18.

CUBISM
Robert Rosenbhtm

INTRODUCTION
Robert Rosenblum's Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art is an important
contribution to the study of the movement itself but ranges beyond this to
deal with the impact of Cubism on the Futurists, the German Expressionists,
abstract and fantastic art, as well as twentieth-century sculpture and artists
in England and America. It is, therefore, to some degree, a survey of major
currents in twentieth-century art. Particularly commendable is the way in
which Rosenblum approaches the development of Cubism through a careful
analysis of individual works of art, which will be apparent in the following
selection from his book.
The most important single document of this movement is the collabora-
tive effort of the Cubist artists and theorists, Albert Gleizes and Jean
Metzinger: Du Cubisme, published in 1912 and translated into English in
1913. It is available, with some revisions in the 1913 translation, in Modern
Artists on Art, edited by Robert L. Herbert (1964). Of nearly equal impor-
tance is the more familiar work by Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres
Cubistes (1913), available in English as The Cubist Painters (1949). See also
Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and
Critics (1969). Among other works are the following selected titles: A. J.
Eddy, Cubists and Post- Impressionism, a pioneer work first published in
Chicago in 1914, followed by a London edition in 1915; D. H. Kahnweiler,
The Rise of Cubism (1949), a translation of his 1920 publication Der Weg
zum Kubismus; Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (1936); Picasso, Fifty
Years of His Art (1946); Christopher Gray, Cubist Aesthetic Theories (1953);
John Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907-1914 (1959); and
Edward Fry, Cubism (1966). A good account of Cubism can be found in
Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century, 2 vols. (1965). Among
numerous articles are Winthrop Judkins, "Toward a Reinterpretation of
Cubism," Art Bulletin, XXX (1948), 270-278; Edward F. Fry, "Cubism

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1907-1908: An Early Eyewitness Account," Art Bulletin, XLVIII (1966),
70-73; Clement Greenberg, "The Role of Nature in Modern Painting,"
Partisan Review, XVI (January 1949), 78-81; Christopher Gray, "Cubist
Conception of Reality," College Art Journal, XIII, no. 1 (1953), 19-23; D. H.
Kahnweiler, "Cubism: The Creative Years," Art News Annual, XXIV (1955),
107-116; Clement Greenberg, "Pasted-Paper Revolution," Art News, LVII
(September 1958), 46-49; and Linda Henderson, "A New Facet of Cubism:
'The Fourth Dimension' and 'Non-Euclidean Geometry' Reinterpreted," Art
Quarterly, XXXIV, 4 (1971), 410-433.

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 are moments in the history of art when the genesis of a
There
new and major style becomes so important that appears it

temporarily to dictate the careers of the most individual

artists. So it was around 1510, when the diverse geniuses of Michel-
angelo, Raphael, and Bramante rapidly coalesced to create the
monumental style of the High Renaissance; and around 1870, when
painters as unlike as Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro approached a
common goal in their evolution toward Impressionism. And so it was
again around 1910, when two artists of dissimilar backgrounds and
personalities, Picasso and Braque, invented the new viewpoint that
hascome to be known as Cubism.
From our position in the second half of the twentieth century,
Cubism emerges clearly as one of the major transformations in
Western art. As revolutionary as the discoveries of Einstein or Freud,
the discoveries of Cubism controverted principles that had prevailed
for centuries. For the traditional distinction between solid form and
the space around it, Cubism substituted a radically new fusion of
mass and void. In place of earlier perspective systems that deter-
mined the precise location of discrete objects in illusory depth,
Cubism offered an unstable structure of dismembered planes in
indeterminate spatial positions. Instead of assuming that the work of
art was an illusion of a reality that lay beyond it, Cubism proposed
that the work of art was itself a reality that represented the very
process by which nature is transformed into art.
In the new world of Cubism, no fact of vision remained absolute.
A dense, opaque shape could suddenly become a weightless trans-
parency; a sharp, firm outline could abruptly dissolve into a vibrant
texture; a plane that denned the remoteness of the background could
be perceived simultaneously in the immediate foreground. Even the
identity of objects was not exempt from these visual contradictions.
In a Cubist work, a book could be metamorphosed into a table, a
hand into a musical instrument. For a century that questioned the
very concept of absolute truth or value, Cubism created an artistic
language of intentional ambiguity. In front of a Cubist work of art,

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 ROBERT ROSENBLUM
the spectator was to realize that no single interpretation of the
fluctuating shapes, textures, spaces, and objects could be complete in
itself. And, awareness of the paradoxical nature of
in expressing this
reality and the need it in multiple and even con-
for describing
tradictory ways, Cubism offered a visual equivalent of a fundamental
aspect of twentieth-century experience.
The genesis of this new style, which was to alter the entire course
of Western painting, sculpture, and even architecture, produced one
of the most exhilarating moments in the history of art. . . .

This new world began with an explosion, for [Picasso's] Les

Demoiselles D'Avignon [see cover], projected in 1906 but worked on
mostly in the spring of 1907, appears to be the thunderous outburst
that released the latent forces of the preceding year. Like most
. . .

major pictorial revolutions, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (whose title,

a reference to a Barcelona red-light district, was given it later)
mirrors the past and proclaims the future, for it both resumes an
earlier tradition and begins a new one. Yet no masterpiece of
Western painting has reverberated so far back into time as Picasso's
five heroic nudes, who carry us across centuries and millenniums. To
begin, we sense the immediate heritage of Cezanne's studies of
bathers, and, through them, the whole Renaissance tradition of the
monumental nude, whether the noble structural order of Poussin and
—
Raphael or in the extraordinary anatomical compression of the two
central figures —
the anguish of Michelangelo's slaves. But Les
Demoiselles can take us even further back in time, and in civiliza-
tion, to ancient, pre-Christian worlds. The three nudes at the left,
who twist so vigorously from their draperies, evoke first the Venuses
and Victories of the Hellenistic world, and then, cruder and more
distant, the squat, sharp-planed figures of the pagan art of Iberia.
And in the two figures at the right, this atavism reaches a fearsome
—
remoteness in something still more primitive the ritual masks of
African Negro art.
The most immediate quality of Les Demoiselles is a barbaric,
dissonantpower whose excitement and savagery were paralleled not
only by such eruptions of vital energy as Matisse's art of 1905-1910,
—
but by music of the following decade witness the titles alone of
such works as Bartok's Allegro barbaro (1910), Stravinsky's Le Sacre
du printemps (1912-1913), and Prokofiev's Scythian Suite (1914-
1916). Les Demoiselles marks, as well, a shrill climax to the nine-
teenth century's growing veneration of the primitive whether —
Ingres' enthusiasm for the linear stylizations of Greek vase painters

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 Cubism
and Italian primitives or Gauguin's rejection of Western society in
favor of the simple truths of art and life in the South Seas. In Les
Demoiselles, this fascination with the primitive is revealed not only
in explicit references to Iberian sculpture in the three nudes at the
left and to African Negro sculpture in the two figures at the right

but in the savagery that dominates the painting. The anatomies

themselves are defined by jagged planes that lacerate torsos and
limbs in violent, unpredictable patterns. So contagious, in fact, are
the furious energies of these collisive, cutting angles that even the
still life in the charged with the same electric vitality
foreground is

that animates the figures. The scimitarlike wedge of melon, con-

trasted with the tumbling grapes and pears, seems to generate the
ascending spirals of pink flesh; and, similarly, other inanimate forms,
such as the curtain at the left, seem to echo the harsh junctures
of the human anatomies.
This primitive power of form is fully complemented by the
magnetic expression of the heads. Here, one senses above all the
hypnotic presence of staring eyes that have a ritualistic fixity amid
all this splintering animation. One moves from the single eye of

the figure at the extreme left, placed frontally on a profile head

as in Egyptian painting, to the more demonic pair of eyes, in
different shades of blue and on different levels, that invests the
squatting figure in the right foreground with magical force. Viewed
as prophecy, this emphasis on the mysterious psychological intensity
of a staring eye was to be a constant element in Picasso's later work,
even in some of his most cerebral Cubist paintings.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has often been criticized for its sty-
listic incoherence, especially apparent in the shift from the Iberian
stylizations of the three women at the left to the more sinister and
grotesque style of the heads of the two women at the right, pre-
sumably repainted under the influence of African Negro sculpture.
Yet this very inconsistency is an integral part of Les Demoiselles. The
irrepressible energy behind its creation demanded a vocabulary of
change and impulse rather than of measured statement in a style
already articulated. The breathless tempo of this pregnant historical
moment virtually obligated its first masterpiece to carry within itself
the very process of artistic evolution. In fact, the velocity of stylistic
change from left to right in this single painting foreshadows, in
contracted form, the comparably swift creation of a more disci-
plined Cubist vocabulary in the years that follow.
What are the pictorial problems that Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon,

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ROBERT ROSENBLUM
with molten vocabulary, had posed but not yet solved? The
its still

radical quality of Les Demoiselles lies, above all, in its threat to the

integrity of mass as distinct from space. In the three nudes at the

left, the arcs and planes that dissect the anatomies begin to shatter

the traditional sense of bulk; and in the later figures at the right, this
fragmentation of mass is even more explicit. The nudes' contours
now merge ambiguously with the icy-blue planes beside them, and
the concavities of the noses tend to disrupt the sense of a continuous
solid. The square plane that describes the breast of the figure at the
left still adheres to her torso, whereas the square plane that describes
the breast of the figure at the upper right suddenly becomes de-
tached from the body to assert its independent existence. Just as the
impulse to explore the autonomous life of linear and planar rhythms
seems almost to dominate Picasso's contact with perceived reality,
the colors, too, have become more abstract. The blues and pinks
used earlier in the Blue and Rose periods to convey moods of
depression and frailty are now almost independent from expressive
or representational ends. Most remarkably, the brilliant and varied
pinks of the nudes exist first as autonomous means of fracturing these
bodies into their agitated planar components and only second as
means of representing flesh. And it is exactly this new freedom in the
exploration of mass and void, line and plane, color and value
independent from representational ends that —
makes Les
Demoiselles so crucial for the still more radical liberties of the
mature years of Cubism. . . .

In Les Demoiselles, the influence of African Negro art is evi-

dent. .Primitive sculpture apparently exemplified, for Picasso,
. .

the freedom to distort anatomy for the sake of creating a rhythmic

structure that can merge solids and voids and invent new shapes. For
another, its terrifying power and suggestion of a supernatural
presence seem to have been equally stimulating. . . .

The violence of 1907 can be felt in the still lifes of that year. The
emotional neutrality that we might expect in a still life is upset, for
example, in the Still Life with Skull [1907, The Hermitage Museum,
Leningrad], not only by the way in which Picasso has adapted the
jagged, twisting rhythms of Les Demoiselles but by his use of a
riotous, almost Expressionist palette, whose searing reds, blues, and
lavenders add to the dissonance. The very choice of still-life objects
contributes to the surprising drama of a table top, for, amid the
sensuous and intellectual pleasures of artist's palette, pipe, and

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Cubism
books, Picasso has introduced the traditional still-life theme of vanity
and human transience by including a mirror and a skull. In so doing,
he recalls the original allegorical intention of Les Demoiselles in —
which a figure carrying a skull was to enter the hedonistic environ-
ment of five nudes, a sailor, and an arrangement of flowers and
—
fruit and foreshadows, as well, the impassioned expressive qualities
with which he will so often invest his later still lifes, even without
the help of such traditional symbolism. . . .

In the following year, Picasso temporarily purged himself of these

barbaric impulses in order to concentrate on the more measured and
systematic study of the formal problems created so violently in Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon. The less impassioned, more resolute qualities
of the works of 1908 may be explained, in part, by the almost
inevitable calm and control that might be expected to follow the
cathartic vehemence of 1907. It may also be explained by the
disciplining influence of the French tradition, which confronted
Picasso in historical retrospect at the famous Cezanne memorial
exhibition held at the Salon d'Automne in 1907 and in living actu-
ality in the person of Georges Braque, whom he met at about the
same time through the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the dealer
and, later, historian of Cubism — Daniel Henry Kahnweiler. In his
work of 1908, Picasso seems more and more to suppress the pathos
and fury of his earlier art, substituting the rigorous control of eye and
intellect recurrent in the French pictorial tradition. . . .

Conspicuous in Picasso's oeuvre of 1908 were still lifes and

landscapes. Though he had painted these subjects before, and often
with vigor and drama, their new predominance in his work of 1908
indicates a turning from his earlier preoccupation with the human
figure as a vehicle of feeling. Just as Cezanne in the 1870's, under the
impact of Impressionism, was to reject or, rather, to harness the
human passions that animated his early work, so, too, did Picasso
abandon subjects that evoked human compassion in order to focus on
the emotionally more neutral themes that are provided by still life
and landscape. . . .

From 1907 on, Picasso's development cannot be understood

without also considering the evolution of the Frenchman Georges
Braque. From the time of their first meeting in 1907 until about
1914, the art of the two men followed a closely interrelated course
that for several years attained a disciplined vocabulary that sub-
ordinated individual eccentricities to a comparatively objective

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standard. As a Frenchman who had come to Paris from Le Havre in
1900, Braque could hardly have been less like Picasso in background.
While Picasso was painting scenes of allegory and human despair,
Braque worked within the confines of the Impressionist viewpoint,
painting candidly observed landscapes and still lifes. By 1906, he had
given his temporary allegiance to the coloristic exuberance of the
Fauves, producing such works as the landscape at L'Estaque. Yet
here, in historical retrospect, we can already perceive a certain
insistence on the analysis of solids that distinguishes Braque from his
fellow Fauves and allies him more closely to the structural bent of
Cezanne, who had earlier scrutinized this very Provencal landscape
in terms of its volumetric fundamentals. And in the following year,
1907, Braque painted another of Cezanne's sites, the Viaduct at
L'Estaque, in which the angular definition of planes in the central
vista of earth, bridge, and houses grows even more emphatic,
especially by contrast with the looser definition of the trees that
frame the view. . . .

... In 1908, he continued to explore landscape and still life as a

means to pictorial rather than emotive ends. The Houses at
L'Estaque (Fig. 52) of that year is perhaps even more advanced than
any of Picasso's contemporary work. Again, a comparison with
Cezanne is inevitable and demonstrates once more that Braque, like
Picasso in 1908, had resolved the precarious tension of Cezanne's
dual homage to optically perceived nature and intellectually con-
ceived art in favor of art. Next to a Cezanne landscape like the
Turning Road at Montgeroult of 1899, Braque's canvas consciously
disregards the data of vision. His Provencal nouses, boldly defined by
the most rudimentary planes, have so thoroughly lost contact with
—
the realities of surface texture or even fenestration that at places as
in the background and the lower right foreground — they are subtly
confounded with the green areas of vegetation. And, just as the
description of surfaces becomes remote from reality, so, too, do the
colors take leave of perceived nature and tend toward an ever more
severe monochrome that permits the study of a new spatial structure
without the interference of a complex chromatic organization.
In the same way, the light follows the dictates of pictorial rather
than natural laws. Although multiple sources of light are often
implied in Cezanne's work, his painting never violates so completely
the physical laws of nature. In Braque's painting, however, the
—
houses are illuminated from contrary sources from above, from the

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Cubism
front, from both sides — most distinctly the planar
in order to define
constituents of architecture and landscape. And spatially, too, no
painting of Cezanne's is so congestedly two-dimensional; for
Braque's houses, despite their ostensible bulk and suggestions of
perspective diminution, are so tightly compressed in a shallow space
that they appear to ascend the picture plane, rather than to recede
into depth.
Yet, within this apparently rudimentary vocabulary there are the
most sophisticated and disconcerting complexities. It may be no-
ticed, for example, that whereas the planar simplifications suggest
the most primary of solid geometries, the contrary light sources that
strongly shadow and illumine these planes permit, at the same time,
unexpected variations in the spatial organization. Suddenly a convex
passage becomes concave, or the sharply defined terminal plane of a
house slides into an adjacent plane to produce a denial of illusion-
istic depth more explicit than Cezanne's.
Both Matisse and Louis Vauxcelles, the critic who had unwittingly
given the Fauves their name, referred to Braque's work of the time
and to this painting in particular as being composed of cubes
remarks that were destined to name the Cubist movement for
history. Yet their observation was only partially right. For all the
seeming solidity of this new world of building blocks, there is
something strangely unstable and shifting in its appearance. The
ostensible cubes of Houses at L'Estaque were to evolve into a
pictorial language that rapidly discarded this preliminary reference
to solid geometry and turned rather to a further exploration of an
ever more ambiguous and fluctuating world. . . .

By the beginning of 1910, impelled to an ever greater fragmenta-

tion of mass and to a more consistently regularized vocabulary of
arcs and angles, Picasso treated even the human figure with a
stylistic coherence that finally confounded the organic and the
inorganic. The Girl with Mandolin (Fig. 53), a Corot-like studio
portrait of a girl named Fanny Tellier, takes us far beyond the 1909
figure paintings. . With its paradoxes of plane, light, and texture,
. .

the Girl with Mandolin introduces the strangely elusive and fluctu-
ating world of the mature years of Cubism, a world in which the
fixed and the absolute are replaced by the indeterminate and the
relative.
As in the aestheticand structural innovations of contemporary
architecture, in which transparent glass planes and free-standing

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 ROBERT ROSENBLUM

53. Pablo Picasso, Girl with Mandolin, 1910, Oil, 39

%" by 29"(Collection of Xelson
A. Rockefeller)

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 Cubism
walls both define a volume and belie that definition by implying a
fusion with the space around it, the precise boundaries of the
contours that describe the model and her mandolin cannot be
located with visual certainty. In this unstable world of bodiless yet
palpable shapes, the integrity of matter undergoes an assault com-
parable to that made on the once indivisible atom. The contours of
the hair, for example, destroy the solidity of the head by merging
with the planes that describe the adjacent space, just as the bent
elbows seem to dematerialize in their transparent ambiance.
Similarly, spatial positions must now be defined relatively rather
than absolutely. Unlike the fixed positions determined by Renais-
sance perspective systems, planes here are in a state of constant flux,
shifting their relative locations according to a changing context. Is
the cylinder of the upper arm behind or before the incomplete cubes
at the left? Are these same cubes concave or convex? Do they move
toward us or away from us? Even the texture of the painting shares
such ambiguity. The shaded planes evoke the illusion, on the one
hand, of modeled, opaque solids, and on the other, of a curiously
translucent substance whose complex structural order is as visually
puzzling as the spatial relations in a house of mirrors.
If fixed spatial relations are rejected by the continual shifting and
rearrangement of planes, so, too, are fixed temporal relations. In
observing how the profile of the head is repeated or how the upper
arm shifts to a plane different from the plane of the shoulder, the
spectator is obliged to assume that the figure is pieced together of
fragments taken from multiple and discontinuous viewpoints. The
ambiguous quality of time in a Cubist painting derives from this very
phenomenon, for one senses neither duration nor instantaneity, but
rather a composite time of fragmentary moments without per-
manence or sequential continuity.
In so creating a many-leveled world of dismemberment and
discontinuity, Picasso and Braque are paralleled in the other arts.
For example, their almost exact contemporary, Igor Stravinsky,
demonstrates a new approach to musical structure that might well
—
be called "Cubist." Often his melodic line especially in Le Sacre
—
du printemps (1912-1913) is splintered into fragmentary motifs by
rhythmic patterns as jagged and shifting as the angular planes of
Cubist painting and equally destructive of a traditional sense of fluid
sequence. Similarly, Stravinsky's experiments in polytonality, as in
Petrouchka (1911), where two different tonalities (C and F# major in

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 ROBERT ROSENBLUM
the most often cited example) are sounded simultaneously, provide
close analogies to the multiple images of Cubism, which destroy the
possibility ofan absolute reading of the work of art. In literature as
well, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (both born within a year of
Picasso and Braque) were to introduce "Cubist" techniques in novels
like Ulysses (composed between 1914 and 1921) and Mrs. Dalloway
(1925). In both these works the narrative sequence is limited in time
to the events of one day; and, as in a Cubist painting, these events
are recomposed in a complexity of multiple experiences and inter-
pretations that evoke the simultaneous and contradictory fabric of
reality itself.
Despite the fact that the more consistent vocabulary and radical
disintegrations of Girl with Mandolin introduce a more advanced
and abstruse stage of Cubism, Picasso somehow preserves much of
the physical and emotional integrity of his model. Her feminine
form, with itsrounded patterns of breasts and coiffure echoing the
arc of the mandolin, is by no means obscured totally in the Cubist
network of planes; and there even emerges something of a quiet,
introspective melancholy (not unlike that of the Circus period) from
a style that has so often been narrow-mindedly interpreted as coldly
antagonistic to so-called "humanistic" values. . . .

Braque's exploration of the ever more complex language of

Cubism closely paralleled Picasso's, although portraiture, which
attracted Picasso throughout his career, was foreign to Braque, who
generally preferred landscapes, still lifes, and anonymous figures. In

one of the epoch-making canvases of Cubism, the Still Life with

Violin and Pitcher of 1909-1910 (Fig. 54), Braque's decomposition
of solids into air-borne, twinkling facets is as fully advanced as in any
of Picasso's work of the time and creates perhaps even richer visual
and intellectual paradoxes. Transparent and opaque forms are
confounded wittily: the pitcher, which might well be made of glass,
appears more opaque than the violin, whose fragile transparencies
belie its wooden substance. Space, too, is fascinatingly ambiguous:
the illusion of depth inferred from the sharp cut of the wall and
triple molding at the right is contradicted by the continuous oscil-
lation of planes that seem to cling to the picture surface as if
magnetized. But most brilliant is the trompe-Voeil nail that projects
obliquely from the very top center of the canvas, a device that
Braque uses in a comparable work of this time, the Violin and
Palette, in which the nail projects through the hole of the artist's

342
54. Georges Braque, Still Life with Violin and Pitcher, 1909-1910, Oil,
46y2 " by 28%" (Kunstmuseum, Basel)

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 ROBERT ROSENBLUM
palette. Here we have an essential key to the complex interchanges
of art and reality that were later to be explored in collage, for the
illusionistic nail helps to establish one of the basic meanings of
—
Cubism that a work of art depends upon both the external reality
of nature and the internal reality of art.
This proposition may seem a truism in the sense that almost all art
of the past reveals this dual responsibility toward nature and toward
its own language, but it was Braque and Picasso who first made this

quality explicit in demonstrating, as it were, the very process by

which nature becomes art. In these terms, the nail shatters the
deception that Renaissance perspective would sustain in its attempt
to transform the surface of the picture into a transparent window
through which we see an illusion of reality. By appearing to cast a
shadow upon the flat surface of the canvas, the trompe-Voeil nail also
casts doubts upon the illusions around it. If the painter's medium is
now so irrevocably be two-dimensional, then the dog-
proved to
eared corner and the oblique thrust of wall and molding in the
upper right of the Still Life with Violin and Pitcher are patently
deceptions, as are the tilted, overlapping sheets of music below the
nail in the Violin and Palette. But the implications go still further.
The trompe-Voeil nail is, after all, no more and no less real than the
ostensibly unreal Cubist still life below, just as the almost palapable
scroll of the violin in both pictures is actually no more and no less
real than the body of the violin, which slips out of its material skin
like a specter. The inevitable conclusion is that a work of art
presents a complex interchange between artifice and reality. A
picture depends upon external reality, but the Cubist means of
—
recording this reality unlike the means devised by the Renais-
—
sance are not absolute but relative. One pictorial language is no
more "real" than another, for the nail, conceived as external reality,
is just as false as any of the less illusionistic passages in the
canvas — or conversely, conceived as art, is just as true. . . .

It is therefore essential to realize that, no matter how remote from

literal appearances Cubist art may at times become,
it always has an

ultimate reference to external reality, without which it could not

express the fundamental tension between the demands of nature and

the demands of art. Even the color, texture, and light of Braque's
Still Life with Violin and Pitcher testify to this dual responsibility.

Although it has often been pointed out that the ascetic ochers,
silvers, and grays of 1910 and 1911 move far from the variegated

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more abstract realm, the artificial colors of
colors of reality into a
this painting are nevertheless partially relevant to the world of
appearances. The browns of the violin and the table top at its right
are directly appropriate to the colors of wood, just as the milky
white planes of the tablecloth and the pitcher can allude, not
implausibly, to the folds of a fabric and to the crystalline facets of
what is perhaps a transparent pitcher. In the same way, the light in

this painting, for all the arbitrariness of the contradictory patterns of

highlight and shadow, conveys a luminosity that refers to the laws
of physics and visual perception as well as to the laws of art. . . .

Generally, however, the works of 1910-11 grow progressively

more distant from a legible transcription of visual reality and in-
creasingly difficult to decipher in their extraordinary degree of
transformation from nature to art. A Picasso drawing of 1910, a study
of a nude (Fig. 55), can indicate perhaps even more clearly than the
paintings of the time the extreme purity that the Cubist vocabulary
had attained by 1910. The impulse toward fragmentation of surfaces
into component planes is now so strong that the very core of
matter seems be disclosed as a delicately open structure
finally to
of interlocking arcs and angles. Yet paradoxically, if this form
appears to dissolve outward into the openness of the surrounding
void, it also appears to coalesce inward into a strangely crystal-
line substance.
Ironically, thisadvanced moment of Cubism is at once simpler
and more complex than the earlier phases. On the one hand, the
vocabulary, in its almost complete restriction to flattened arcs and
straight lines and its abstention from irrelevant literal detail, has
reached a pristine simplicity. On the other hand, the syntax has
achieved an infinite sophistication revealed, for example, in the
endlessly intricate shifting of planes within a hairbreadth, or in the
equally rich variations of light and dark that make this gossamer
scaffolding quiver in unpredictable ways upon the white surface of
the paper. To accuse such a drawing of being a dry exercise in
geometry is to ignore, for one thing, the extraordinarily subtle
deviations from an absolute geometric purity in both the irregulari-
ties of touch and the irregularities of shape of these slightly imper-
fect curves and straight lines. In addition, it is to overlook the
intellectual exhilaration with which the human form has been
translated magically into a spider web of mysterious spatial rela-
tions. Not since the century of Donatello, Uccello, and Piero della

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55- Pablo Picasso, Nude, 1910, Charcoal drawing, lg 1/^' by i2yi6 " (The Metro-
politan Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949)

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 Cubism
Francesca has there been so exalted a union of art, nature, and
geometry. . . .

. . [By the summer of 1911] it is astonishing to see how closely

.

Braque's art and Picasso's have converged in the pursuit of this new
pictorial world. Once more, there are reminders of paintings by
Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro in the 1870's that, at times, are almost
indistinguishable from one another. But, for all the ostensible
anonymity of the Cubist style of 1911, differences between the two
masters are still discernible. Typically, the rhythms of the Picasso
are sharper and more strident and the alternations of light and
. . . ;

dark are comparably more sudden and nervous. Braque, by contrast,

retains a greater suppleness in his transitions and a more obvious
equilibrium of structure. . . .

In two masterpieces of this climactic year of Cubism Braque's —

Portuguese (Fig. 56), painted in the spring of 1911, and Picasso's Ma
Jolie, painted in the winter of 1911-1912 —
we are again confronted
with a figure playing a stringed instrument. Although the attraction
of Picasso and Braque to this subject and to musical instruments in
general has often been interpreted in rather speculative terms (such
as the analogies between the abstract nature of Cubism and that of
music), the frequency of violins, guitars, and mandolins may be
explained better, perhaps, by the fact that these instruments pro-
vided a convenient and easily manipulated example in reality of the
purified pictorial forms of early Cubism. Indeed, a stringed instru-
ment, with its clear oppositions of curved and rectilinear shape, solid
and void, line and plane, is almost a dictionary of the Cubist lan-
guage of 1910-1912. Moreover, the specific juxtaposition of human
figure and stringed instrument presented an opportunity to confound
the anatomy of man and guitar in the kind of punning between the
animate and the inanimate which was seen in earlier Cubist works
and which now becomes more explicit. Again, both these canvases,
for all the remoteness from the everyday world implied by their
fantastic geometries, depend upon what is essentially a common-
place situation. Braque's point of departure is a Portuguese musician
in a Marseilles bar; Picasso's is a woman —
not improbably his new
love, Eva (Marcelle Humbert) — who plays a stringed instrument
(perhaps a guitar). But, within these almost trivial scenes, there
appear strangely disconcerting elements letters, numbers, and —
symbols. In the Braque, the BAL, D D
CO, &, and 10,40 can be
explained in literal terms as fragments from posters that one would

347
 ROBERT ROSENBLUM

Oil,
7
45 /8 " b y V*l*
Kunst "

56. Georges Braque, The Portuguese, Spring 1911, (

museum, Basel)

348
 Cubism
expect to find on the wall of a bar (the D BAL, for example, is
undoubtedly the latter half of GRAND BAL); and in the Picasso, the
MA JOLIE, the $, and the four-lined music staff are explicit de-
scriptions of the music being played and sung, a piece whose
apparent title, "Ma Jolie," refers, with Cubist double-entendre, both
to the refrain of a popular tune of the time ("O Manon, ma jolie,
mon coeur te dit bonjour") and to Picasso's affectionate name for
Eva. Yet, in the context of the unliteral vocabulary of Cubism, these
letters, numbers, and symbols offer another major innovation in the
history of Western painting.
Confronted with these various alphabetical, numerical, and
musical symbols, one realizes that the arcs and planes that surround
them are also to be read as symbols, and that they are no more to be
considered the visual counterpart of reality than a word is to be
considered identical with the thing to which it refers. The parallel-
ism of these traditional symbols and Braque's and Picasso's newly
invented geometric symbols is insisted upon through the way in
which both are subjected to the same fragmentation. In a world of
shifting and partial appearances, these old-fashioned signs, too, are
first dismembered and then reintegrated with the dense visual and
intellectual fabric of the painting. Thus, the title "Ma Jolie" slips
into two different levels and the D BAL hovers in space and fades at
the edges. Or, similarly, in the Picasso the four-lined music staff
becomes an analogue of the four fingerlike parallels (perhaps the
lower right and the strings of the musical
fluting of a glass) in the
instrument (slightly below center). By this fusion of the traditional
symbols for words, numbers, and music with the newly created
geometric symbols of Cubism, Braque and Picasso offer a decisive
rejection of one of the fundamentals of Western painting since the
Renaissance, namely, that a picture presents an illusion of perceived
reality. In its place, we have almost a reversion to a medieval
viewpoint in which a pictorial image is a symbol and its relation to
reality is conceptual. It is tempting to say that the medieval
manuscript page suggests the closest parallel to the Cubist mixture
of conventional symbols and extremely stylized images of reality.
Nevertheless, it would be a gross simplification to consider Cubism a
simple reassertion of the symbolic viewpoint that had prevailed in
the art of the Middle Ages or of early periods of antiquity. Cubism
obviously expresses a much more complex and ambiguous relation to
reality than does any art of the past.

349
 ROBERT ROSENBLUM
Though we may stress the symbolic nature of the Cubist vocabu-
lary, it is by contrast with the abstract quality of
also true that,
letters and numbers, Braque's and Picasso's geometric description of
perceived reality still has the immediacy of pictorial illusion, con-
taining, as it does, fragments of light and texture, of strings, clothing,
wood. Once more, then, as with the trompe-Voeil nail, the implica-
tion is that a painting is neither a replica nor a symbol of reality, but
that it has a life of its own in a precarious, fluctuating balance
between the two extremes of illusion and symbol. In a sense, what
Picasso and Braque discovered was the independent reality of the
pictorial means by which nature is transformed into art upon the
flat surface of a canvas.
With this growing awareness of a painting as a physical fact in
itself, it was inevitable that Cubism would evolve an increasingly
acute consciousness of the two-dimensional reality of the picture
surface that Renaissance perspective had succeeded in disguising. In
the Portuguese and Ma Jolie, space has been so contracted that a new
kind of pictorial syntax is created. The overlapping planes and their
complicated light and shadow imply relationships in an illusory
depth, yet each plane is committed to a contact with the picture
surface. The printed symbols appear to shift and fade in space, yet,
at the same time, they rest as flatly upon the opaque plane of the
canvas as printed letters on a page. Once again, the constant re-
arrangement and shuffling of spatial layers in these pictures call
explicit attention to the paradoxical process of picture making. The
traditional illusionistic devices of textural variation and chiaroscuro
are simultaneously contradicted by the subordination of each pic-
torial element to the sovereignty of the flat picture surface.
It is precisely such willfully ambiguous descriptions of phenomena'

that make the Portuguese and Ma Jolie the masterpieces that they
are. Their language, like the language of modern poetry, is multi-
leveled, and conforms to the twentieth century's refusal to accept a
single, absolute interpretation of reality. The contradictions in these
works are endless. A transformed into a fantastic
prosaic subject is

structure of the highest conceptual complexity; a taut, architectonic

design dissolves into the shimmering vibrations of delicately stippled
textures and flickering light; a rigorously restricted and impersonal
vocabulary of simple geometric shapes is executed with a keen sense
of the artist's individual and irregular brushwork; a monkishly
somber palette of ochers, grays, and browns is treated with a sump-

350
 Cubism
tuous subtlety that rivals the dark chromatic modulations of the late
Titian or Rembrandt; a fabric of bewildering translucence and
density asserts the opacity of the canvas underneath; an unfamiliar
world of hieroglyphs is punctuated by vivid fragments of reality.
Yet, if these paintings illumine those complex paradoxes that per-
tain so specifically to our century's destruction of absolutes, it should
not be forgotten that they also stand securely in the great tradi-
tion of Western painting that stems from the Renaissance. Like the
masterpieces of the past —
whether by Masaccio, Rubens, or
—
Cezanne these canvases present a tense and vital equilibrium
between the reality of nature and the reality of art.
If Cubism wished to make explicit the means by which nature
becomes art, then the growing complication of Cubist syntax in 1911
must have threatened the balance between dependence upon nature
and autonomy of art. For example, in Braque's circular Soda of 1911
the teeming fragments of still-life objects (which appear to include a
wineglass, a pipe, a sheet of music, and the label SODA) have
become so intricate that not only the composition itself but its

references to the external world are dangerously obscured. Although

Picasso never reached so complex a degree of analysis as both
this,

he and Braque apparently began to feel a strong urge toward

clarifying their ever more diffuse and labyrinthine pictorial structure
and their increasingly illegible constructs of reality. With the same
intellectual exhilaration that characterized the successive revolu-
tions of 1907-1911, first Picasso and then Braque resolved the crisis

of 1911 by revitalizing their contact with the external world in a

way that was as unexpected as it was disarmingly logical.
This revolution in picture making was inaugurated by Picasso's
Still Life with Chair Caning (Fig. 57), which has traditionally been

dated winter 1911-1912, but is now dated, according to a recent

conversation between Douglas Cooper and Picasso, May 1912. Here,
within this small and unpretentious assemblage of the letters JOU
(from he Journal), a pipe, glass, knife, lemon, and scallop shell,
another fundamental tradition of Western painting has been de-
stroyed. Instead of using paint alone to achieve the appearance of
reality, Picasso has pasted a strip of oilcloth on the canvas. This
pasting or, to use the now familiar French term, collage, is perhaps
even more probing in its commentary on the relation between art
and reality than any of such earlier Cubist devices as trompe-Voeil or
printed symbols, since the result now involves an even more com-

351
57- Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, Oil, pasted oilcloth simulat-
ing chair caning on canvas, 10%" by i3 3/4 " (oval) (Picasso Collection © by
S.P.A.D.E.M. Paris 1976)

plex paradox between "true" and "false." The oilcloth is demon-

strably more "real" than the illusory Cubist still-life objects, for it is

not a fiction created by the artist but an actual machine-made

fragment from the external world. Yet, in its own terms, it is as false
as the painted objects around it, for it purports to be chair caning
but only oilcloth. To enrich this irony, the most unreal Cubist
is

objects seem to have a quality of true depth, especially the trompe-

Voeil pipe stem, which is rendered even more vivid by juxtaposition
with the flatness of the trompe-Voeil chair caning below. And, as a
final assault on our suddenly outmoded conceptions about fact and
illusion in art and reality, Picasso has added a rope to the oval
periphery of the canvas, a feature that first functions as a conven-
tional frame to enclose a pictorial illusion and then contradicts

352
 Cubism
this function by creating the illusion of decorative woodcarving
on the edge of a flat surface from which these still-life objects
project.
Perhaps the greatest heresy introduced in this collage concerns
Western painting's convention that the artist achieve his illusion of
reality with paint or pencil alone. Now Picasso extends his creative
domain to materials that had previously been excluded from the
world of canvas or paper and obliges these real fragments from a
nonartistic world to play surprisingly unreal roles in a new artistic
world. Moreover, this destruction of the traditional mimetic rela-
tionship between art and reality becomes even more emphatic by
the very choice of a material that in itself offers a deception. For
here Picasso mocks the illusions painstakingly created by the artist's
hand by rivaling them with the perhaps more skillful illusions
impersonally stamped out by a machine. If the reality of art is a
relative matter, so, too, is the reality of this seemingly real chair
caning, which is actually oilcloth.
The close interchange of ideas between Picasso and Braque and
the very disputable dates traditionally assigned to many works
still

of this period make it difficult to establish any secure chronological

priority in the various innovations of collage. Generally, however, it
is claimed that in his drawn and pasted Fruit Dish of September

1912, Braque was the first to initiate papier colle (pasted paper), a
term that refers specifically to the use of paper fragments as opposed
to the more inclusive term collage. In any case, Braque's Fruit Dish
continues that complex juggling of fact and illusion which makes
Picasso's earlier Still Life with Chair Caning so compelling to the
eye and the intellect. Again, as in Picasso's collage, the true ele-
ments pasted into the picture are even falser than the drawn fiction
of the Cubist still life, for they are strips of wallpaper simulating the
grain of oak. Once more, these fragments of reality are made to
perform roles even more unreal than those implied by their simple
function as decorative facsimiles of wood. . . .

If collage, with its material references to nonartistic realities,

acted as an antidote to the growing illegibility of so many Cubist
works of 1911, it nevertheless enriched considerably the paradoxes
involved in the Cubist dialectic between art and reality. It effected,
moreover, a profound reorganization of the very structure of Cubist
painting. In the first place, the size of these clippings is now larger

than those increasingly small and diffuse pictorial units of 1911, and

353
 — —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM
therefore begins to establish a simpler and more readily grasped
pattern of fewer and bolder shapes. Thus, in opposition to the
painted works preceding them, these early collages are composi-
tionally lucid and extremely restricted in the number of their
pictorial elements. But, more important still, the technique of
pasting so strongly emphasizes the two-dimensional reality of the
picture surface that even the few vestiges of traditional illusionism
clinging to earlier Cubist painting —
the vibrant modeling in light
and dark, the fragmentary diagonals that create a deceptive
—
space could not survive for long. Rapidly, the luminous shimmer
and the oblique disposition of planes in earlier Cubism were to be
replaced by a new syntax in which largely unshaded planes were to
be placed parallel to the picture surface. In the case of actual
collage, the placement was quite literally on top of the opaque
picture surface, thereby controverting another fundamental princi-
ple of Western painting since the quattrocento, if not earlier
namely, that the picture plane was an imaginary transparency
through which an illusion was seen. . . .

Besides contributing such stylistic clarifications, collage stimu-

lated an even greater consciousness of the independent reality of
pictorial means than had been achieved in earlier Cubism. In these
drawn and pasted pictures there is a new and radical dissociation of
the outlines defining an object and the textured or colored area
(represented by the pasted papers) traditionally filling these shapes.
Now, the contours of objects seem to function in counterpoint, as it
were, to their textured or colored substance, so that the previously
inseparable elements of line, texture, and color suddenly have
independent existences. This phenomenon, although adumbrated in
paintings of 1910-1911, had never reached the autonomy of separate
pictorial means so explicitly defined in collage. . . .

The crucial transformations of Cubist style that occurred in 1912

make it necessary to draw a distinction between works that precede
and works that follow this year. The most familiar terms for the
earlier and the later phases Analytic Cubism and Synthetic
—
Cubism are so commonly accepted today that, even if one were to
cavil at their precision, they are no more likely to be abandoned or
replaced than the far more imprecise name of Cubism itself.
The term Analytic Cubism is perhaps the more accurately de-
scriptive of the two. It refers explictly to the quality of analysis that

354
 Cubism
dominates the searching dissections of light, line, and plane in the
works of 1909-1912 (Figs, 53, 56). Indeed, no matter how remote
from appearances these works may become, they nevertheless
depend quite clearly on a scrutiny of the external world that, at
times, is almost as intense as that of the Impressionists. By contrast,
the works that follow have a considerably less objective character,
and suggest far more arbitrary and imaginative symbols of the
external world. In this they parallel the change from the Impres-
sionists' fidelity to objective visual fact in the 1870's to the Post-
Impressionists' more subjective and symbolic constructs of reality in
the late 1880's. Ostensibly, Synthetic Cubism is no longer so con-
cerned with exploring the anatomy of nature, but turns rather to the
creation of a new anatomy that is far less dependent upon the data of
perception. Instead of reducing real objects to their abstract com-
ponents, the works following 1912 appear to invent objects from
such very real components as pasted paper, flat patches of color, and
clearly outlined planar fragments. The process now seems to be one
of construction rather than analysis; hence the term synthetic.
Although this convenient classification of the creative processes
before and after 1912 may be applicable to many works, it can also
be somewhat misleading in its implication that after 1912 there is an
about-face in the Cubists' relation to nature. It is certainly true that
many Synthetic Cubist drawings and paintings after 1912 offer a
capricious rearrangement of reality that would be impossible in the
Analytic phase. However, it must be stressed that this presumed
independence of nature is more often of degree than of kind. . . .

The post- 19 12 works of Picasso, Braque, and other Cubists often

depend on as close a scrutiny of the data of perception as did the
pre- 19 12 works, however different the results may seem. Without
thiscontact with the external world, Cubism's fundamental assertion
that awork of art is related to but different from nature could not be
made; for there would be no means of measuring the distance
traversed between the stimulus in reality and its pictorial re-crea-
tion.
It is probably more meaningful, then, to think of Synthetic

Cubism, not primarily in terms of a dubious reversal of the Cubists'

relation to nature, but, rather, in terms of a demonstrable reorga-
nization of Cubist pictorial structure. Now illusionistic depth is
obliterated by placing the newly enlarged and clarified pictorial

355
 ROBERT ROSENBLUM
elements —
line, plane, color, texture —
parallel to and, by implica-
tion, imposed upon the two-dimensional truth of the canvas or
paper. Beginning in 1912, the work of Picasso and Braque and —
ultimately, most major painting of our century — is based on the

radically new principle that the pictorial illusion takes place upon
the physical reality of an opaque surface rather than behind the
illusion of a transparent plane. . . .

356