This essay is dedicated to Barbara Niven who prompted it in an ABC teashop off the Gray’s Inn Road a long time ago.
Certains hommes sont des collines
Qui s’élèvent entre les hommes
Et voient au loin tout l’avenir
Mieux que s’il était présent
Plus net que s’il était passé.
Apollinaire
The things that Picasso and I
said to one another during those years will never be said again,
and even if they were,
no one would understand them any more.
It was like
being roped together on a mountain.
Georges Braque
There are happy moments,
but no happy periods in history.
Arnold Hauser
The work of art is therefore
only a halt in the becoming
and not a frozen aim on its own.
El Lissitzky
I find it hard to believe that the most extreme Cubist works were painted over fifty years ago. It is true that I would not expect them to have been painted today. They are both too optimistic and too revolutionary for that. Perhaps in a way I am surprised that they have been painted at all. It would seem more likely that they were yet to be painted.
Do I make things unnecessarily complicated? Would it not be more helpful to say simply: the few great Cubist works were painted between 1907 and 1914? And perhaps to qualify this by adding that a few more, by Juan Gris, were painted a little later?
And anyway is it not nonsense to think of Cubism having not yet taken place when we are surrounded in daily life by the apparent effects of Cubism? All modern design, architecture and town planning seems inconceivable without the initial example of Cubism.
Nevertheless I must insist on the sensation I have in front of the works themselves: the sensation that the works and I, as I look at them, are caught, pinned down, in an enclave of time, waiting to be released and to continue a journey that began in 1907.
Cubism was a style of painting which evolved very quickly, and whose various stages can be fairly specifically defined.1 Yet there were also Cubist poets, Cubist sculptors, and later on so-called Cubist designers and architects. Certain original stylistic features of Cubism can be found in the pioneer works of other movements: Suprematism, Constructivism, Futurism, Vorticism, the de Stijl movement.
The question thus arises: can Cubism be adequately defined as a style? It seems unlikely. Nor can it be defined as a policy. There was never any Cubist manifesto. The opinions and outlook of Picasso, Braque, Léger or Juan Gris were clearly very different even during the few years when their paintings had many features in common. Is it not enough that the category of Cubism includes those works that are now generally agreed to be within it? This is enough for dealers, collectors, and cataloguers who go by the name of art historians. But it is not, I believe, enough for you or me.
Even those whom the stylistic category satisfies are wont to say that Cubism constituted a revolutionary change in the history of art. Later we shall analyse this change in detail. The concept of painting as it had existed since the Renaissance was overthrown. The idea of art holding up a mirror to nature became a nostalgic one: a means of diminishing instead of interpreting reality.
If the word ‘revolution’ is used seriously and not merely as an epithet for this season’s novelties, it implies a process. No revolution is simply the result of personal originality. The maximum that such originality can achieve is madness: madness is revolutionary freedom confined to the self.
Cubism cannot be explained in terms of the genius of its exponents. And this is emphasized by the fact that most of them became less profound artists when they ceased to be Cubists. Even Braque and Picasso never surpassed the works of their Cubist period: and a great deal of their later work was inferior.
The story of how Cubism happened in terms of painting and of the leading protagonists has been told many times. The protagonists themselves found it extremely difficult – both at the time and afterwards – to explain the meaning of what they were doing.
To the Cubists, Cubism was spontaneous. To us it is part of history. But a curiously unfinished part. Cubism should be considered not as a stylistic category but as a moment (even if a moment lasting six or seven years) experienced by a certain number of people. A strangely placed moment.
It was a moment in which the promises of the future were more substantial than the present. With the important exception of the avant-garde artists during a few years after 1917 in Moscow, the confidence of the Cubists has never since been equalled among artists.
D. H. Kahnweiler, who was a friend of the Cubists and their dealer, has written:
I lived those seven crucial years from 1907 to 1914 with my painter friends … what occurred at that time in the plastic arts will be understood only if one bears in mind that a new epoch was being born, in which man (all mankind in fact) was undergoing a transformation more radical than any other known within historical times.2
What was the nature of this transformation? I have outlined elsewhere (in The Success and Failure of Picasso) the relation between Cubism and the economic, technological and scientific developments of the period. There seems little point in repeating this here: rather, I would like to try to push a little further our definition of the philosophic meaning of these developments and their coincidence.
An interlocking world system of imperialism; opposed to it, a socialist international; the founding of modern physics, physiology and sociology; the increasing use of electricity, the invention of radio and the cinema; the beginnings of mass production; the publishing of mass-circulation newspapers; the new structural possibilities offered by the availability of steel and aluminium; the rapid development of chemical industries and the production of synthetic materials; the appearance of the motor-car and the aeroplane: what did all this mean?
The question may seem so vast that it leads to despair. Yet there are rare historical moments to which such a question can perhaps be applied. These are moments of convergence, when numerous developments enter a period of similar qualitative change, before diverging into a multiplicity of new terms. Few of those who live through such a moment can grasp the full significance of the qualitative change taking place; but everybody is aware of the times changing: the future, instead of offering continuity, appears to advance towards them.
This was surely the case in Europe from about 1900 to 1914 -although one must remember, when studying the evidence, that the reaction of many people to their own awareness of change is to pretend to ignore it.
Apollinaire, who was the greatest and most representative poet of the Cubist movement, repeatedly refers to the future in his poetry.
Where my youth fell
You see the flame of the future
You must know that I speak today
To tell the whole world
That the art of prophecy is born at last.
The developments which converged at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe changed the meaning of both time and space. All, in different ways, some inhuman and others full of promise, offered a liberation from the immediate, from the rigid distinction between absence and presence. The concept of the field, first put forward by Faraday when wrestling with the problem – as defined in traditional terms – of ‘action at a distance’, entered now, unacknowledged, into all modes of planning and calculation and even into many modes of feeling. There was a startling extension through time and space of human power and knowledge. For the first time the world, as a totality, ceased to be an abstraction and became realizable.
If Apollinaire was the greatest Cubist poet, Blaise Cendrars was the first. His poem, ‘Les Pâques à New York’ (1912) had a profound influence on Apollinaire and demonstrated to him how radically one could break with tradition. The three major poems of Cendrars at this time were all concerned with travelling – but travelling in a new sense across a realizable globe. In ‘Le Panama ou Les Aventures de Mes Sept Oncles’ he writes:
Poetry dates from today
The milky way round my neck
The two hemispheres on my eyes
At full speed
There are no more breakdowns
If I had the time to save a little money I’d
be flying in the air show
I have reserved my seat in the first train through
the tunnel under the Channel
I am the first pilot to cross the Atlantic solo
900 millions
The 900 millions probably refers to the then estimated population of the world.
It is important to see how philosophically far-reaching were the consequences of this change and why it can be termed qualitative. It was not merely a question of faster transport, quicker messages, a more complex scientific vocabulary, larger accumulations of capital, wider markets, international organizations, etc. The process of the secularization of the world was at last complete. Arguments against the existence of God had achieved little. But now man was able to extend himself indefinitely beyond the immediate: he took over the territory in space and time where God had been presumed to exist.
‘Zone’, the poem that Apollinaire wrote under the immediate influence of Cendrars, contains the following lines:
Christ pupil of the eye
Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows how
This century changed into a bird ascends like Jesus
Devils in pits raise their heads to watch it
They say it’s imitating Simon Magus of Judea
If it can fly, we’ll call it the fly one
Angels swing past its trapeze
Icarus Enoch Elias Apollonius of Tyana
Hover round the first aeroplane
Dispersing at times to let through the priests
As they bear the Holy Eucharist
Forever ascending and raising the Host …3
The second consequence concerned the relation of the self to the secularized world. There was no longer any essential discontinuity between the individual and the general. The invisible and the multiple no longer intervened between each individual and the world. It was becoming more and more difficult to think in terms of having been placed in the world. A man was part of the world and indivisible from it. In an entirely original sense, which remains at the basis of modern consciousness, a man was the world which he inherited.
Again, Apollinaire expresses this:
I have known since then the bouquet of the world
I am drunk from having drunk the universe whole.
All the previous spiritual problems of religion and morality would now be increasingly concentrated in a man’s choice of attitude to the existing state of the world considered as his own existing state.
It is now only against the world, within his own consciousness, that he can measure his stature. He is enhanced or diminished according to how he acts towards the enhancement or diminishment of the world. His self apart from the world, his self wrenched from its global context – the sum of all existing social contexts – is a mere biological accident. The secularization of the world exacts its price as well as offering the privilege of a choice, clearer than any other in history.
Apollinaire:
I am everywhere or rather I start to be everywhere
It is I who am starting this thing of the centuries
to come.
As soon as more than one man says this, or feels it, or aspires towards feeling it – and one must remember that the notion and the feeling are the consequence of numerous material developments impinging upon millions of lives – as soon as this happens, the unity of the world has been proposed.
The term ‘unity of the world’ can acquire a dangerously utopian aura. But only if it is thought to be politically applicable to the world as it is. A sine qua non for the unity of the world is the end of exploitation. The evasion of this fact is what renders the term utopian.
Meanwhile the term has other significations. In many respects (the Declaration of Human Rights, military strategy, communications, etc.) the world since 1900 has been treated as a single unit. The unity of the world has received de facto recognition.
Today we know that the world should be unified, just as we know that all men should have equal rights. Insofar as a man denies this or acquiesces in its denial, he denies the unity of his own self. Hence the profound psychological sickness of the imperialist countries, hence the corruption implicit in so much of their learning – when knowledge is used to deny knowledge.
At the moment of Cubism, no denials were necessary. It was a moment of prophecy, but prophecy as the basis of a transformation that had actually begun.
Already I hear the shrill sound of the friend’s voice to come
Who walks with you in Europe
Whilst never leaving America …
I do not wish to suggest a general period of ebullient optimism. It was a period of poverty, exploitation, fear and desperation. The majority could only be concerned with the means of their survival, and millions did not survive. But for those who asked questions, there were new positive answers whose authenticity seemed to be guaranteed by the existence of new forces.
The socialist movements in Europe (with the exception of that in Germany and sections of the trade-union movement in the United States) were convinced that they were on the eve of revolution and that the revolution would spread to become a world revolution. This belief was shared even by those who disagreed about the political means necessary – by syndicalists, parliamentarians, communists and anarchists.
A particular kind of suffering was coming to an end: the suffering of hopelessness and defeat. People now believed, if not for themselves then for the future, in victory. The belief was often strongest where the conditions were worst. Everyone who was exploited or downtrodden and who had the strength left to ask about the purpose of his miserable life was able to hear in answer the echo of declarations like that of Lucheni, the Italian anarchist who stabbed the Empress of Austria in 1898: ‘The hour is not far distant when a new sun will shine upon all men alike’; or like that of Kalyaev in 1905 who, on being sentenced to death for the assassination of the Governor-General of Moscow, told the court ‘to learn to look the advancing revolution straight in the eye’.
An end was in sight. The limitless, which until now had always reminded men of the unattainability of their hopes, became suddenly an encouragement. The world became a starting point.
The small circle of Cubist painters and writers were not directly involved in politics. They did not think in political terms. Yet they were concerned with a revolutionary transformation of the world. How was this possible? Again we find the answer in the historical timing of the Cubist movement. It was not then essential for a man’s intellectual integrity to make a political choice. Many developments, as they converged to undergo an equivalent qualitative change, appeared to promise a transformed world. The promise was an overall one.
‘All is possible,’ wrote André Salmon, another Cubist poet, ‘everything is realizable everywhere and with everything.’
Imperialism had begun the process of unifying the world. Mass production promised eventually a world of plenty. Mass-circulation newspapers promised informed democracy. The aeroplane promised to make the dream of Icarus real. The terrible contradictions born of the convergence were not yet clear. They became evident in 1914 and they were first politically polarized by the Russian Revolution of 1917. El Lissitzky, one of the great innovators of Russian revolutionary art until this art was suppressed, implies in a biographical note how the moment of political choice came from the conditions of the Cubist moment:
The Film of El’s Life till 19264
BIRTH: My generation was born
a few dozen years
before the Great October Revolution.
ANCESTORS: A few centuries ago our ancestors had the luck
to make the great voyages of discovery.
WE: We, the grandchildren of Columbus,
are creating the epoch of the most glorious inventions.
They have made our globe very small,
but have
expanded our space
and intensified our time.
SENSATIONS: My life is accompanied
by unprecedented sensations.
Barely five years old I had the rubber leads
of Edison’s phonograph stuck in my ears.
Eight years,
and I was chasing after the first electric tram in Smolensk,
the diabolical force
which drove the peasant horses out of the town.
COMPRESSION OF MATTER: The steam engine rocked my cradle.
In the meantime it has gone the way of all ichthyosauruses.
Machines are ceasing
to have fat bellies full of intestines.
Already we have the compressed skulls
of dynamos with their electric brains.
Matter and mind
are directly transmitted through crankshafts
and thus made to work.
Gravity and inertia are being overcome.
1918: In 1918 in Moscow before my eyes
the short-circuit sparked
which split the world in
half.
This stroke drove our present apart
like a wedge
between yesterday and tomorrow.
My work
too
forms part of driving the wedge
further
in.
One belongs here or there:
there is no middle.
The Cubist movement ended in France in 1914. With the war a new kind of suffering was born. Men were forced to face for the first time the full horror – not of hell, or damnation, or a lost battle, or famine, or plague – but the full horror of what stood in the way of their own progress. And they were forced to face this in terms of their own responsibility, not in terms of a simple confrontation as between clearly defined enemies.
The scale of the waste and the irrationality and the degree to which men could be persuaded and forced to deny their own interests led to the belief that there were incomprehensible and blind forces at work. But since these forces could no longer be accommodated by religion, and since there was no ritual by which they could be approached or appeased, each man had to live with them within himself, as best he could. Within him they destroyed his will and confidence.
On the last page of All Quiet on the Western Front the hero thinks:
I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.5
The new kind of suffering which was born in 1914 and has persisted in Western Europe until the present day is an inverted suffering. Men fought within themselves about the meaning of events, identity, hope. This was the negative possibility implicit in the new relation of the self to the world. The life they experienced became a chaos within them. They became lost within themselves.
Instead of apprehending (in however simple and direct a way) the processes which were rendering their own destinies identical with the world’s, they submitted to the new condition passively. That is to say the world, which was nevertheless indivisibly part of them, reverted in their minds to being the old world which was separate from them and opposed them: it was as though they had been forced to devour God, heaven and hell and live for ever with the fragments inside themselves. It was indeed a new and terrible form of suffering and it coincided with the widespread, deliberate use of false ideological propaganda as a weapon. Such propaganda preserves within people outdated structures of feeling and thinking whilst forcing new experiences upon them. It transforms them into puppets – whilst most of the strain brought about by the transformation remains politically harmless as inevitably incoherent frustration. The only purpose of such propaganda is to make people deny and then abandon the selves which otherwise their own experience would create.
In ‘La Jolie Rousse’, Apollinaire’s last long poem (he died in 1918), his vision of the future, after his experience of the war, has become a source of suffering as much as of hope. How can he reconcile what he has seen with what he once foresaw? From now on there can be no unpolitical prophecies.
We are not your enemies
We want to take over vast strange territories
Where the flowering mystery waits to be picked
Where there are fires and colours never yet seen
A thousand imponderable apparitions
Which must be given reality
We wish to explore the vast domain of goodness
where everything is silent
And time can be pursued or brought back
Pity us who fight continually on the frontiers
Of the infinite and the future
Pity for our mistakes pity for our sins.
The violence of summer is here
My youth like the spring is dead
Now, O sun, is the time of scorching Reason
Laugh then laugh at me
Men from everywhere and more particularly here
For there are so many things I dare not tell you
So many things you will not let me say
Have pity on me.
We can now begin to understand the central paradox of Cubism. The spirit of Cubism was objective. Hence its calm and its comparative anonymity as between artists. Hence also the accuracy of its technical prophecies. I live in a satellite city that has been built during the last five years. The character of the pattern of what I now see out of the window as I write can be traced directly back to the Cubist pictures of 1911 and 1912. Yet the Cubist spirit seems to us today to be curiously distant and disengaged.
This is because the Cubists took no account of politics as we have since experienced them. In common with even their experienced political contemporaries, they did not imagine and did not foresee the extent, depth and duration of the suffering which would be involved in the political struggle to realize what had so clearly become possible and what has since become imperative.
The Cubists imagined the world transformed, but not the process of transformation.
Cubism changed the nature of the relationship between the painted image and reality, and by so doing it expressed a new relationship between man and reality.
Many writers have pointed out that Cubism marked a break in the history of art comparable to that of the Renaissance in relation to medieval art. That is not to say that Cubism can be equated with the Renaissance. The confidence of the Renaissance lasted for about sixty years (approximately from 1420 to 1480): that of Cubism lasted for about six years. However, the Renaissance remains a point of departure for appreciating Cubism.
In the early Renaissance the aim of art was to imitate nature. Alberti formulated this view: ‘The function of the painter is to render with lines and colours, on a given panel or wall, the visible surface of any body, so that at a certain distance and from a certain position it appears in relief and just like the body itself.’6
It was not, of course, as simple as that. There were the mathematical problems of linear perspective which Alberti himself solved. There was the question of choice – that is to say the question of the artist doing justice to nature by choosing to represent what was typical of nature at her best.
Yet the artist’s relation to nature was comparable to that of the scientist. Like the scientist, the artist applied reason and method to the study of the world. He observed and ordered his findings. The parallelism of the two disciplines is later demonstrated by the example of Leonardo.
Although often employed far less accurately during the following centuries, the metaphorical model for the function of painting at this time was the mirror. Alberti cites Narcissus when he sees himself reflected in the water as the first painter. The mirror renders the appearances of nature and simultaneously delivers them into the hands of man.
It is extremely hard to reconstruct the attitudes of the past. In the light of more recent developments and the questions raised by them, we tend to iron out the ambiguities which may have existed before the questions were formed. In the early Renaissance, for example, the humanist view and a medieval Christian view could still be easily combined. Man became the equal of God, but both retained their traditional positions. Arnold Hauser writes of the early Renaissance: ‘The seat of God was the centre round which the heavenly spheres revolved, the earth was the centre of the material universe, and man himself a self-contained microcosm round which, as it were, revolved the whole of nature, just as the celestial bodies revolved round that fixed star, the earth.’7
Thus man could observe nature around him on every side and be enhanced both by what he observed and by his own ability to observe. He had no need to consider that he was essentially part of that nature. Man was the eye for which reality had been made visual: the ideal eye, the eye of the viewing point of Renaissance perspective. The human greatness of his eye lay in its ability to reflect and contain, like a mirror, what was.
The Copernican revolution, Protestantism, the Counter-Reformation destroyed the Renaissance position. With this destruction modern subjectivity was born. The artist becomes primarily concerned with creation. His own genius takes the place of nature as the marvel. It is the gift of his genius, his ‘spirit’, his ‘grace’ which makes him god-like. At the same time the equality between man and god is totally destroyed. Mystery enters art to emphasize the inequality. A century after Alberti’s claim that art and science are parallel activities, Michelangelo speaks – no longer of imitating nature – but of imitating Christ: ‘In order to imitate in some degree the venerable image of Our Lord, it is not enough to be a painter, a great and skilful master; I believe that one must further be of blameless life, even if possible a saint, that the Holy Spirit may inspire one’s understanding.’8
It would take us too far from our field even to attempt to trace the history of art from Michelangelo onwards – Mannerism, the Baroque, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century classicism. What is relevant to our purpose is that, from Michelangelo until the French Revolution, the metaphorical model for the function of painting becomes the theatre stage. It may seem unlikely that the same model works for a visionary like El Greco, a Stoic like Poussin (who actually worked from stage models he built himself) and a middle-class moralist like Chardin. Yet all the artists of these two centuries shared certain assumptions. For them all the power of art lay in its artificiality. That is to say they were concerned with constructing comprehensive examples of some truth such as could not be met with in such an ecstatic, pointed, sublime or meaningful way in life itself.
Painting became a schematic art. The painter’s task was no longer to represent or imitate what existed: it was to summarize experience. Nature is now what man has to redeem himself from. The artist becomes responsible not simply for the means of conveying a truth, but also for the truth itself. Painting ceases to be a branch of natural science and becomes a branch of the moral sciences.
In the theatre the spectator faces events from whose consequences he is immune; he may be affected emotionally and morally but he is physically removed, protected, separate, from what is happening before his eyes. What is happening is artificial. It is he who now represents nature – not the work of art. And if, at the same time, it is from himself that he must redeem himself, this represents the contradiction of the Cartesian division which prophetically or actually so dominated these two centuries.
Rousseau, Kant and the French Revolution – or rather, all the developments which lay behind the thought of the philosophers and the actions of the Revolution – made it impossible to go on believing in constructed order as against natural chaos. The metaphorical model changed again, and once more it applies over a long period despite dramatic changes of style. The new model is that of the personal account. Nature no longer confirms or enhances the artist as he investigates it. Nor is he any longer concerned with creating ‘artificial’ examples, for these depend upon the common recognition of certain moral values. He is now alone, surrounded by nature, from which his own experience separates him.
Nature is what he sees through his experience. There is thus in all nineteenth-century art – from the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of the Romantics to the ‘optics’ of the Impressionists – considerable confusion about where the artist’s experience stops and nature begins. The artist’s personal account is his attempt to make his experience as real as nature, which he can never reach, by communicating it to others. The considerable suffering of most nineteenth-century artists arose out of this contradiction: because they were alienated from nature, they needed to present themselves as nature to others.
Speech, as the recounting of experience and the means of making it real, preoccupied the Romantics. Hence their constant comparisons between paintings and poetry. Géricault, whose ‘Raft of the Medusa’ was the first painting of a contemporary event consciously based on eyewitness accounts, wrote in 1821: ‘How I should like to be able to show our cleverest painters several portraits, which are such close resemblances to nature, whose easy pose leaves nothing to be desired, and of which one can really say that all they lack is the power of speech.’9
In 1850 Delacroix wrote: ‘I have told myself a hundred times that painting – that is to say, the material thing called painting – was no more than the pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and that of the spectator.’10
For Corot experience was a far less flamboyant and more modest affair than for the Romantics. But nevertheless he still emphasized how essential the personal and the relative are to art. In 1856 he wrote: ‘Reality is one part of art: feeling completes it … before any site and any object, abandon yourself to your first impression. If you have really been touched, you will convey to others the sincerity of your emotion.’11
Zola, who was one of the first defenders of the Impressionists, defined a work of art as ‘a corner of nature seen through a temperament’. The definition applies to the whole of the nineteenth century and is another way of describing the same metaphorical model.
Monet was the most theoretical of the Impressionists and the most anxious to break through the century’s barrier of subjectivity. For him (at least theoretically) the role of his temperament was reduced to that of the process of perception. He speaks of a ‘close fusion’ with nature. But the result of this fusion, however harmonious, is a sense of powerlessness – which suggests that, bereft of his subjectivity, he has nothing to put in its place. Nature is no longer a field for study, it has become an overwhelming force. One way or another the confrontation between the artist and nature in the nineteenth century is an unequal one. Either the heart of man or the grandeur of nature dominates. Monet wrote:
I have painted for half a century, and will soon have passed my sixty-ninth year, but, far from decreasing, my sensitivity has sharpened with age. As long as constant contact with the outside world can sustain the ardour of my curiosity, and my hand remains the quick and faithful servant of my perception, I have nothing to fear from old age. I have no other wish than a close fusion with nature, and I desire no other fate than (according to Goethe) to have worked and lived in harmony with her rules. Beside her grandeur, her power and her immorality, the human creature seems but a miserable atom.
I am well aware of the schematic nature of this brief survey. Is not Delacroix in some senses a transitional figure between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? And was not Raphael another transitional figure who confounds such simple categories? The scheme, however, is true enough to help us appreciate the nature of the change which Cubism represented.
The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram: the diagram being a visible, symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures. A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearances: but these too will be treated symbolically as signs, not as imitations or re-creations.
The model of the diagram differs from that of the mirror in that it suggests a concern with what is not self-evident. It differs from the model of the theatre stage in that it does not have to concentrate upon climaxes but can reveal the continuous. It differs from the model of the personal account in that it aims at a general truth.
The Renaissance artist imitated nature. The Mannerist and Classic artist reconstructed examples from nature in order to transcend nature. The nineteenth-century artist experienced nature. The Cubist realized that his awareness of nature was part of nature.
Heisenberg speaks as a modern physicist. ‘Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves: it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning.’12 Similarly, the frontal facing of nature became inadequate in art.
How did the Cubists express their imitation of the new relation existing between man and nature?
1 By their use of space
Cubism broke the illusionist three-dimensional space which had existed in painting since the Renaissance. It did not destroy it. Nor did it muffle it – as Gauguin and the Pont-Aven school had done. It broke its continuity. There is space in a Cubist painting in that one form can be inferred to be behind another. But the relation between any two forms does not, as it does in illusionist space, establish the rule for all the spatial relationships between all the forms portrayed in the picture. This is possible without a nightmarish deformation of space, because the two-dimensional surface of the picture is always there as arbiter and resolver of different claims. The picture surface acts in a Cubist painting as the constant which allows us to appreciate the variables. Before and after every sortie of our imagination into the problematic spaces and through the interconnections of a Cubist painting, we find our gaze resettled on the picture surface, aware once more of two-dimensional shapes on a two-dimensional board or canvas.
This makes it impossible to confront the objects or forms in a Cubist work. Not only because of the multiplicity of viewpoints – so that, say, a view of a table from below is combined with a view of the table from above and from the side – but also because the forms portrayed never present themselves as a totality. The totality is the surface of the picture, which is now the origin and sum of all that one sees. The viewing point of Renaissance perspective, fixed and outside the picture, but to which everything within the picture was drawn, has become a field of vision which is the picture itself.
It took Picasso and Braque three years to arrive at this extraordinary transformation. In most of their pictures from 1907 to 1910 there are still compromises with Renaissance space. The effect of this is to deform the subject. The figure or landscape becomes the construction, instead of the construction being the picture acting as an expression of the relation between viewer and subject.13
After 1910 all references to appearances are made as signs on the picture surface. A circle for a top of a bottle, a lozenge for an eye, letters for a newspaper, a volute for the head of a violin, etc. Collage was an extension of the same principle. Part of the actual or imitation surface of an object was stuck on to the surface of the picture as a sign referring to, but not imitating, its appearance. A little later painting borrowed from this experience of collage, so that, say, a pair of lips or a bunch of grapes might be referred to by a drawing which ‘pretended’ to be on a piece of white paper stuck on to the picture surface.
2 By their treatment of form
It was this which gave the Cubists their name. They were said to paint everything in cubes. Afterwards this was connected with Cézanne’s remark: ‘Treat nature by the cylinder, by the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective.’ And from then on the misunderstanding has continued – encouraged, let it be said, by a lot of confused assertions by some of the lesser Cubists themselves.
The misunderstanding is that the Cubist wanted to simplify – for the sake of simplification. In some of the Picassos and Braques of 1908 it may look as though this is the case. Before finding their new vision, they had to jettison traditional complexities. But their aim was to arrive at a far more complex image of reality than had ever been attempted in painting before.
To appreciate this we must abandon a habit of centuries: the habit of looking at every object or body as though it were complete in itself, its completeness making it separate. The Cubists were concerned with the interaction between objects.
They reduced forms to a combination of cubes, cones, cylinders – or, later, to arrangements of flatly articulated facets or planes with sharp edges – so that the elements of any one form were interchangeable with another, whether a hill, a woman, a violin, a carafe, a table or a hand. Thus, as against the Cubist discontinuity of space, they created a continuity of structure. Yet when we talk of the Cubist discontinuity of space, it is only to distinguish it from the convention of linear Renaissance perspective.
Space is part of the continuity of the events within it. It is in itself an event, comparable with other events. It is not a mere container. And this is what the few Cubist masterpieces show us. The space between objects is part of the same structure as the objects themselves. The forms are simply reversed so that, say, the top of a head is a convex element and the adjacent space which it does not fill is a concave element.
The Cubists created the possibility of art revealing processes instead of static entities. The content of their art consists of various modes of interaction: the interaction between different aspects of the same event, between empty space and filled space, between structure and movement, between the seer and the thing seen.
Rather than ask of a Cubist picture: Is it true? or: Is it sincere? one should ask: Does it continue?
Today it is easy to see that, since Cubism, painting has become more and more diagrammatic, even when there has been no direct Cubist influence – as, say, in Surrealism. Eddie Wolfram in an article about Francis Bacon has written: ‘Painting today functions directly as a conceptual activity in philosophical terms and the art object acts only as a cypher reference to tangible reality.’14
This was part of the Cubist prophecy. But only part. Byzantine art might equally well be accommodated within Wolfram’s definition. To understand the full Cubist prophecy we must examine the content of their art.
A Cubist painting like Picasso’s ‘Bottle and Glasses’ of 1911 is two-dimensional insofar as one’s eye comes back again and again to the surface of the picture. We start from the surface, we follow a sequence of forms which leads into the picture, and then suddenly we arrive back at the surface again and deposit our newly acquired knowledge upon it, before making another foray. This is why I called the Cubist picture-surface the origin and sum of all that we can see in the picture. There is nothing decorative about such two-dimensionality, nor is it merely an area offering possibilities of juxtaposition for dissociated images – as in the case of much recent neo-Dadaist or pop art. We begin with the surface, but since everything in the picture refers back to the surface we begin with the conclusion. We then search – not for an explanation, as we do if presented with an image with a single, predominant meaning (a man laughing, a mountain, a reclining nude), but for some understanding of the configuration of events whose interaction is the conclusion from which we began. When we ‘deposit our newly acquired knowledge upon the picture surface’, what we in fact do is find the sign for what we have just discovered: a sign which was always there but which previously we could not read.
To make the point clearer it is worth comparing a Cubist picture with any work in the Renaissance tradition. Let us say Pollaiuolo’s ‘Martyrdom of St Sebastian’. In front of the Pollaiuolo the spectator completes the picture. It is the spectator who draws the conclusions and infers all except the aesthetic relations between the pieces of evidence offered – the archers, the martyr, the plain laid out behind, etc. It is he who through his reading of what is portrayed seals its unity of meaning. The work is presented to him. One has the feeling almost that St Sebastian was martyred so that he should be able to explain this picture. The complexity of the forms and the scale of the space depicted enhance the sense of achievement, of grasp.
In a Cubist picture, the conclusion and the connections are given. They are what the picture is made of. They are its content. The spectator has to find his place within this content whilst the complexity of the forms and the ‘discontinuity’ of the space remind him that his view from that place is bound to be only partial.
Such content and its functioning was prophetic because it coincided with the new scientific view of nature which rejected simple causality and the single permanent all-seeing viewpoint.
Heisenberg writes:
One may say that the human ability to understand may be in a certain sense unlimited. But the existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known to the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word understanding.15
Such a notion implies a change in the methodology of research and invention. W. Grey Walter, the physiologist, writes:
Classical physiology, as we have seen, tolerated only one single unknown quantity in its equations – in any experiment there could be only one thing at a time under investigation … We cannot extract one independent variable in the classical manner; we have to deal with the interaction of many unknowns and variables, all the time … In practice, this implies that not one but many -as many as possible – observations must be made at once and compared with one another, and that whenever possible a simple known variable should be used to modify the several complex unknowns so that their tendencies and interdependence can be assessed.16
The best Cubist works of 1910, 1911 and 1912 were sustained and precise models for the method of searching and testing described above. That is to say, they force the senses and imagination of the spectator to calculate, omit, doubt and conclude according to a pattern which closely resembles the one involved in scientific observation. The difference is a question of appeal. Because the act of looking at a picture is far less concentrated, the picture can appeal to wider and more various areas of the spectator’s previous experience. Art is concerned with memory: experiment is concerned with predictions.
Outside the modern laboratory, the need to adapt oneself constantly to presented totalities – rather than making inventories or supplying a transcendental meaning as in front of the Pollaiuolo – is a feature of modern experience which affects everybody through the mass media and modern communication systems.
Marshall McLuhan is a manic exaggerator, but he has seen certain truths clearly:
In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action … The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology. The age of mechanical industry that preceded us found vehement assertion of private outlook the natural mode of expression … The mark of our time is its revolution against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally.17
The Cubists were the first artists to attempt to paint totalities rather than agglomerations.
I must emphasize again that the Cubists were not aware of all that we are now reading into their art. Picasso and Braque and Léger kept silent because they knew that they might be doing more than they knew. The lesser Cubists tended to believe that their break with tradition had freed them from the bondage of appearances so that they might deal with some kind of spiritual essence. The idea that their art coincided with the implications of certain new scientific and technological developments was entertained but never fully worked out. There is no evidence at all that they recognized as such the qualitative change which had taken place in the world. It is for these reasons that I have constantly referred to their intimation of a transformed world: it amounted to no more than that.
One cannot explain the exact dates of the maximum Cubist achievement. Why 1910 to 1912 rather than 1905 to 1907? Nor is it possible to explain exactly why certain artists, at exactly the same time, arrived at a very different view of the world – artists ranging from Bonnard to Duchamp or de Chirico. To do so we would need to know an impossible amount about each separate individual development. (In that impossibility – which is an absolute one – lies our freedom from determinism.)
We have to work with partial explanations. With the advantage of sixty years’ hindsight, the correlations I have tried to establish between Cubism and the rest of history seem to me to be undeniable. The precise route of the connections remains unknown. They do not inform us about the intentions of the artists: they do not explain exactly why Cubism took place in the manner it did; but they do help to disclose the widest possible continuing meaning of Cubism.
Two more reservations. Because Cubism represented so fundamental a revolution in the history of art, I have had to discuss it as though it were pure theory. Only in this way could I make its revolutionary content clear. But naturally it was not pure theory. It was nothing like so neat, consistent or reduced. There are Cubist paintings full of anomalies and marvellous gratuitous tenderness and confused excitement. We see the beginning in the light of the conclusions it suggested. But it was only a beginning, and a beginning cut short.
For all their insight into the inadequacy of appearances and of the frontal view of nature, the Cubists used such appearances as their means of reference to nature. In the maelstrom of their new constructions, their liaison with the events which provoked them is shown by way of a simple, almost naïve reference to a pipe stuck in the ‘sitter’s’ mouth, a bunch of grapes, a fruit dish or the title of a daily newspaper. Even in some of the most ‘hermetic’ paintings -for example Braque’s ‘Le Portugais’ – you can find naturalistic allusions to details of the subject’s appearance, such as the buttons on the musician’s jacket, buried intact within the construction. There are only a very few works – for instance Picasso’s ‘Le Modèle’ of 1912 – where such allusions have been totally dispensed with.
The difficulties were probably both intellectual and sentimental. The naturalistic allusions seemed necessary in order to offer a measure for judging the transformation. Perhaps also the Cubists were reluctant to part with appearances because they suspected that in art they could never be the same again. The details are smuggled in and hidden as mementoes.
The second reservation concerns the social content of Cubism – or, rather, its lack of it. One cannot expect of a Cubist painting the same kind of social content as one finds in a Brueghel or a Courbet. The mass media and the arrival of new publics have profoundly changed the social role of the fine arts. It remains true, however, that the Cubists – during the moment of Cubism – were unconcerned about the personalized human and social implications of what they were doing. This, I think, is because they had to simplify. The problem before them was so complex that their manner of stating it and their trying to solve it absorbed all their attention. As innovators they wanted to make their experiments in the simplest possible conditions; consequently, they took as subjects whatever was at hand and made least demands. The content of these works is the relation between the seer and the seen. This relation is only possible given the fact that the seer inherits a precise historical, economic and social situation. Otherwise they become meaningless. They do not illustrate a human or social situation, they posit it.
I spoke of the continuing meaning of Cubism. To some degree this meaning has changed and will change again according to the needs of the present. The bearings we read with the aid of Cubism vary according to our position. What is the reading now?
It is being more and more urgently claimed that ‘the modern tradition’ begins with Jarry, Duchamp and the Dadaists. This confers legitimacy upon the recent developments of neo-Dadaism, auto-destructive art, happenings, etc. The claim implies that what separates the characteristic art of the twentieth century from the art of all previous centuries is its acceptance of unreason, its social desperation, its extreme subjectivity and its forced dependence upon existential experience.
Hans Arp, one of the original Dadaist spokesmen, wrote: ‘The Renaissance taught men the haughty exaltation of their reason. Modern times, with their science and technology, turned men towards megalomania. The confusion of our epoch results from this overestimation of reason.’
And elsewhere: ‘The law of chance, which embraces all other laws and is as unfathomable to us as the depths from which all life arises, can only be comprehended by complete surrender to the Unconscious.’18
Arp’s statements are repeated today with a slightly modified vocabulary by all contemporary apologists of outrageous art. (I use the word ‘outrageous’ descriptively and not in a pejorative sense.)
During the intervening years, the Surrealists, Picasso, de Chirico, Miró, Klee, Dubuffet, the Abstract Expressionists and many others can be drafted into the same tradition: the tradition whose aim is to cheat the world of its hollow triumphs, and disclose its pain.
The example of Cubism forces us to recognize that this is a one-sided interpretation of history. Outrageous art has many earlier precedents. In periods of doubt and transition the majority of artists have always tended to be preoccupied with the fantastic, the uncontrollable and the horrific. The greater extremism of contemporary artists is the result of their having no fixed social role; to some degree they can create their own. But there are precedents for the spirit of it in the history of other activities: heretical religions, alchemy, witchcraft, etc.
The real break with tradition, or the real reformation of that tradition, occurred with Cubism itself. The modern tradition, based on a qualitatively different relationship being established between man and the world, began, not in despair, but in affirmation.
The proof that this was the objective role of Cubism lies in the fact that, however much its spirit was rejected, it supplied to all later movements the primary means of their own liberation. That is to say, it re-created the syntax of art so that it could accommodate modern experience. The proposition that a work of art is a new object and not simply the expression of its subject, the structuring of a picture to admit the coexistence of different modes of space and time, the inclusion in a work of art of extraneous objects, the dislocation of forms to reveal movement or change, the combining of hitherto separate and distinct media, the diagrammatic use of appearances -these were the revolutionary innovations of Cubism.
It would be foolish to underestimate the achievements of post-Cubist art. Nevertheless it is fair to say that in general the art of the post-Cubist period has been anxious and highly subjective. What the evidence of Cubism should prevent us doing is concluding from this that anxiety and extreme subjectivity constitute the nature of modern art. They constitute the nature of art in a period of extreme ideological confusion and inverted political frustration.
During the first decade of this century a transformed world became theoretically possible and the necessary forces of change could already be recognized as existing. Cubism was the art which reflected the possibility of this transformed world and the confidence it inspired. Thus, in a certain sense, it was the most modern art – as it was also the most philosophically complex – which has yet existed.
The vision of the Cubist moment still coincides with what is technologically possible. Yet three-quarters of the world remain undernourished and the foreseeable growth of the world’s population is outstripping the production of food. Meanwhile millions of the privileged are the prisoners of their own sense of increasing powerlessness.
The political struggle will be gigantic in its range and duration. The transformed world will not arrive as the Cubists imagined it. It will be born of a longer and more terrible history. We cannot see the end of the present period of political inversion, famine and exploitation. But the moment of Cubism reminds us that, if we are to be representative of our century – and not merely its passive creatures -the aim of achieving that end must constantly inform our consciousness and decisions.
The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art. The incongruity of that moment, compared to the uncounted, unperceived silence which preceded it, is the secret of art. What is the meaning of that incongruity and the shock which accompanies it? It is to be found in the distinction between the actual and the desirable. All art is an attempt to define and make unnatural this distinction.
For a long time it was thought that art was the imitation and celebration of nature. The confusion arose because the concept of nature itself was a projection of the desired. Now that we have cleansed our view of nature, we see that art is an expression of our sense of the inadequacy of the given – which we are not obliged to accept with gratitude. Art mediates between our good fortune and our disappointment. Sometimes it mounts to a pitch of horror. Sometimes it gives permanent value and meaning to the ephemeral. Sometimes it describes the desired.
Thus art, however free or anarchic its mode of expression, is always a plea for greater control and an example, within the artificial limits of a ‘medium’, of the advantages of such control. Theories about the artist’s inspiration are all projections back on to the artist of the effect which his work has upon us. The only inspiration which exists is the intimation of our own potential. Inspiration is the mirror image of history: by means of it we can see our past, while turning our back upon it. And it is precisely this which happens at the instant when a piece of music begins. We suddenly become aware of the previous silence at the same moment as our attention is concentrated upon following sequences and resolutions which will contain the desired.
The Cubist moment was such a beginning, defining desires which are still unmet.
1969
1 See John Golding, Cubism, London, Faber & Faber, 1959; New York, Harper & Row, 1971.
2 D. H. Kahnweiler, Cubism, Paris, Editions Braun, 1950.
3 In the Penguin translation of Apollinaire a misreading of these lines unfortunately reverses the meaning of the poem.
4 El Lissitzky, Dresden, Verlag der Kunst, 1967, p. 325 (trans. Anya Bostock).
5 E. M. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A. W. Wheen, London, Putnam & Co., 1929; New York, Mayflower/Dell Paperbacks, 1963.
6 Quoted in Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1600, London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1956; OUP paperback edn, 1962.
7 See Arnold Hauser, Mannerism, London, Routledge, 1965; New York, Knopf, 1965; an essential book for anybody concerned with the problematic nature of contemporary art, and its historical roots.
8 Quoted in Anthony Blunt, op. cit.
9 Artists on Art, ed. R. J. Goldwate and M. Treves, New York, Pantheon Books, 1945; London, John Murray, 1976.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, London, Allen & Unwin, 1959, p. 75; New York, Harper & Row/Torch, 1959.
13 For a similar analysis of Cubism, written thirty years earlier but unknown to the author at the time of writing, see Max Raphael’s great work, The Demands of Art, London, Routledge, 1968, p. 162. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1968.
14 Eddie Wolfram, in Art and Artists, London, September 1966.
15 Werner Heisenberg, op. cit., p. 172.
16 W. Grey Walter, The Living Brain, London, Duckworth, 1953; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1961, p. 69; New York, Norton, 1963.
17 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964; New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964; pp. 4, 5.
18 Quoted in Hans Richter, Dada, London, Thames & Hudson, 1966, p. 55; New York, Oxford University Press, 1978.