We found that Fauvism had little justification as a meaningful label in history or in theory. Cubism is also an ambiguous term, derisive in origin and of limited application. Nevertheless the Cubist movement, which may be said to have begun in 1907 and to have ended with the outbreak of war in 1914, had a stylistic coherence lacking in Fauvism. Long after the artists concerned had abandoned the style, or transformed it, it persisted as an influence in the architecture and decorative arts of the new century. The consequences of one individual act of perception were and remain incalculable.
This individual act of perception is recorded in a painting by Picasso, now called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ( p. 69). It was begun in the spring of 1907, but after many preliminary studies; the date of its completion is in doubt, though Picasso has admitted that the two figures to the right of the composition, which hardly conform to the rest of it, were painted at a later date—how much later he could not, or would not, say. 1 The date of completion is somewhat important, because on it depends whether we can say that this painting was influenced by African sculpture or not. Picasso himself has said that he first saw African sculpture in the ethnographical section of the Palais du Trocadero in the autumn of this same year 1907; that is to say, after having painted Les Demoiselles , 2 But the visual evidence, as Mr John Golding has clearly shown, 3 proves that the decisive experience took place
68 Origins of Cubism
while he was actually working on the painting, which is in point of fact stylistically incoherent, and was never considered ‘finished’ by Picasso himself. The faces of the three ‘demoiselles’ on the left of the picture are undoubtedly influenced by Iberian sculpture. 4 Picasso had studied such sculpture in the Louvre, and had even had two pieces in his possession at the time he began to paint Les Demoiselles. 5 But the two figures on the right of the picture, one crouching, the other standing and drawing back a curtain, are directly influenced by African negro sculpture to which Picasso’s attention had first been drawn by Matisse in 1906, but which he began to understand and appreciate during 1907, while painting Les Demoiselles. Picasso had discovered an art which was essentially conceptual (he himself called it ‘raisonnable’), and Cubism emerges as a fusion of the conceptual or rational element in African art with Cezanne’s principle of ‘realization’ of the motif.
There is no doubt, however, that the main influence revealed in Les Demoiselles is Cezanne’s. Picasso, like most artistic prodigies, was a roving eclectic in the early phases of his development. Influences from many sources appear in his work—Romanesque art of his native Catalonia, Gothic art in general, sixteenthcentury Spanish painting (particularly the work of El Greco), and finally the work of his immediate predecessors, such as Toulouse-Lautrec, and of the Fauves whom he met when he first settled in Paris. But these influences were comparatively sporadic and superficial: the influence of Cezanne was profound and permanent.
The paintings of Cezanne exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1904 and 1905, and again in the Salon of 1906, had given rise to widespread criticism and appreciation. 6 In 1907 a memorial exhibition, consisting of fifty-six paintings by the now revered Master of Aix, was held in Paris. Picasso may have seen all, and certainly saw some of these exhibitions; he may also have seen paintings by Cezanne at Vollard’s gallery. If one compares the composition of Les Demoiselles with the numerous Baigneuses of Cezanne, the derivation of the group is obvious: there is the
pablo picasso Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, igoy
70 Origins of Cubism
essential difference that Cezanne’s pyramidal structure is replaced by vertical parallels, but the pose of some of the individual figures is identical. 7 In the completed painting, however, certain innovations appear for which there is no parallel in Cezanne’s Baigneuses, notably the geometricization of the sharply outlined figures, and of the folds of the draperies against which the demoiselles disport themselves.
Questions of derivation and resemblance are not in themselves important; it is the new style that emerges from their complete fusion that was to be decisive for the whole future of Western art. But before the fusion could be complete, there was to be a strengthening of the African influence. The Woman in Yellow [Le Corsage Jaune) of 1907 in the Pulitzer Collection, the Dancer of the same year in the Chrysler Collection; Friendship (spring, 1908), in the Museum of Modern Western Art, Moscow, and the Head of summer, 1908 (also in the Chrysler Collection); these are all direct transpositions of the ‘rationality’ of African negro sculpture into pictorial compositions; in one or two cases it is even possible to indicate the provenance of the type of African sculpture that must have served as a model. 8
Les Demoiselles contained elements of geometricization which merge into the same stylistic elements in Cubism, but it was not yet a Cubist picture. The two years from the spring of 1907, when he began to paint Les Demoiselles, to the summer of 1909, when he spent some time at Horta de Ebro in Spain, was a period of intense revision for Picasso. And not for Picasso alone. In the autumn of 1907 David Henry Kahnweiler, who had opened a gallery which was henceforth to be the focus for the new developments, introduced him to a young painter from Le Havre, Georges Braque (b. 1882). The next year (1908) a group of painters and poets sometimes called Croupe du Bateau-Lavoir (after the tenement in which Picasso had been living since 1904, nicknamed ‘the floating laundry’) began to take shape in Montmartre. In addition to Braque and Picasso, it included Max Jacob, Marie Laurencin (1885-1956), Guillaume Apollinaire, Andre Salmon, Maurice Raynal, Juan Gris (1887-1927), and Gertrude and Leo Stein.
pablo picasso Woman's Head, igog
WSmmt
Pablo picasso Seated Woman with Fan. igo8
pablo picasso Factory at Horta de Ebro, igog
In the same year Apollinaire introduced Fernand Leger (1881 — 1955 ) t0 the group, though it was not until 1910 that Leger came into close personal contact with Picasso and Braque. During 1909 there were several new recruits—Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), Albert Gleizes (1881-1953), Auguste Herbin (b. 1882), Henri Le Fauconnier (1881-1946), Andre Lhote (b. 1885), Jean Metzinger (1883-1956), Francis Picabia (1878-1953), and the sculptor Alexander Archipenko (b. 1887).
The individual contributions made to the formation of the Cubist style by the members of this group are difficult to disentangle, but it would be a mistake to look on Picasso as a dominating influence. Certain landscapes painted by Braque in L’Estaque in the summer of 1908 anticipate very closely the landscapes which Picasso painted at Horta de Ebro in the summer of 1909 (compare Braque’s Houses at VEstaque, 1908, with Picasso’s Factory at Horta, 1909)’ Braque throughout his career has maintained a stylistic integrity which is the one virtue that Picasso
georges braque Houses at L’Estaque. igo8
could not claim, and this integrity dates from the formative stage of Cubism. Nevertheless, when Picasso returned from Horta in the summer of 1909 and held an exhibition at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery of the pictures he had painted during the summer, it was at once apparent that Cubism had acquired a new meaning. What had been, in Les Demoiselles , a mannerism, became in the portrait of Fernande (Museum of Modern Art, New York) a style.
This style is usually distinguished from the earlier phases of Cubism as ‘analytical’, but this term suggests an intellectual or methodical approach to painting which has been repudiated by both Picasso and Braque, who have always insisted on the essentially intuitive or sensational nature of their creative activity. There is, of course, a very complete and consistent geometrical ‘structurization’ of the subject, such as, in a less obvious way, Cezanne had practised. But again (see page 18) this had been arrived at by way of‘modulation’; that is to say, by a sensitive co-ordination of the constituent planes; the difference being that Braque and
pablo picasso The Card Player, igig—14
Georges braque Young Girl with Guitar, igig
78 Cubism
Picasso now abandoned the attempt to resolve this problem in terms of colour and relied essentially on light and shade. Picasso himself has defined Cubism as ‘an art dealing primarily with forms, and when a form is realized, it is there to live its own life’. The aim is not to analyse a given subject: in the same statement Picasso disowned any idea of research, which he saw rather as ‘the principal fault of modern art’. Cubism, he said, has kept itself within the limits and limitations of painting as always practised—only the subjects painted might be different, ‘as we have introduced into painting objects and forms that were formerly ignored’. But ‘mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music and whatnot, have been related to Cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which brought bad results, blinding people with theories’. 9
The exclusion of colour gave a sculptural effect to the magnificent series of portraits and still-lifes that Picasso and Braque painted during the next two or three years, but it is a fragmented sculpture, as if reflected in a mirror-glass mosaic. When, as he did from time to time, Picasso practised sculpture (there is a Wpman’s Head of bronze dating from 1909 in the Museum of Modern Art, New York), the fragmented effect is produced by angular distortions of the modelled surface. The analysis in this case (as no less obviously in the paintings of the period) has no ‘scientific’ justification (in anatomy or in representation—the portraits, for example, do not resemble their subjects in their characteristic appearance). The form produced is there to live its own life, which is a life communicated by the subject but re-created in the object.
If ‘analytic’ is a misleading term for the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque between 1910 and 1912, ‘synthetic’, which is by implication a contrary term, is even less appropriate for the next phase of their work, which continues until the outbreak of the war. There is actually no possibility of making an aesthetic distinction between these two phases of an evolving style; elements that were to become dominant in the paintings of 1913-14 (parts
A
que Girl's Head. ig2g
GEORGES BR
of musical instruments, fragments of typography, textures of wood, etc.) are present in embryo in the paintings of 1910-12. Picasso’s The Girl with the Mandoline of 1910 is still identifiable as a portrait of Fanny Tellier; but the Accordionist of 1911 is already anonymous and Ma Jolie of 1911-12, without any violent transition, introduces the typography that was to become such a dominant feature of the collages of 1913-14. One may by way of analogy
ROGER DE LA fresnaye Conjugal Life. 1913
speak of a ‘rococo’ Cubism in contrast with an earlier ‘classic’ Cubism; but the style is the man himself, the visual elements which he selects to create a vital organization of form.
Nevertheless, the gradual introduction of elements other than paint produced a further variation of Picasso’s style which was to lead him far from Cubism; but before we deal with this development we must trace the immediate diffusion of the movement itself. Braque’s development continued parallel with Picasso’s until the outbreak of the war, in which he served and was wounded. After the war he resumed where he had left off, but only, as it were, to consolidate the position he had reached in 1914.1 he geometrical idiom was gradually modified, to be replaced by freer and more cursive forms, a private iconography of impeccable taste—an arr as serene and comforting as Matisse’s.
louis marcoussis Two Poets. IQ2g
Braque became what is sometimes called ‘a painter’s painter’, so that from the point of view of a painter of a younger generation, such as Patrick Heron, it is possible to maintain that he is ‘the greatest living painter’, and in so doing ‘to remind a contemporary audience, fed to satiety on brilliant innovation, frenzied novelty and every variety of spontaneous expression, that, after all, permanence, grandeur, deliberation, lucidity and calm are paramount virtues of the art of painting’. 10 This is true, but our age has demanded other virtues: a new vision to express a new dimension of consciousness—not only harmony, but the truth which is, alas, fragmentary and unconsoling.
From 1909 onwards new recruits were joining the Cubist movement. Those of 1909 have already been mentioned; in 1910 came Roger de la Fresnaye (1885-1925), Louis Marcoussis
juan gris Woman's Head. IQ22
(1883-1941) and the three Duchamp brothers (to be distinguished as Jacques Villon (b. 1875), Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918), and Marcel Duchamp (b. 1887). By this time a secession became inevitable—a new group, the Groupe de Puteaux, gathered round Jacques Villon and included Gleizes, La Fresnaye, Leger, Metzinger, Picabia, and Frank Kupka (1871-1957). In 1912 Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), who had come to Paris from Holland in 1910, and Diego Rivera (1886-1957), who came from Mexico about this time, made contact with this group. But the more the self-styled Cubists increased in numbers, the more evident it became that the movement included, not only distinct individualities, but even stylistic contradictions. This was made quite clear by the publication of a book in 1912 , Du Cubisme, by Gleizes and Metzinger, that revealed a tendency to which the founders of the movement, Picasso and Braque, could never subscribe. This tendency, which may be implicit in the mechanistic bias of our
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albert gleizes Study 5 for ‘Portrait of an Army Doctor'. igig
jean metzinger Landscape. igi2
modern civilization, is an expression, perhaps unconscious, of the will to substitute for the principle of composition after nature , the principle of autonomous structure . n We shall see presently how in subsequent years this tendency developed into completely nonhgurative types of art, but at the period we are considering such an outcome was not predictable. In Les peintres cubistes, which Guillaume Apollinaire wrote about 1911-12 and published in this ‘scientific’ tendency is rightly traced to Seurat, ‘in whose works firmness of style is rivalled by the almost scientific clarity of conception’. It was Metzinger who carried forward this ‘intellectual vision’ and ‘approached sublimity’. ‘His art’, wrote Apollinaire at this time, ‘always more and more abstract, but
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juan gris Bottle and Glass. igi4
86 Development of Cubism
always charming, raises and attempts to solve the most difficult and unforeseen problems of aesthetics. Each of his paintings contains a judgement of the universe, and his whole work is like the sky at night, when, cleared of clouds, it trembles with lovely lights. There is nothing unrealized in his works; poetry ennobles their slightest details.’ 12
As for Gleizes, who is inevitably associated with Metzinger, his goal was ‘a sublime precision’, and ‘a capacity to individualize abstractions’. ‘All the figures in the pictures of Albert Gleizes are not the same figure, all trees are not the tree, all rivers, river; but the spectator, if he aspires to generality, can readily generalize figure, tree or river, because the work of the painter has raised these objects to a superior degree of plasticity in which all the elements making up individual characters are represented with the same dramatic majesty.’
Gleizes and Metzinger, important as they were at this exploratory stage in the development of Cubism, did not have the eventual importance of a painter to whom Apollinaire gave a somewhat grudging recognition: Juan Gris. To Apollinaire Juan Gris seemed to be in danger of becoming too decorative (a shop-window dresser), ‘too vigorous and too impoverished; it is a profoundly intellectual art, according to colour a merely symbolic significance’. This is a true observation, but it does not touch what was of most significance in Gris’s art—his ability to combine the ‘composition after nature’ with the autonomous structure of the picture space. Gris did this by first planning the structure of his painting, and then imposing the subject on this framework; and for this reason the style he evolved has been called ‘synthetic’ Cubism. It was a procedure that profoundly influenced the development of non-figurative art in the post-war years—though Gris’s own development in the years immediately preceding his death in 1927 at the early age of forty was to be disappointing and Apollinaire’s word ‘impoverished’ becomes much more apt. He is an example, with such painters as Gleizes and Lhote, of the ease with which a new style becomes a new form of academicism.
Development of Cubism 87
It is one more illustration of the illogicality of the historical development of art that a relatively minor painter such as Gris should have had a more obvious influence than one of the major figures of the modern movement, and one who sprang from the same aesthetic background—Fernand Leger (1881-1955). Leger had kept himself a little apart from the Bateau-Lavoir artists in Montmartre. From 1905 to 1906 he had been influenced by Matisse and the Fauves in general, but then he too discovered the significance of Cezanne, and more literally than any other painter at the time, seems to have taken to heart Cezanne’s famous remark about interpreting nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone. 13 His first large painting in this style, the Nudes in the Forest of 1910 now in Kroller-Muller Museum at Otterloo (Holland), is a dense assemblage of such geometrical forms. By 1911, when he painted The Smokers now in the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York, he had found a freer and more personal idiom, well described in his own words:
FERNAND LEGER Cyclists. 1944
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1 | JH 1 |
‘To be free and yet not to lose touch with reality , that is the drama of that epic figure who is variously called inventor, artist or poet. Days and nights, dark or brightly lit, seated at some garish bar; renewed visions of forms and objects bathed in artificial light. Trees cease to be trees, a shadow cuts across the hand placed on the counter, an eye deformed by the light, the changing silhouettes of the passers-by. The life of fragments: a red finger-nail, an eye, a mouth. The elastic effects produced by complementary colours which transform objects into some other reality. He fills himself with all this, drinks in the whole of this vital instantaneity which cuts through him in every direction. He is a sponge: sensation of being a sponge, transparency, acuteness, new realism.’ 14
There is a directness or logicality in the development of Leger’s painting between 1911 and 1918 which is lacking in the other
fernand leger Soldier with Pipe. igi6
' • mm
90 Fernand Leger
Cubists of the period. He may have hesitated at first, but once he had found his idiom he developed it consistently. He always proceeded from a visual experience, and though he often attained an extreme of abstraction in which it is difficult to identify the original motif, nevertheless he remains in contact with his original visual experience, and with a generalized notion of real space and vital forms. He might have developed towards a pure formal art but for the war, in which he served as a sapper. ‘During those four years’, he once confessed, ‘I was abruptly thrust into a reality which was both blinding and new. When I left Paris my style was thoroughly abstract: period of pictorial liberation. Suddenly, and without any break, I found myself on a level with the whole of the French people; my new companions in the Engineer Corps were miners, navvies, workers in metal and wood. Among them I discovered the French people. At the same time I was dazzled by the breech of a 75 millimetre gun which was standing uncovered in the sunlight: the magic of light on white metal. This was enough to make me forget the abstract art of 1912-13. 515
It was a visionary revelation. ‘Once I had got my teeth into that sort of reality I never let go of objects again.’ This may be true in the sense that the motifs of his paintings were henceforth to be connected with the life of the people, or with the mechanistic aspects of modern civilization; there are nevertheless paintings as late as 1920 (La Tombola in the Kahnweiler Collection; ill. Cooper, p. 89) as abstract as anything he painted in 1912-13; and even much later there are nature mortes in which the function of the visual image is merely formal or ‘conceptual’. A bunch of keys, a playing-card or a leaf signify nothing beyond the flat area of pure colour they occupy in a painting which, in Apollinaire’s words, ‘contains its own explanation’.
In spite of his immense integrity (or perhaps because of it) Leger had few followers. Whereas there were to be a hundred imitators of Picasso in every European and American country, there are only one or two who adopt the personal idiom of Leger. 16 He exerted a more direct influence (apart from personal characteristics such as his simplicity and humanity) by his dynamic use of
fernand leger The Parrot. 194.0
pure colour, by which I mean that colour was released from its figurative function to become purely decorative. Leger was one of those great painters like Veronese or Tiepolo who have no inhibitions about the decorative application of their art. He always welcomed an opportunity to paint murals in which his amazing energy could find full scope in large rhythmic areas of pure colour.
This coloristic aspect of Cubism had also been the preoccupation of Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), who was responsible for another deviation from orthodox Cubism (by which I mean the ‘analytical’ Cubism of Picasso and Braque). This deviation Apollinaire christened Orphism and defined it as ‘the art of painting new structures out of elements which have not been borrowed from the visual sphere, but have been created entirely by the artist himself, and been endowed by him with fullness of reality. The works of the orphic artist must simultaneously give a pure aesthetic pleasure, a structure which is self-evident, and a sublime meaning, that is, the subject. This is pure art.’ 17 Apollinaire, writing about 1912,
fernand leger Woman in Blue. 1912
94 Robert Delaunay
associated Leger, Picabia and Marcel Duchamp with this ‘important trend’. Later the Czech painter already mentioned, Frank (Frantisek) Kupka and two Americans, Patrick Henry Bruce (1880-1937) and Stanton Macdonald Wright (b. 1890), joined Delaunay, together with a Russian painter who became his wife, Sonia Terk. Delaunay, who was a Parisian by birth, had joined the Bateau-Lavoir group in 1909, after an early development which included the usual Fauve and Cezannian phases. Apollinaire described the kind of Cubism Delaunay evolved as ‘instinctive’, and certainly it was based on a passion which gave priority to colour—‘colour alone is both form and subject’, declared Delaunay. But equally it was based on the quasi-scientific experiments of the Impressionists, and in this respect Delaunay was trying to develop the researches of Seurat and Signac, and like these artists had studied the scientific treatises of Michel Eugene Chevreul to good effect. But also like Picasso and Braque, he was preoccupied with formal problems, and strove in particular to combine different aspects of figures and objects in the same painting. He himself gave the name of Simultaneisme to this kind of painting and was later to characterize it in these words: ‘Nothing horizontal or vertical—light deforms everything, breaks everything up.’ In this aspect of his work he came close to the Futurists, whose contemporary activities will be described in the next chapter. Delaunay’s originality, and his importance in the history of modern art, is that he was gradually led to dispense with the motif\ and to rely for his effects on a geometrical exploitation of the refrangibility of the spectrum itself. His paintings become what might be called fragmented rainbows, and by 1912 he had painted a completely ‘non-objective’ composition [Le Disque ); that is to say, a composition not derived from a motif in nature, but composed as a geometrical pattern of colours. Already Kandinsky in Munich was experimenting with ‘improvisations’ that likewise were completely non-objective or non-figurative. The Orphism of Delaunay was at first more geometric, but the preoccupation of the two artists was essentially the same. The first exhibition of the new formed group {Der Blaue Reiter) in Munich in
ROBERT DELAUNAY Sun Disks, ig 12-13
December 1911 (see page 224) included work by Delaunay, and from that time onwards Delaunay and Kandinsky had maintained close touch by correspondence and had advanced, as it were, on a common front. Indeed, Delaunay’s influence in Germany was far greater than it ever was in France; Franz Marc and Paul Klee must be included among those on whom he had a decisive effect.
Already by the end of 1910 the original insight which gave birth to the Cubist movement, and which was based primarily on a sense of geometrical structure derived from Cezanne, had submitted to several diversions. Picasso himself, in the series of portraits which he painted in this year 1910-11 (Vollard, Kahnweiler, Uhde, Eva or Ma Jolie) and Braque in his Woman with Mandoline (two versions of 1910) and Seated Woman, Mandoline Player, and The Portuguese of 1911, passed beyond a structure which interpreted the seen object to the creation of a structure which though suggested by the seen object existed by virtue of its own monumental coherence and power. Picasso’s Aficionado (Kunstmuseum, Basle), painted in 1912, is ‘abstracted’ in the sense that the fragments or facets into which it is divided have a direct reference to the subject. One may discover not only elements derived from the features (nose, eyes) and clothing (hat) of the bullfight fan who was the point of departure, but also
fragments of typography (Nimes, where presumably the bullfight took place, and the word torero from a poster announcing the bullfight). That is to say, although the composition is derived from reality, there is no immediate perceptual image to be represented—rather a group of visual elements associated with a memory-image. These associated elements may indeed, as Picasso always insisted, be derived from visual experience; but the important distinction is that the painting becomes a free association of images (a construct of the visual imagination) and not the representation of a subject controlled by the laws of perspective. The whole conception of ‘realization’, as attempted by Cezanne, had been abandoned. The ‘focus’ is no longer concentric, fixing the object in a spatial continuum which recedes to a culminating point on our horizon. The focus is in the picturespace itself, and to the organization of this picture-space all visual elements contribute as colour and form, but not as the representation of an immediate perceptual image. There is only one ‘percept’: this is the composition itself: any elements from nature, that is to say, visual images derived from the subject, are broken down so that they may serve as structural elements. The solid rock is quarried (broken up into cubes); the stones are then used to build an independent structure.
This is the moment of liberation from which the whole future of the plastic arts in the Western World was to radiate in all its diversity. Once it is accepted that the plastic imagination has at its command, not the fixities of a perspectival point of view (with the consequent necessity of organizing visual images with objective coherence) but the free association of any visual elements (whether derived from nature or constructed a priori ), then the way is open to an activity which has little correspondence with the plastic arts of the past. Of course, there are basic correspondences in so far as the plastic arts are plastic —that is to say, concerned with the manipulation of form and colour. In this sense, art has always been abstract and symbolic, appealing to human sensibility by its organization of visual and tactile sensations. But the vital difference consists in whether the artist in order to agitate the human
sensibility proceeds from perception to representation; or whether he proceeds from perception to imagination, breaking down the perceptual images in order to re-combine them in a nonrepresentational (rational or conceptual) structure. This conceptual structure must still appeal to human sensibility, but the assumption is that it does this more directly, more intensely, and more profoundly in this new way than if burdened with an irrelevant representational function. On one side of this watershed in the history of art it may be argued that natural forms realized in conventional space reinforce the artist’s appeal to human sensibility; on the other side it may be argued that since natural forms introduce a criterion of accurate presentation that is subject to an intellectual judgement, the spectator is likely to be affected more powerfully through images that can be freely organized to appeal directly to human sensibility.
An acceptance of this principle of the free association of images still leaves to the artist a wide choice, and the historical developments after 1912 are largely determined by the process of selection adopted by the particular artist or group of artists. Picasso and Braque extended their freedom of plastic association: that is to say, though their range of subjects was always arbitrarily limited, they would associate musical instruments with newspapers, wine-glasses with wall-papers, playing-cards with pipes, simply because these familiar objects lent themselves to the construction of an effective image. It is debatable whether such images have any deeper significance. Mr Barr suggests 18 that though ‘the Cubists, traditionally, are supposed to have had little interest in subject matter whether objectively or symbolically, yet their preference for a rather repetitious range of subjects may be significant. Besides occasional vacation landscapes Picasso and his colleagues painted figures of poets, writers, musicians, pierrots, harlequins and women; or still-life compositions with everrecurring guitars, violins, wine, brandy, ale and liqueur bottles, drinking glasses, pipes, cigarettes, dice, playing-cards, and words or word fragments referring to newspapers, music or drinks. These subjects, both people and things, consistently fall within the
98 The Invention of Collages
range of the artistic and bohemian life and form an iconography of the studio and cafe. Whether they represent simply the artist’s environment or whether they symbolize in a more positive though doubtless unconscious way his isolation from ordinary society is a debatable question.’ But what we find in the development of Cubism from 1912 to 1914 is an increasing reliance, not so much on the motif or any visual images associated with the motif but on textures. From imitating textures in paint Picasso and Braque proceed to use the original textures themselves by sticking pieces of newspaper, wall-paper, oilcloth, or fabric on to the canvas, linking these elements with areas of paint or outlines of charcoal. The technique was given a new name, collage, the normal French word for the process of mounting or pasting. For a year or two the technique retained its pictorial aim, but it led easily to a sculptural use of the same methods, and in 1914 Picasso constructed several three-dimensional still-lifes with bric-a-brac from the studios or cafe. These may be regarded as the direct precursors of constructions of a similar nature which were, a few years later, to constitute one of the main features of the Surrealist movement.
Cubist sculpture had a separate development, associated with the names of Brancusi, Duchamp-Villon, Gonzalez, Archipenko, Lipchitz, and Henri Laurens, but originally there was an intimate interchange of visual concepts and even of materials, and for this reason a brief reference to Cubist sculpture is justified in this history of modern painting. Some of the Cubist painters had experimented with sculpture—there is even a coloured plaster Harlequin (1917) by Juan Gris and a bronze LTtalienne (1912) by Roger de la Fresnaye. The first sculptor to use the Cubist idiom was Raymond Duchamp-Villon (b. 1876) in 1910; Archipenko began to show works at the Salon d’Automne of 1911; Brancusi followed in 1912 (at the Salon des Independants— La Muse endormie, now in the Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris); Lipchitz in 1913. Duchamp-Villon was undoubtedly the first to work out the implications of a Cubist sculpture, and to see immediately that it implied an identity or at least a confusion with the principles of architecture. As Apollinaire said: ‘a structure becomes architecture,
— — —
henri laurens The Guitarist. igi6
henri laurens Little Boxer. 1920
and not sculpture, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature’. An abstract sculpture would, scale apart (and why restrict sculpture in scale?) become a disinterested architecture:
’The utilitarian end aimed at by most contemporary architects is responsible for the great backwardness of architecture as compared with the other arts. The architect, the engineer, should have sublime aims: to build the highest tower, to prepare for time and ivy the most beautiful of ruins, to throw across a harbour or a river an arch more audacious than the rainbow, and finally to compose to a lasting harmony, the most powerful ever imagined by man.
‘Duchamp-Villon had this titanic conception of architecture. A sculptor and an architect, light is the only thing that counts for him; but in all other arts, also, it is only light, the incorruptible light, that counts.’ 19
But there is a distinction that can be made between disinterested architecture and an abstract sculpture, and this is concerned not
so much with light as with the representation of movement: that is to say, endowing a static structure with a dynamic effect. This is exactly what Duchamp-Villon achieved in such pieces as The Horse (bronze, 1914; Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris) and Alexander Archipenko in Boxing Match (synthetic stone, 1913; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice). Duchamp-Villon died in 1918, but in his latest work, such as Head of a Professor Gosset (bronze, 1917), he had reached a degree of structural intensity which foreshadowed the forthcoming achievements of the Constructivist movement (see Chapter Four). Also to be mentioned in this connexion, if only because of his close association with Picasso, is the Spanish sculptor Julio Gonzalez (1876-1942) who came from Barcelona to Paris in 1900. At first a painter, from 1928 until his death he devoted himself to the development of sculpture in wrought iron.
Archipenko (b. 1887), who came from Moscow to Paris in 1908, first made contact with the Cubist group in 1910, and was much the most inventive of the pioneers of modern sculpture, a fact which is not often acknowledged. Already in 1912 he had introduced (on the same principle as the collage ) different materials —wood, metal, and glass—into the same construction; and he was the first sculptor to realize the expressive value of the pierced hole as a contrast to the boss, or as a connecting link between opposite surfaces (the device that Henry Moore was subsequently to exploit to such good effect).
Henri Laurens (1885-1954) and Jacques Lipchitz (b. 1891) were somewhat later recruits to the Cubist movement, Laurens joining in 1911, Lipchitz not until 1913. But by the end of 1914 both artists had made decisive contributions to the development of Cubist sculpture, first translating the geometrical analysis of form into solid three-dimensional structures, and then exploiting the new freedom to evolve a disinterested architecture. In this respect again the Constructivists were anticipated, but characteristic works of the Cubist sculptors such as Laurens’s Woman with a Fan , 1914, and Lipchitz’s Man with a Guitar of 1915 (?) (cast stone, Museum of Modern Art, New York) are strict transpositions of
Constantin brancusi The Sleeping Muse, igog-26
the painting style of Picasso or Braque into three-dimensional structures. Laurens’s Head, a wood construction of 1918 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) seems to be directly inspired by the similar wood constructions made by Picasso in 1914. Both Laurens and Lipchitz maintained the Cubist idiom far longer than the painters who had inspired it.
We come finally to a sculptor who, though sometimes associated with the Cubists (he exhibited with them at the Salon des Independants in 1912 and again in 1913), remained essentially an individualist: the Rumanian Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). And not only an individualist, but a pragmatist, that is to say, one who was never motivated by theory, but discovered himself and his art in action. There are works of his which from their general appearance may be called Cubist (for example, The Prodigal Son of 1914, Arensberg Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art). But if we revert to what I have called ‘the moment of liberation’ (see page 96), then one can see how decisively Brancusi rejected the Cubist revolution. He never broke down the unity of the perceptual image, to re-combine the fragments in a free construction. On the contrary, his whole effort was to preserve the integrity of the original visual experience, the innocency of a primordial consciousness, undisturbed by egoistic pretensions. From this point of view his art is diametrically opposed to that of Expressionism. Brancusi strove to eliminate the personal factor, to arrive at the essence of things, to strip from objects all accretions
AMEDEO MODIGLIANI
Head of a Woman, igio-13
CONSTANTIN BRAN
Young Girl's Head, if)
due to time and history. But this also implied an art diametrically opposed to Cubism, which, as we have seen, delighted in fragments of visual experience, in assortments of impressions. Beauty, said Brancusi, is absolute equity, and by this he meant, to use the phrase of Boileau and the eighteenth-century aestheticians, that nothing is beautiful but the true (:rien n'est beau que le vrai ). 20 In terms of sculpture, an art which in any case involves formal concentration, 21 this meant for Brancusi a reduction of the object to its organic essentials. The egg became, as it were, the formal archetype of organic life, and in carving a human head, or a bird, or a fish, Brancusi strove to find the irreducible organic form, the shape that signified the subject’s mode of being, its essential reality. That in this enterprise he often arrived at forms which are
amedeo modiciliani The Italian Woman
104 Brancusi and Modigliani
geometrical or even ‘abstract’ merely serves to relate Brancusi’s aim to that of Cezanne—creations like the marble Leda (Art Institute of Chicago), the Adolescent Torso of maplewood (Arensberg Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art), and the various versions of the Mademoiselle Pogany bust, are striking illustrations of an art that seeks to interpret nature by the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone. Indeed, it might be argued that Brancusi has shown a better understanding of Cezanne’s intention than any of the Cubist painters—certainly a more consistent attempt to ‘realize’ the organic structure of natural objects.
It has sometimes been objected that Brancusi’s method with its meticulous search for simplicity led in fact to a certain kind of sophistication—the kind of sophisticated elegance that we also find in the paintings of Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), an artist whom he befriended in 1909 and persuaded to turn for a time to sculpture. Modigliani had exhibited the previous year at the Salon des Independants, and was still torn between the contrary influences of Gauguin and Cezanne. But Brancusi (and therefore implicitly Cezanne) was to triumph. As Modigliani gradually found himself between 1915 and 1920, his style developed its characteristic mannerisms—elongated figures, curvilinear rhythms, ochre, or earthy coloration—but his debt to Brancusi remained evident to the untimely end.
A consideration of Brancusi and Modigliani has taken us beyond the stylistic range of Cubism. There are other artists who were associated with the Cubists—notably Picabia and Marcel Duchamp—who will be more appropriately considered in relation to subsequent developments (Dada and Surrealism). The end of the Cubist movement (though not the end of Cubism) came with the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914. Braque, Gleizes, Leger, Lhote, Villon, and Duchamp-Villon were immediately mobilized. Most of the others were gradually recruited. Picasso and Gris, as Spaniards, retained their freedom and continued their work in Paris. The group was never to be reconstituted, but in its brief existence it had liberated a creative energy that in the aftermath of war was to transform the art of the whole world.