Cubism
Pablo Picasso—An Introduction
Pablo Ruiz Picasso, age twenty, looking rather “goth.”
When I’m in the galleries at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, I obviously spend a good deal of time looking at the art. But I also watch people look at the art and listen to what they have to say. The comments that people make can be quite thoughtful. Indeed, visitor comments and questions have added enormously to my appreciation of the art over the years. Still, there are many comments that are born of pure befuddlement. And many of these target Picasso. Indeed, many people seem to believe that Picasso’s abstraction of the human figure, his penchant for reconfiguring the body by mis-aligning a nose or an eye for instance, is the result of his inability to draw. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
There is an old anecdote that tells of Picasso emerging from an exhibition of drawings by young children and saying, “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.” Perhaps this quote is fictitious, still it points to a truism. Picasso was an extraordinary craftsman, even when measured against the old masters. That he chose to struggle to overcome his visual heritage in order to find a language more responsive to the modern world is an important triumph that has had a vast effect upon our world. I do not write these words lightly. Picasso’s art has transformed and inspired among others: architects, designers, writers, mathematicians, and even philosophers. There is no question that Picasso’s art has had a most profound impact on the twentieth century.
While Picasso suggests the value of unlearning the academic tradition, it is important to remember that he had mastered its techniques by a very early age. His father, Dona Maria Picasso y Lopez was a drawing teacher and curator at a small museum. The young Picasso began drawing and painting by age seven or eight. By age ten, Picasso assisted his father, sometimes painting in the minor elements of the elder’s canvases. Soon after his father became a professor at the art academy in Barcelona, the young Picasso completed the entrance examinations (in record time) and was advanced to the school’s upper-level program. He repeated this feat when he applied to the Royal Academy in Madrid
Pablo Picasso—In Paris
Like Van Gogh before him, Picasso arrived in Paris determined to work through the avant-garde’s techniques and subjects to better understand such art. An example of Picasso exploring the achievements of contemporary art in Paris can be seen by comparing the above 1873 Degas canvas with Picasso’s 1904 Woman Ironing.
It is not surprising that Picasso, the great draftsman would be interested in the work of the “odd man out” Degas who alone among the Impressionists retained the primacy of line. In the example above, the silhouette is reversed and Picasso has infused a somewhat maudlin weariness to his attenuated and curiously sensual laborer. Still, Picasso understands Degas’s experimentation with abstraction. Note how in Degas’s image, the luminous negative space defined between the arms refuses to recede beyond the figure, remaining trapped instead. Likewise, Picasso defines and centers an almost identical form. Notice also, the bowl that Picasso places in the lower right corner. Like everything in this canvas, it is roughly formed with a dry brush. Still the simple strokes of white and dark gray that define the volume speak to the magical pleasure of rendering space, a love that Picasso carries with him through out his career, even when he finally slays illusionism.
Pablo Picasso—Family of Saltimbanques
The great early Picasso at the National Gallery in Washington portrays a family of saltimbanques. Wandering circus performers that move from town to town, saltimbanque are never truly welcome but only briefly tolerated. Like so many of Picasso’s early subjects during his so called blue and rose periods in the first years of the twentieth century, here are a group of disenfranchised people that live, alienated on the fringe of society. This particular group include characters from the sixteenth-century Italian performing tradition, commedia dell’ arte. One such figure is the rogue wit Harlequin (he wears the multi-colored triangles). Picasso seems to have identified with such characters at this time. As Picasso often reminded people, at this point in his career he was very poor. Both a Spaniard in France who did not yet speak the language and an unknown artist, Picasso might well have felt an affinity with such figures as the saltimbanque.
Pablo Picasso—Gertrude Stein
In 1904 Picasso returned to Paris and rented a studio in an old dilapidated building full of artists and poets at 13 rue Ravignan dubbed, the Bateau-Lavoir (or laundry barge) by poet-in-residence, Max Jacob. It is at this time that Picasso first comes into contact with Henri Matisse and Gertrude Stein. In 1905 Leo Stein (Gertrude’s brother) buys Bonheur de Vivre while Gertrude commissions a portrait from Picasso. The related story goes like this, Stein sat for Picasso so many times (supposedly 90 sittings) that eventually he said that he could no longer see her face when he looked at her. He then wiped out the face just before a trip to Spain. In the autumn of 1905 after his return, Picasso painted in the mask-like face that reflects his new interest in archaic Iberian sculpture which he had just seen in an exhibition at the Louvre. There is one more element to this anecdote, Stein’s friends often noted that the painting didn’t look like her. Picasso’s response was, “it will.” For her part, Stein said in later years that it was the only image of her that she thought was successful. What do you think it means to transform a portrait into a mask? And must that mask be a likeness?
Cubism
Cubism is a terrible name. Except for a brief period, the style has nothing to do with cubes. It is instead an extension of the formal ideas developed by Cézanne. These were the ideas that inspired Matisse as early as 1904 and Picasso perhaps a year or two later. We certainly saw these ideas asserted in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. But Picasso’s great 1907 canvas is not yet really Cubism. It is more accurate to say that it is the foundation upon which Cubism is constructed. If we want to really see the origin of the style, we need to look beyond Picasso to his new friend Georges Braque. A young French painter that had been a Fauvist until he was struck by both the posthumous Cézanne retrospective exhibition held in Paris in 1907 and his first sight of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles. Like so many people that saw Les Demoiselles, Braque hated Picasso’s outrageous canvas (Matisse predicted that eventually Picasso would be found hanged behind the work, so great was his mistake). Nevertheless, Braque stated that it haunted him through the winter.
Like every good Parisian, Braque fled Paris in the summer. In this regard, Paris is rather like New York, which, every August, is emptied of all residents that can afford to leave. But in the summer of 1908 Braque decided to summer in the part of Provance in which Cézanne had lived and worked. Braque spent the summer shedding the colors of Fauvism and exploring the structural issues that consummed Cézanne. He wrote:
“It [Cézanne's impact] was more than an influence, it was an invitation. Cézanne was the first to have broken away from erudite, mechanized perspective…” Quoted in William Rubin’s Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism: New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1989, 353.
Like Cézanne, Braque sought to undermine depth by forcing the viewer to recognize the canvas not as a window but as it truly is, a vertical curtain that hangs before us. In Houses at L’Estaque Braque simplifies the form of the houses, here are the so called cubes, but he nullifies the obvious recessionary overlapping with the trees that force forward even the most distant building.
When Braque returned to Paris in late August, he found Picasso an eager audience. Almost immediately, Picasso began to exploit Braque’s investigations. But far from being the end of their working relationship, this exchange becomes the first in a series of collaborations that lasts six years and creates an intimate creative bound between these two artists that is unique in the history of art. Between the years 1908 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Braque and Picasso work together so closely that experts can have difficulty telling the work of one artist from the other. For months on end they would visit each others studio on an almost daily basis sharing ideas and challenging each other as they went. Still, a pattern did emerge and it tended to be to Picasso’s benefit. When a radical new idea was introduced, more then likely, it was Braque that recognized its value. But it was inevitably Picasso who realized its potential and was able to fully exploit it.
By 1910, Cubism had matured into a complex system that is seemingly so esoteric that it appears to have rejected all esthetic concerns. The average museum visitor, when confronted by a 1910 or 1911 canvas by Braque or Picasso, the period known as Analytic Cubism, often looks pained and leaves the gallery as quickly as possible even while acknowledging the importance of such work. In other words, for most people, Cubism is ugly and confusing. I suspect that the problem is not so much the art as that difficulty that is inevitable when such images are approached with little or no preparation. After all, we as a society seem to be under the delusion that art ought to be understandable to the layman.
In order to understand Cubism we need to go back to Cézanne’s still lifes or even further, to the Renaissance. Let me use an example that worked rather nicely in the classroom last semester. There I was lecturing away, have you noticed that I can go on? I was about to try to explain Cubism as I was drinking cold coffee from a paper cup. I set the cup on the desk in the front of the room and said, “If I were a Renaissance artist painting that cup on that table I would position myself at particular point and construct the objects and surrounding space frozen in that spot. On the other hand, if I were Cézanne, I might allow myself to see the changing shapes and lines that result when I shift my weight from one leg to the other. I might allow myself to see slightly around the paper cup since, as Cézanne, I am interested in vision and memory working together. Finally, if I were Braque or Picasso, I would want even more. I would not be satisfied with the narrow limiting conventions of the Renaissance nor even with the too timid explorations of the master Cézanne.
As a Cubist I want to express my total visual understanding of the paper coffee cup. I want more than the Renaissance painter or even Cézanne, I want to express the entire cup simultaneously on the static surface of the canvas since I can hold all that visual information in my memory. I want to render the cup’s front, its sides, its back, and its inner walls, its bottom from both inside and out, and I want to do this on a flat canvas. How can this be done? To some extent, the answer is provided by Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In that canvas, everything was fractured. The women and the drapery was just so many pieces of broken glass. By breaking an object in to smaller elements Picasso was able overcome the unified singularity of an object and instead transform it into an object of vision.
At this point the class began to look quite confused, so I turned back to the paper cup and began to rip it into pieces (I had finished the coffee). If I want to be able to show you both the back and front and inside and outside simultaneously, I must fragment the object. Basically this is the strategy of the Cubists.
From 1908 through the end of 1911 and the very first months of 1912, Braque and Picasso co-invent the first phase of Cubism which is sometime called Analytic Cubism, because it is largely concerned with the analysis of form. But then Braque goes away to Provance in the summer of 1912 and wanders into a hardware store. There he finds a roll of oil cloth with printed patterns. Oil cloth is the early version of contact paper, the vinyl adhesive now used to line the shelves in a cupboard. Then as now, these materials can be bought in a variety of patterns. Solid colors, flowers, etc. Braque purchased a piece that was printed with fake wood grain. He was interested because he was then at work on a Cubist drawing of a guitar and he was about to render the grain of the wood in pencil himself. Instead, he cut the oil cloth and pasted the factory printed grain right into his drawing and thus changed the direction of art for the next ninety years.
Picasso, Still-Life with Chair Caning (1912)
CLICK ABOVE FOR A VIDEO ABOUT THIS PAINTING
As you might expect, Picasso was not far behind. Here he uses both oil cloth and letters but remember, it was really Braque who introduced collage. He never gets enough credit so I like to give him a plug where appropriate. Still, whether the oilcloth is printed with a pattern of wood grain or chair caning is unimportant. The key is the meaning of what would have then been considered the action of an iconoclast (icon=image/clast=destroyer). When Braque, and then Picasso put an industrially produced object (low commercial culture) into the realm of fine art (high culture) they not only broke boundaries, they questioned the elitism that underlies the separation between common everyday experience and the rarefied contemplative realm of high art.
Of equal importance, these artists finally ripped the notions of craft from art. Let me make an analogy.
Here, Braque and Picasso, have introduced a “fake” element on purpose, not to mislead but rather to force this discussion. They ask: “Can this object still be art if I don’t actually render its forms, if the quality of the art is no longer directly tied to my technical skills or level of craftsmanship? Virtually all avant-garde art of the second half of the twentieth century is indebted to this brave renunciation. Let’s start at the upper right. Almost at the edge of the canvas (at two o’clock) there is the handle of a knife. Follow it to the left to find the blade. The knife cuts a piece of citrus fruit. You can make out the rind and the segments of the slice at the bottom right corner of the blade. Below the fruit which is probably a lemon, is the white scalloped edge of a napkin. To the left of these things and standing vertically in the top center of the canvas (12 o’clock) is a wine glass. It’s hard to see at first so look carefully. Just at the top edge of the chair caning is the glass’s base, above it is the stem, and then the bowl. It is difficult to see because it is seen from more than one angle. At eleven o’clock is the famous “JOU”. Game yes, but also the first three letters of the French word for newspaper (or more literally, daily. Journal=daily). In fact, you can make out the bulk of the folded paper quite clearly. Don’t be confused by the pipe that lays across the newspaper. Do you see its stem and bowl?
But there are still big questions, why the chair caning, what is the gray diagonal at the bottom of the glass, and why the rope frame? Also, why don’t the letters sit better on the newspaper? Finally, why is the canvas oval? Any ideas? Think of a port hole.
The port hole reference is an important clue. It has already been determined that this still life is composed of a sliced lemon, a glass, newspaper, and a pipe. Perhaps this is a breakfast setting with a citron presse (French lemonade). In any case, these items are arranged upon a glass tabletop. You can see the reflection of the glass. In fact, the glass allows us to see below the table’s surface, the chair caning is just that, is represents the seat tucked in below the table. Okay, so far so good. But why is the table elliptical in shape? This appears to be a cafe table, and they are round or square but never oval. Yet, when we look at a circular table, we never see it from directly above. Instead we see it at an angle and it appears as an ellipse. It depends upon whether you see the rope (which Picasso had woven especially for this painting) as the bumper of a table, as it was used in some cafes, or as the frame of a port hole or window. That the rope functions in either a horizontal or vertical orientation; that it slipage between the realm of object and sight reminds the viewer (us) of the transformation of the table from the referent to the signifier. Put simply, Picasso wants us to remember that the painting is something different from that which it represents. Or as Gertrude Stein said, “A rose is a rose is a rose.”
