Chapter 22
Cubist Puzzles and Finding the Fast Lane with the Futurists
In This Chapter
Sorting out Cubism
Keeping up with Futurism
Checking to see if Futurism was a dead end
Cubism and Futurism (founded in 1908 and 1909, respectively) revo-lutionized art by showing multiple views of a subject simultaneously — something no artist had ever done before, with the exception of Cézanne to a limited extent. If you’ve ever caught a glimpse of yourself in a dressing-room mirror and been disoriented by the split, multifaceted images of yourself, then you’re on the right track for deciphering the flat canvases of the Cubists; they depicted objects from all angles. The Futurists, who were addicted to speed (painting quickly, not the drug!), compressed a series of movements into a single gesture, or a time sequence into an instant.
Both groups believed that earlier artists had painted false pictures of life by depicting it from only one angle, either head-on or in profile. The notion that no single viewpoint has a monopoly on truth was in the air. In 1905, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, stating that space and time frames fluctuate, depending on the observer’s position or point of view. Einstein also proved that energy and matter are essentially the same thing. The Futurists capitalized on this idea by merging motion (energy) and matter in their art or by transforming matter into action.
Cubism: All Views At Once
What is Cubism? Crack an egg and then reassemble its fragments on a flat surface. Voila, you’ve made a kind of Cubist construction. You can see all sides of the egg at once, and yet it’s hard to recognize the egg.
Cubist artists moved art toward abstraction by breaking down physical reality into geometric shapes, usually cubes, and then rearranging the cubes — often independently of what they represent — on a flat surface with little or no perspective. A Cubist painting allows you to see a physical object from multiple viewpoints simultaneously (all sides of the egg), although you might not recognize the object.
Cubists didn’t just fragment the main subject of their paintings (the egg) — they also shattered the background (the frying pan, refrigerator, or kitchen). When they reconstructed the fragments, they often mixed the subject and background so that these physical realities interpenetrate one another. In other words, if you shattered both the egg and the frying pan, when you reconstructed them, you might put the frying pan in the egg instead of the egg in the frying pan.
The founders of Cubism were Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. The first fully Cubist painting is Braque’s Houses at L’Estaque. The cluster of cubelike houses in the painting looks like a rockslide on a steep slope. The painting has almost no depth; the background houses are simply the top of the rockslide.
Pablo Picasso
The art of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) dominates much of the 20th century, probably because it kept pace with progress — or stayed a few steps ahead of it. His art passed through many phases after he began hanging out in Paris in the late 1890s. As a teenager, he immersed himself in the latest Parisian art trends. By his 20s, he was setting the trends. His first major phase was his Blue Period (1901–1904), which was followed by his Rose Period (1905–1908), his Analytic Cubist Period (1908–1912), and his Synthetic Cubist Period (1912–1919). After that, Picasso stopped having periods — but his art kept evolving.
Picasso’s first period is called the Blue Period because he used various shades of blue and depicted unhappy or “blue” people. It’s said that Picasso himself was “blue” at this time, deeply depressed because a close friend of his, Carlos Casagemas, had committed suicide in 1901. The two young men had moved to Paris together in 1900. Not long after, Casagemas shot himself in a Parisian café when the woman he loved spurned him. Picasso painted several tributes to his friend, including Death of Casagemas and Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas, and then launched into his Blue Period.
One of Picasso’s noteworthy Blue Period paintings is Life, or La Vie (see the color section), painted in 1903. It depicts a pair of gaunt young lovers (the woman nude, the man nearly nude) who face off with a stern elderly woman cradling an infant. The elderly woman looks at them; they don’t look at her. Perhaps the child is theirs, or maybe it represents the child they want to have. The couple and woman confront each other through a space neither seems able to penetrate. The couple’s nakedness shows their vulnerability. The woman’s clothes suggest her strength. In the background, two equally vulnerable nude women crouch in fetal positions within picture frames. A naked man tries unsuccessfully to comfort one of them. The only content person in the painting is the infant, sleeping in the elder woman’s cloak, which she has gathered around the child like a womb. The repeated fetal positions, with their suggestion of vulnerability, and stages of life represented by the infant, young couple, and elder woman, suggest the cycle of life (La Vie) and perhaps a need to return to the comfort of the womb.
Picasso gave the young man the face of his friend Casagemas, which adds another level of meaning to the work. Perhaps the reason why the old woman sees the young couple and they don’t notice her is because they’re not in the same space: She is recalling her past, before Casagemas killed himself. The paintings behind them may be snapshots of her memories before and after Casagemas’s death.
Radiographs of La Vie show the underlayers of the painting. Picasso made several changes before settling on the picture seen today. The X-ray reveals that, in an earlier version, Casagemas’s young woman was pregnant. Perhaps this alludes to a real or desired pregnancy that caused their split. Who can say? Even stranger is the fact that Picasso originally painted his own face in the place of Casagemas. Perhaps some artists’ secrets are better off left buried beneath the layers of paint!
The bridge between Picasso’s realistic paintings and Cubism is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (see Figure 22-1), painted from 1908 to 1909. In this painting, Avignon is not the French city but a street in Barcelona’s red-light district. The demoiselles are prostitutes who confront the viewer like a potential customer. (Ironically, demoiselle means “gentlewoman,” “bachelorette,” “virgin,” or “spinster.”) Picasso unmasks and strips these women, showing us both their inner natures and the geometric structures under their flesh.
In 1906 and 1907, Picasso discovered primitive Iberian art, Gauguin’s primitivism (his Tahiti paintings — see Savage Tales in the appendix), and African art, which sailors brought to Paris from France’s African colonies. All these influences helped shape Picasso’s new style, Cubism. African art influenced many other Paris-based artists as well. The art critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) said that the Fauve painters André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck (see Chapter 21) were deeply impressed by African art because it “succeeded in reproducing the human figure without using any of the elements of direct visual perception.”
In other words, African artists reduced the human figure to semi-abstract forms that conveyed the most essential details about the body and character. Picasso, who had said that “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary,” was equally impressed by this aspect of African art. He learned a new visual language from it, which he adapted and used for the rest of his life.
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Figure 22-1: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is Picasso’s Crossing-of-the-Rubicon painting. It both announced and triggered the abstract art revolution. |
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Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Notice how the faces (or heads) of the two figures on the right of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon are more reductive and aggressive looking — in other words, more like African masks. This suggests that, with these two, Picasso has gotten closer to the instinctual ground floor of human nature. One of their heads is on backwards (swiveled around like Regan in The Exorcist).
Analytic Cubism: Breaking things apart
Georges Braque (1882–1963) and Picasso invented Analytic Cubism in 1908. In Analytic Cubism, the artist presents objects in a prismatic fashion so that the viewer can see all sides at once. As in a prism, some planes intersect, some overlap, and others appear to interpenetrate. To achieve this affect, the artist breaks objects and figures down into geometric units, usually two or three shapes. Then he flattens all the surfaces into a single plane. Finally, he dramatically reduces his color palette to several shades of one or two colors. Looked at another way, the artist drains color and perspective from natural forms so the viewer can focus on multifaceted forms — see all views from a single viewpoint (and not be distracted by color).
The face in Picasso’s Portrait of Ambroise Vollard looks like shattered brown glass. The man’s body is in fragments, though most of his fractured face is recognizable.
The viewer’s job is to pick up the pieces and reconstruct them in his imagination. But you take one look at the fragmented form of the man, and you realize all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Ambroise Vollard back together again. In fact, he’s more interesting in this state. Picasso and Braque soon eliminated representation completely in Analytic Cubism. Braque said, “There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.”
What may be the downside of Analytic Cubism is that the artist has drastically limited his tools of expression (color, form, perspective) to zero in on one aspect of reality that, until that time, had been largely ignored.
Because Braque and Picasso were working with such a limited toolbox of expressive media, much of their work during this period is indistinguishable. Without a signature, it’s hard to tell what is Braque’s and what is Picasso’s.
Synthetic Cubism: Gluing things together
Braque and Picasso created a new version of Cubism, called Synthetic Cubism, in 1912. Instead of breaking objects down, they pasted things together to create a semi-representational whole.
The new style of Cubism began with Picasso’s invention of the collage. In his first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning, he pasted bits of paper (with Cubist shapes drawn on them) onto an oilcloth that is printed with the pattern of chair caning. The picture frame is a piece of rope wrapped around the canvas. Inspired by this work, Braque invented a variant called papier collé, in which the flat object or material stuck into the collage is usually cut to represent an object in the artwork. For example, if one of the elements were a comb used to represent a man’s hair, it might still look like a comb even though cut into the shape of hair. In other words, it would participate in the artistic illusion created by the collage, while retaining its reality as a comb.
Both Picasso and Braque expanded their color palettes and their range of forms during this phase of Cubism. They also continued to manipulate perspective. By overlaying objects, they gave their works a sculptural sense of depth. But instead of your eyes sinking into the canvas toward a vanishing point, like in a traditional painting, the three-dimensionality rises out of the work toward the viewer. Sometimes they made the real three-dimensionality of the work seem to contradict the representational by adding shadows going in different directions with pencil or charcoal.
Fernand Léger: Cubism for the common man
Fernand Léger (1881–1955), a painter, printmaker, filmmaker, ceramist, and set designer for theater, broadened Cubism’s color palette (as did Juan Gris), expanding its expressive possibilities. In 1911, Léger joined Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, Francis Picabia, and others to form an offshoot Cubist movement called the Puteaux Group (sometimes called Orphism), named after a Parisian suburb where the group met.
Léger’s form of Cubism differed greatly from Picasso’s and Braque’s. Not only did he use more colors, but he included curves and three-dimensional forms such as cylinders. He especially liked jarring primary colors, which he used to emphasize the startling incongruities of daily life. He said, “Pictorial contrasts used in their purest sense are . . . the structural basis of modern pictures.”
During World War I, Léger’s style evolved. He was drafted into the army where he said he learned to appreciate “the people.” While recovering from being gassed, he drew and painted what he saw around him (he also illustrated trench warfare while on active duty). Léger felt that art had sidestepped ordinary people and only appealed to intellectuals. So he created Cubism for everyday folks, Cubism that mirrored real life while glorifying the machine age, which he hoped would improve conditions for the working class. Léger’s observations of World War I soldiers playing cards to pass the time inspired his The Card Players. The soldiers in the painting look like disassembled robots playing cards inside a machine. This is intended as a compliment, suggesting that the men are as efficient as machines.
Léger employed a fascinating interplay of angles in the painting while contrasting cylindrical limbs with a factory-like background comprised of red and yellow square shapes. He used green highlights to harmonize with the yellow and fight with the red. Despite its robotic appearance, Léger’s painting doesn’t banish emotion. These mechanical men have personalities. You can see the “poker face” of the player on the right: He adopts a confident but bored look by resting his chin on his left hand (a cigarette between his fingers), while displaying what he believes is his winning hand. His opponent stiffens and scans his cards to see if he can still pull off a win.
Futurism: Art That Broke the Speed Limit
The Futurists introduced a couple new features into art: compression of movement and greater interpenetration of subjects and backgrounds. Even though earlier photographers like Eadweard Muybridge had shot series of photos of people or animals moving, the Futurists depicted moving figures and machines at multiple moments of time all in one image. You could say they took a cinematic sequence and compressed it into a single shot.
In the first Futurist Manifesto (published in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro on February 20, 1909), the group’s founder, Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), said, “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. . . . All subjects previously used [in art] must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed.”
The first Futurist Manifesto was little more than raving — a loud shout that announced that the old guard must yield to the avant-garde. The Futurists declared,
We want to demolish museums and libraries. . . . Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. . . . To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda [the Mona Lisa]!
Marinetti soon attracted others to the movement: Umberto Boccioni (painter and sculptor), Gino Severini (painter), Giacomo Balla (painter), Luigi Russolo (painter and composer), and Carlo Carrà (painter and writer). In 1910, the Futurists published the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (their third publication), which offers some visionary ideas for a more active form of art:
All things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves. . . . Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty.
Not only did the Futurists compress a series of movements into a single frame, but they also illustrated the interaction between man and his environment by blending him into his surroundings and vice versa:
Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit, and the sofas penetrate our bodies. The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it.
With this system of interaction and interpenetration, the borders that separate human beings from their surroundings break down. Geography becomes part of identity. If someone says proudly, “I’m from New York,” then the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building pierce through his head and subways race through his body.
In addition, the Futurists wanted their public to be active participants in their collages of life, to sit inside their paintings rather than view them from the outside like tourists in a museum:
The construction of pictures has hitherto been foolishly traditional. Painters have shown us the objects and the people placed before us. We shall henceforward put the spectator in the center of the picture.
To cleanse the world of what they consider the dinosaurs of old art and culture, the Futurists advocated war. “We want to glorify war,” wrote Marinetti, “the only cure for the world.” In 1918, Marinetti founded a Futurist political party, which merged with Mussolini’s Fascist Party in 1919.
In the following sections, I examine the work of two of the greatest Futurists, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini.
Umberto Boccioni
Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), both a painter and sculptor, is considered the best artist of the Futurists. One of his works that illustrates the Futurist idea of blending man into his surroundings is La Strada Entra Nella Casa (The Street Enters the House), painted in 1911. In this work, a woman peering over a balcony at a hyperactive street scene absorbs the action that she sees: The street below scales the balcony and cuts through her; the reddish horses galloping on the road charge through her consciousness and her body. Neighboring apartment buildings infiltrate the woman’s flat. Buildings farther down the street lean on each other, sharing walls. The whirling energy of city life infects everyone and everything.
One of Boccioni’s most celebrated works is the sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (see Figure 22-2). The bronze statue of a robotic running man is the Futurist ideal: a human with the dynamism and speed of a machine. The figure looks like a hybrid of Darth Vader and Nike of Samothrace: power and action in a single form. Ironically, in the original Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti declared that “A screaming automobile that seems to run like a machine-gun is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace” (see Chapter 7).
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Figure 22-2: Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space illustrates the Futurist concept of simultaneity: multiple moments suggested by a single image. |
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Scala / Art Resource, NY
The statue is also reminiscent of the liquid metal policeman in Terminator II (1990) during one of his meltdowns. The man liquefies, re-forms, and moves swiftly into the next moment all at the same time. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space is as futuristic today as it was in 1913 when Boccioni created it.
Transferring the ideas of Futurist painting to sculpture, Boccioni wrote in his 1912 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, “Let us tear the body open and let us enclose the environment in it.”
Gino Severini
Gino Severini (1883–1966) was among the most original Futurist artists. Strongly influenced by Cubism, his geometric canvases are typically crowded with interlaced activity that seems to expose life from every angle. He tended to use analogous colors to blend his diverse forms, and complementary colors to suggest dramatic actions. For example, in his Red Cross Train Passing a Village, the stylized French Red Cross locomotive roars past houses and hillsides. The landscape of triangular-cut hills, stylized trees, and rectilinear buildings appears just as streamlined as the train, as if it were designed to accommodate speed.
In The Boulevard (see the color section) Severini blends pedestrians into the cityscape they navigate, while preserving something of the pedestrians’ rather generic individualities. This pretty scene looks like a semi-abstract quilt of an alpine ski resort. But like other Futurist work, the overall impression is that the artist has captured a human being’s fragmented consciousness of his surroundings. Some of Severini’s work could be called Cubist Futurism.