than the little rills into which the great river of life divides itself, flowing through the body of humanity’.204 The planes of Gleizes’s surface harmonise, interlocking the figure with the surrounding space. Form harmonises with content: like the metaphor of the river in the background, the planes move past one another rhythmically like ‘rills’ within the movement of the eye. ‘It seems to me then,’ Augustine wrote, ‘that time is merely an extension, though of what it is an extension, I do not know. I begin to wonder whether it is an extension of the mind itself.’205
The appeal of Augustine’s thought to Gleizes is clear, for there are parallels between it, his and Bergson’s philosophies of time, even including the modern notion of reality as an ‘extension of the mind’. Gleizes represented people engaged in seasonal tasks – such as La Femme aux Phlox, La Cuisine and Dépiquage des Moissons – as a synthesis of these themes; their very being is interconnected within the time and space of the environment. These paintings, extended from the artist’s mind, deliberately provoke an organic, Bergsonian sense of temporality as opposed to the relocation of time outside of, and operating upon, the modern subject. In contrast, global standard time was established shortly after, from the Eiffel Tower on 1 July 1913, reconfiguring people’s lives to the second within a homogenous global network.206 Bergson responded with disdain to modernity’s encoding of temporality through timepieces, mechanistic handheld devices dividing time into spatial segments that irrevocably transformed human relation to it. Indeed, a number of works reacted against modernity’s increasing temporal systematisation. Marcel Proust celebrated subjective time in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913–27), whilst Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent (1907) centred on a plot for the destruction of the Greenwich Observatory as the symbolic site for the standardisation of time zones. ‘Man’ as the object of knowledge in modernity also placed the human subject within a positivist matrix, organising life through new technologies of control into artificial segments in order to achieve a quantitative understanding and economic transformation of the body in space and time. Aristotelian time, as the measure of motion according to numerical value, based on a hypothetical objective reality, became increasingly invasive. This was in contrast to the Augustinian notion of time as an ‘extension of the mind’ whereby the soul ‘distends’, stretching out into memory to recover time’s passing into non-existence. Expressing subjective temporality against mathematical time, Gleizes’s paintings were concerned with existence in time within a technological and industrial age.
Gleizes’s upbringing in Courbevoie, a rural suburb of Paris, serves as a context for his ambivalent attitude towards modernity’s urban sprawl and the disappearance of traditional rural life. (In Chapter 3, we will observe that the collision of the rural with the industrial also influences Oskar Schlemmer’s art, though with markedly different consequences.) Gleizes was profoundly concerned with the growth of industrial capitalism and urban transformation. The importance of Gleizes’s work has perhaps been overlooked compared to other modernist painters embracing technological modernity. Gleizes has a considered position to the techno-industrial transformation of culture, perceiving the dystopian consequences of such ‘progress’. Here Gleizes followed René Guénon by arguing that this culture was ‘mechanical, commercially minded, cruel in war, incapable of poetry – [and] in terminal decline’.207 Even after World War I, Gleizes remained consistent in his fear of the cultural consequences of mechanisation. He did not participate in the postwar rappel à l’ordre discussed by Romy Golan,208 or in the avant-garde’s subsequent acceptance of rationalisation, mechanisation and consumerism. Green argues that Gleizes’s close colleague Metzinger, among others, betrayed Cubism.209 By contrast, however, Gleizes argued in Clarté that machines and factories have a cultural place, but that ‘[t]heir appearance is logical like numbers, but with precision and coldness of numbers’.210 (And it was precisely a synthesis of technology’s coldness that lent enormous potential energy to the hot blood of human will in Ernst Jünger’s reactionary modernist fantasy of a ‘new man’ fulfilling Germany’s great destiny, which I discuss later.)211 Whilst Jünger imagined a rigid ‘man of steel’ emerging from the war, for Gleizes – instead influenced by Romains’s notion of opening subjectivity to be co-extensive with one’s environment and other people – the prospect of a modern industrial consciousness was disastrous. Industrial capitalism radically altered the bionomic between humanity and its environment; he perceived that human existence was overwhelmed by industrial rhythm. Unsurprisingly, Gleizes did not hurry to embrace the machine and the coming of war. Even during the avant-garde’s broad après-guerre endorsement of rational systemisation, the machine aesthetic and capitalism, Gleizes criticised the intrinsic relationship between machine production and war. He saw modernity giving birth to overproduction, consequently producing high levels of consumption, establishing capitalist-imperialist hegemony over resources and markets, and destroying the proletariat’s skills and means of existence independent from the factory.212 War is a perfect system for economic modernity: it simultaneously consumes as it produces.
Gleizes argued that mechanisation represented the antithesis of human progress; industrial prostheses were symptomatic of a West desperate for reinvigoration. His thought lies in profound contrast to notions of the utopian, prosthetically-enhanced body imagined elsewhere within modernity’s avant-garde. Gleizes also characterised Henry Ford as a ‘modern’ man – opposed to war but nonetheless making a fortune from its devastation, ‘unable to see the cleavage between his own personal decency and the immense horror he was creating in the world through his daily work’.213 However, Gleizes did not oppose technology as a ‘positive prosthesis’ – a concept that, as Armstrong writes, ‘involves a more utopian version of technology, in which human capacities are extrapolated’214 – harnessed to ‘natural’, organic rhythms. Gleizes’s critique of mechanisation instead related to the notion of ‘negative prosthesis’ – appending the body to supplement a perceived failure within the transformed demands of industrial culture. Indeed, positive prostheses were incorporated in industrial motifs within his work. The monumental Dépiquage des Moissons, exhibited at the 1912 Section D’Or, was a celebration of a mechanical prosthesis at work, and at over 2.5 × 3.5 metres the painting loomed over the rest of the exhibition.215 Through form and content Gleizes celebrated an interpenetration of machine, human and environment into one harmonious bionomic. Rather than reducing the world to an economic resource, or imposing a rhythm upon human relations to space and time, the machine is incorporated within an, albeit cautious, utopian vision of modernity. Gleizes’s concern was with human experience ‘reduced to the simple level of a sensory mechanism’216 rather than the use of technology in the service of humanity. In Homocentrisme (1935) he later posited an ecological notion of the intimate ‘indissoluble alliance’ of the subject and world in opposition to the industrialised subject subjugated under capitalism:
the senses were indispensable for the realisation of man at once in his body and in relation to the world to which he belongs. We see at once that, in opposition to the humanist attitude, which separates man from the surrounding world, the homocentrist unites man and the world intimately, in an indissoluble alliance. Remove the man and you remove the world. Remove the world and you suppress man.217
In the ‘indissoluble alliance’ between humanity and environment, Gleizes’s Portrait de Jacques Nayral developed the method of La Femme aux Phlox through the representation of matter based upon experiential phenomena rather than a linear perspectival order. Indeed, Husserl’s production of a phenomenological method, predicated upon his research of the structure of consciousness, and the problem between it and alterity, had parallels with Gleizes’s own artistic development. Whilst it is highly unlikely that Husserl’s work on phenomenology influenced French artists at this time, the conditions existed for the French reception of Husserlian phenomenology.218 Within Gleizes’s milieu, Bergson’s popular works were certainly well known, Ogden Rood had made Helmholtz’s work on vision understandable to artists (a French translation of Rood’s work appeared in 1881) and Maurice Princet, who has been named among the ‘creators’ of Cubism,219 made accessible non-Euclidean mathematics and possibly Einsteinian theory. Modern German thought had influenced French professors at Strasbourg (as Alsace-Lorraine then belonged to Germany) and at the prestigious Belgian university of Louvain. Husserl had actually been mentioned in French as early as 1910 – that recurring year – in Léon Noël’s argument that physiological mental processes conditioned thought, and therefore reality. Also in 1910, Victor Delbos contributed to a series of lectures on contemporary German philosophy. He presented a paper on Husserl, summarising his three epistemological presuppositions: firstly, the laws of ‘psychic life’ must not be imposed, but derived from experience; secondly, that logical method should proceed from subjectivity (and its representations); and thirdly, that truth consists only of the successful reconciliation of matter within language.220 Husserl was therefore discussed in print in 1910, though whilst the influence of Husserlian phenomenology on cubist painting would make an interesting theoretical proposition, it cannot be historically justified. Nevertheless, it is clear that Husserl’s ideas did not arrive in a philosophical vacuum.221 Indeed, the thought of the French philosophers Charles Renouvier, Léon Brunschvicg, Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier, and Émile Boutroux all influenced Bergson, whose thought was contemporaneous with Cubism.
We might consider Gleizes’s Portrait de Jacques Nayral within the context of these radical developments of thought concerning the relation between subject and world. As we shall see, Gleizes’s process for portraiture realised aspects of experience in Bergsonian and Blondelian philosophy. The latter had written that ‘the most positive truths are drawn from action … knowledge is derivative of action and that it obtains its justification and its reality from it’.222 Similarly, Bergson’s emphasis on the fluidity of the subject’s relation to time and space is figured both in Gleizes’s writing in Du ‘Cubisme’ and his painting, premised upon a kinaesthetic ‘passage’ based on duration, rather than the observation of space within geometric perspective. Gleizes’s portraiture therefore not only synthesised artistic, scientific and literary influences, but also contemporary philosophical ideas about the phenomenal relocation of reality at the nexus between self and world.
Gleizes and Metzinger sought to explain and defend Apollinaire’s appellation ‘Cubism’ in Du ‘Cubisme’, published after the 1911 Salon d’Automne that included Portrait de Jacques Nayral. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes wrote that through Du ‘Cubisme’ Gleizes and Metzinger ‘sought to establish a kind of legislation of the cubist movement, in order to raise it to the rank of an honourable means of expression, to integrate it into the Eternal and Universal Unity of art’.223 This cubist ‘manifesto’ emerged from weekly meetings at the Duchamps’ home in Puteaux, including figures such as Léger, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Picabia, Kupka, Gris, Gleizes, Metzinger, Apollinaire, Princet, Archipenko and La Fresnaye, along with hosts Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. Ribemont-Dessaignes described the Puteaux meetings as involving ‘passionate discussion on which it seemed the future of the human spirit depended’.224 According to Cottington, the group debated: ‘The philosophy of Bergson, the question of dynamism, the notion of simultaneity and their relevance to painting, the social purpose and epistemological status of art, the symbolic, the expressive and the formal possibilities for painting of number and geometry.’225 Gleizes’s investment in Cubism lay in a belief in its profound contribution to culture, a conviction that it was the artist’s duty to be both socially and ethically responsible at a critical historical moment.
Du ‘Cubisme’ was a theoretical and pragmatic response to Cubism’s critics. In three articles between 1911 and 1912, Gleizes had already attempted to justify Cubism as a valid response in its ‘modern’ depiction of culture, by linking it to a classical heritage that included Giotto and Raphael.226 In Du ‘Cubisme’, Gleizes and Metzinger attempted to rebuff xenophobic claims about Cubism’s ‘treasonous’ Germanic tendencies, by locating it within a French realist tradition, whilst elevating the ‘everyday’ as subject matter through a sense of democratic social responsibility. Indeed, other cubist painters were concerned with their immediate surroundings: the Delaunays with urbanism and Léger with technological modernity, whilst Gleizes responded to the convergence between the industrial and the rural. Attempting to legitimate ‘Cubism’ as a movement, Gleizes and Metzinger placed it within a lineage from Cézanne via Courbet, David, Ingres and Manet after Leonardo and Michelangelo, amongst others. In fact, Du ‘Cubisme’ attempted to wrestle tradition away from classicism and nationalism in consolidating its basis within modernity. Accordingly, later in 1912, the Puteaux cubists organised the exhibition ‘Section d’Or’, despite only Gris making reference to the golden section.227
As an artist’s manifesto, Du ‘Cubisme’ is quite sophisticated in its theoretical architecture. Gleizes and Metzinger’s writings can be contextualised within nineteenth-century French thought in their rather Kantian proposal that representation has an arbitrary relation to a fundamentally unknowable world. They write, ‘[t]here is nothing real outside ourselves … except the coincidence of a sensation and an individual mental tendency’.228 Gleizes and Metzinger suggested that perception was not a ‘mirror of nature’, but a synthesis of ideas, impressions and emotions, echoing Cézanne (whom they declare to understand as foreseeing Cubism) and his belief that painting lies at the intersection of sensation and intelligence. Therefore, as Gleizes and Metzinger wrote, ‘let no one be decoyed by the appearance of objectivity … [as] There are no direct means of valuing the process by which the relations between the world and the thought of the artist are rendered perceptible to us’.229 Nothing can be known except the phenomena at the juncture of ‘self’ with ‘other’: existence is necessarily intersubjective as the picture, according to Gleizes, ‘harmonizes with things in general, with the universe: it is an organism’.230
Despite Du ‘Cubisme’’s emphasis on the synthesis between subject and world, Antliff argues that Gleizes and Metzinger’s text advocated their own ‘Nietzschean’ self-interest.231 Du ‘Cubisme’ does appear at first to privilege artistic subjectivity in the creation of form from matter, stating the painter ‘will fashion the real in the image of his mind, for there is only one truth, and that is our own, when we impress it on others’.232 There lies a potential conflict between the idea of painting as an indivisible phenomenal nexus between self and other, and the artist as a transcendent, privileged agent. However, contradictory elements are inherent within Du ‘Cubisme’. Whilst it suggested there was ‘only one truth’, it also proposed there was no such thing as truth since ‘an object has not one absolute form: it has many: it has as many as there are planes in the region of perception’,233 and, ‘If so many eyes contemplate an object, there are so many images of that object; if so many minds comprehend it, there are so many essential images’.234 This attitude towards the unknowable object stems from a notion that reality ‘is intermediate between our consciousness and the consciousness of others’.235 The celebration of the Nietzschean self does not easily cohere with Gleizes’s thought thus far. Indeed, there is, significantly, the degree of Metzinger’s responsibility for the material relating to Nietzsche within Du ‘Cubisme’. Cottington suggests that Metzinger’s elitist tendencies were already apparent in his poetry and in ‘the Bateau-Lavoir milieu of which Metzinger was a peripheral member … [but] nowhere evident in Gleizes’ thinking of the time’.236 Brooke reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that such ideas are consistent with Metzinger’s thought but not in Gleizes, who believed the artist only had the right to be judged through his work. Gleizes was rather more concerned with unanimism, the collective spirit, and art’s social and ethical responsibility than any insistence on the artist’s privileged status.237 I have already referred to Metzinger’s 1910 ‘Note sur la Peinture’ and its claim that artists should ‘impose their domination on the external world’. Correspondence between Metzinger and Gleizes during the war demonstrates the former’s concern with his own subjectivity. Metzinger believed he had gone beyond the ‘materialist perspective’ of Gris’s and Picasso’s ‘romantic perspective’, to establish a new ‘metaphysical perspective’. Consequently, he wrote it was his duty to impose ‘the rule of the mind’ expressed as mathematical relation.238
Antliff’s specific claims concerning Portrait de Jacques Nayral are also dubitable. He argues that Gleizes’s concern for ‘collective nature’ expressed in La Femme aux Phlox subsequently becomes a concern with just ‘two individuals’ in Portrait de Jacques Nayral. For Antliff, Gleizes’s anthropocentrism is then further refined in Du ‘Cubisme’ through a Nietzschean ‘focus on the self’.239 However, this radical tripartite transformation of Gleizes’s thought is flawed. Firstly, as Cottington and Brooke note, Metzinger is likely responsible for Nietzschean elements of Du ‘Cubisme’. Secondly, Antliff’s identification of a shift from nature to individual neglects the wider context of Gleizes’s work. Gleizes not only painted portraits (what Antliff identifies as a concern between ‘two individuals’) before and after the Portrait de Jacques Nayral, but his earlier works actually privileged human figuration to a greater degree. In fact, Portrait de Jacques Nayral moves away from a stable relationship between artist and subject. Furthermore, Gleizes’s paintings after his portrait of Nayral consistently develop his interest in the temporal bionomic between individual and environment. Paintings made after Du ‘Cubisme’ – Dépiquage des Moissons, Les Baigneuses and La Ville et la Fleuve (Fig. 16) – all demonstrate a continuation of Gleizes’s intellectual commitment to articulating the relationship between human existence, nature, and industrial modernity. These paintings do not signify such a retreat into the ‘singular focus on the self’.
Rather than being complicit in a turn towards ‘self’, Portrait de Jacques Nayral actually attempted a profound dissolution of the self within the other. Informed by Romains’s and Bergson’s metaphysical beliefs about self and world, Gleizes sought to harmonise the artist with the subject rather than impose one upon the other. For Gleizes, the ‘truth’ of portraiture lay in restructuring representation upon time rather than space and incorporating an element of Bergsonian durée in the phenomenal temporality between painter and sitter. Du ‘Cubisme’ acknowledged the ‘indeformability’ of Euclidean spatial convention, and advocated the work of ‘non-Euclidean scientists’ in the expression of visual space through ‘convergence and accommodation.’240 In this sense, Portrait de Jacques Nayral developed, rather than indicated a break from La Femme aux Phlox. Again, the sitter’s body threatens to dissolve into the environment, as Nayral’s body ‘decomposes’ into patches of colour. Gleizes’s use of ‘passage’ merged perspectival space upon planes, synthesising object boundaries through conflation and condensation. Similarly, the residual topoi of the face and hands again retrieve the figure from its complete dissolution as the body diffuses into its milieu, otherwise demanding spectatorial attention to maintain the figurative gestalt. Whilst vision is naturally attracted to facial details for recognition, the attention demanded in distinguishing Nayral’s face and hands prevents simultaneous perception of his whole body. The eye moves from those details to restore bodily cohesion, but, as with the phenomena of multi-stable perception, visual processes fluctuate between topographies of detail and whole in distinguishing the body from its environment: the figure always escapes at the place where the spectator is not looking. Brooke argues that the painting consists of
interpenetrating volumes, [that break] the static nature of single-point perspective. The volumes, break, so to speak, in different directions so that, while the unity of the subject is seen from a single perspective point is respected, the eye is still directed over the whole surface of the canvas.241
At the limits of the spectator’s perceptual attention, Nayral’s body escapes into space.
Nayral’s portrait is premised upon Gleizes’s participation in a phenomenological dynamic between the painter and sitter, of ‘the coincidence of a sensation and an individual mental tendency’.242 Thus whilst Du ‘Cubisme’ referred to the artist’s ‘Nietzschean’ role, it also proposed that ‘there are no direct means of valuing the process by which the relations between the world and the thought of the artist are rendered perceptible to us’.243 This is a fundamentally different position, and more attributable to Gleizes: the relocation of artistic imposition to consideration of the relation between world and artist. This is a view related to Gleizes’s later thought, influenced by Charles Henry, that all perception is the convergence of energy and the projection of the pre-constructed representation of form.244 Du ‘Cubisme’’s opinion that ‘we can only experience certitude in respect of the images which they produce in the mind’245 also appears to be Gleizes’s, emphasising images operating upon the mind rather than the mind’s imposition on events. Gleizes’s concern lies in the interaction of the impression of reality within consciousness. This is readily reconcilable with Romains’s belief that intuition could be discovered ‘through penetration, the internal order of the thing’246 and Bergson, who believed duration, the subjective experience of matter through time, was ‘the foundation of our being’.247 Robbins argues that time, for Gleizes, ‘was one of the principal ends of the new painting’.248 The expression of time consisted of simultaneous representations of multiple psychophysical sensations, cohering upon the canvas just as perception and memory sutured the chaos of sense perception. Gleizes also believed, like Le Fauconnier, Delaunay and Léger, that the phenomenological experience of time, the synthesis of unfolding impressions in time within consciousness and memory, organised experience according to a fundamental, atavistic process through which the subject grasps the world. Therefore his work appealed to collective memory, as both ahistorical and the ‘accumulation of civilization’,249 that imbued the canvas with a profound meaning.
Gleizes synthesised ‘collective memory’ and sensation as he elaborated another type of ‘passage’. The reference to a ‘sensible passage’ in Du ‘Cubisme’ concerns a reaching out for an other (rather than the Cézannian ‘spatial’ passage), based upon the intersubjective relation of the artist and spectator (rather than the Nietzschean imposition of the artist’s will): ‘pictorial space may be defined as a sensible passage between two subjective spaces.’250 Meaning is thus generated through subjective interaction, rather than the viewer occupying the site of the artist. The artist’s ‘personality’ reflects, not imposes, the subject of the painting for a new dynamic with its audience. There is a fundamental connection – ‘passage’ – between subjectivities. This aspect of Du ‘Cubisme’ certainly does not reduce the importance of the spectator in the creation of meaning. Indeed, Gleizes later proposed a notion of the ‘death’ of the author, declaring: ‘Once it has left you, your work is no longer yours.’251 Therefore the spectator is incorporated within the very phenomenon of portraiture, becoming part of the passage between Nayral’s sitting, Gleizes’s subjectivity and their own observation. Robbins reflects that Gleizes’s artistic development was premised on an understanding of the world as an organic process of life moving towards harmonious interaction: ‘His individual consciousness, just as his conditioned perception of reality, was a part of collective consciousness.’252
Gleizes’s intersubjective concerns, and his preoccupation with alterity in a more collective sense, are expressed in both Portrait de Jacques Nayral and Dépiquage des Moissons. Whilst intersubjectivity was an important theme in the work of Romains and Bergson, it was also the contemporaneous concern of Wittgenstein, who wrote of abolishing the difference between ‘I’ and ‘Other’, arguing that true existence comes ‘only when we no longer concern ourselves with the I and have learned to face the world without being bothered over the question of its nature’.253 Whilst ‘Cubism’ attacked painting’s alienating, objective spatial laws, Wittgenstein criticised epistemic dependency upon a rhetorical differentiation between objects that also constituted the conceptual basis of the subject’s relation to the world. Subjectivity is the ability to use language, and as Wittgenstein wrote, ‘the limits of my language signify the limits of my world’.254 However, whilst the self is constructed from the exterior condition of language, whereby ‘I’ am ontologically ‘other’ (the subject articulates its ‘interiority’ through the ‘exteriority’ of language), Wittgenstein also believed the subject has a fundamental intersubjective relation to others because of their shared condition within language. Elsewhere Schopenhauer had written of the possibility of the sympathetic recognition of oneself in others as a salvation from the tyranny of one’s own will. Such recognition of interrelation becomes a source of ethics and knowledge, since reality itself is beyond representation. He writes that the ‘veil of Maya, the principium individuationis, is lifted from the eyes of a man to such an extent that he no longer makes the egoistical distinction between himself and the person of others’.255 Similarly, Mach proposed
we shall arrive at a freer and more enlightened view of life, which will preclude the disregard of other egos and the overestimation of our own. The ethical ideal … [is removed] from the ideal of an overweening Nietzschean ‘superman,’ who cannot, and I hope will not be tolerated by his fellow-men.256
Gleizes’s concern with the ‘sensible passage’ was certainly not unique, nor isolated from contemporary thought, as he sought to articulate a harmonious relation between subjective positions within ‘plastic consciousness’.
Gleizes’s own writings elaborate upon his ‘phenomenological’ process in generating portraiture. Discussing passage he described the merging of artistic and spectatorial subjectivities, but also tried to harmonise the relative ‘essence’ of the sitter with his own personality, intimately interconnecting sitter, artist and spectator. Writing about the specific relation between painter and sitter, he described the use of tactile and motor sensations, the faculties of personality, and a temporal response to the Other as the basis for representation. As Gleizes’s essay ‘Souvenirs’ (1957) revealed, Gleizes was conscious of the subjective cohesion between subject and spectator, attending to the empathetic and temporal relation of his own ego with that of the sitter. Gleizes describes his portrait studies not through the traditional static practice of sitting, but through a study of Nayral’s essential temporal characteristics (such as walking conversations) akin to Bergsonian durée: ‘trying to isolate his true likeness from the accumulation of details and picturesque superfluities which always interfere with the permanent reality of a being. The portrait was executed without turning to the model.’257
Gleizes premised his portraiture upon the temporal existence of fleeting impressions within memory. Already, Gleizes’s Paysage à Meudon of 1911 describes the actual kinaesthetic passage of walks from Courbevoie to see Metzinger in Meudon. Rather than traditional portraiture of an immobile subject, Gleizes engaged processes of empathy, memory, and temporality to capture his sitter. Nayral was already close to Gleizes; he was engaged to the artist’s sister, had supported the Abbaye de Créteil, corresponded with Bergson and was editor-in-chief of the house that later published both Du ‘Cubisme’ and Les Peintres Cubistes. Gleizes described him as ‘one of the most sympathetic individuals he had ever met’.258 Through a synaesthetic ‘study’, Gleizes’s painting recovered elements of Nayral’s ‘essence’ to achieve empathetic intersubjectivity in time. For Robbins, Gleizes’s synthetic approach was an alternative method of perspectival shifting compared to Metzinger’s (or Picasso’s and Braque’s). Gleizes’s figuring of simultaneous, but apparently disparate, phenomena between the subject and environment expressed a direct connection between Nayral’s body and the environment. Robbins remarks upon the convergence of ‘the hair of Nayral with the wind tossed foliage of the trees. This is a fundamentally synthetic notion that points to the unity or compatibility of things.’259 This subjective impression is represented pictorially as Nayral’s hair fuses into the background, producing a form of multi-stable matter. The figure immersed within the environment is always at the borderline of dissolution, as Gleizes acknowledged:
his hair in dark masses standing out lightly in undulations as his forehead, his body solidly structured, suggested to me immediately equivalences, recollections, relationships, penetrations, and correspondences with the elements of environment, the land, the trees, the houses.260
Through harmonising the body in space and time, Gleizes used cubist strategies to represent existence as fundamentally interrelated to the world. His own personality was subsumed within a greater phenomenal ‘passage’ between subjectivities. Indeed, Gleizes’s description of his sittings with Nayral is strikingly similar to Bergson’s intersubjective method. As Bergson wrote in his 1903 essay Introduction to Metaphysics (which Gleizes may well have known) the absolute grasp of the other requires an
indivisible feeling I should experience if I were to coincide for a single moment with the personage himself. The actions, gestures and words would then to appear to flow naturally, as though from their source … The character would be given to me all at once in its entirety … It follows that an absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it.261
Elsewhere, Bergson argued that the ‘deep-seated self’ emerges from the synthesis of states ‘melting into one another and forming an organic whole’.262 We might therefore propose that Gleizes sought to represent the essential elements of Nayral through an empathetic relation, expressed through time and memory, harmonising self with other to achieve an absolute, ‘indivisible’ state of being that could be figured through a ‘plastic consciousness’. Within the nascent cubist movement, through his conditional foundation based upon temporal phenomena, memory and empathy, Gleizes’s painting presented a profound challenge to the spatial practices of objective exteriority and alienation of Western art: subjective presence is understood as simultaneous with the time and space of existence.
