Cubism


 * Cubism** was an early twentieth-century European avant-garde movement that unfolded between 1907 and 1914. Cubism marked a decisive break with inherited values (realism) and practices (perspective) in the visual arts. Shifting art's attention from the //thing seen// to the //activity of seeing//, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and other Cubists rejected the "representational illusion," treated the painting as a physical object that existed in time and space, and made possible the later experiments with form and perception now associated with Modernist and postmodern art. While Cubism took place largely in Europe, and mostly in the visual arts, it was indebted to African arts, and helped, through the famous Armory Show of 1913, to initiate literary Modernism in the United States.

=Origins and Development=

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque are generally credited with the founding of Cubism in Paris around 1907. One source attributes the term itself to a suggestion made in 1909 by Henri Matisse, another to the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles, who, in 1908, describing landscapes painted by Braque, "called the geometric forms in the highly abstracted works 'cubes'." The roots of Cubism are generally traced back to two sources, one domestic -- the late flattened landscapes of Paul Cezanne -- and one non-Western: the visual and sculptural arts of Africa.

Paul Cezanne
Braque had painted the landscapes Vauxcelles saw, in conscious imitation of Paul Cezanne. According to John MacTaggart, Cezanne mistrusted the conventions of perspective invented in the Renaissance and passed down over centuries, that made a two-dimensional surface, the picture plane, appear to hold three dimensional objects. The tricks of perspective "denied the fact that a painting is a flat two-dimensional object," he writes, and Cezanne, who wanted to disclose, not to conceal, the gap between a painting and what it depicted, rejected those illusions in favor of "construction[s] and arrangement[s] of colour on a two-dimensional surface." Cezanne's rejection of perspective in favor of what George Oppen would later call "an art of pure construction" was one of several discoveries that helped bring Cubism into being.

In one of his many paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cezanne eliminates linear perspective, flattening the picture plane, so that the mountain appears neither further nor closer than the trees and houses below it. At the same time, however, the horizon line and the use of atmospheric perspective create depth cues, suggesting that the mountain sits back of the woods and village. This indeterminacy -- is it near or is it far -- foreshadows important developments of twentieth-century avant-garde poetry. At the same time, the mountain, at once "in your face" and mysteriously remote, echoes the quiet paradoxes of Denise Levertov's late mountain study poems. And Cezanne's rejection of what William Carlos Williams dismissed as the "beautiful illusion," and his affirmation of the painting as an object in the world, rhymes with Williams's insistence that the word be "put down for itself, not as a symbol of nature, but a part."

African Art
Another precursor was African art. According to Sabine Rewald, Picasso first saw African masks in the spring of 1907, in Paris, at the ethnographic museum of the Palais du Trocadéro. That encounter inspired the "stylization and distortion" of his //Les Demoiselles d'Avignon// (//The Young Women of Avignon//) whose bodies "are composed of flat, splintered planes rather than rounded volumes ... [t]he space, too, which should recede, comes forward in jagged shards, like broken glass," while the faces of the two figures on the right refer directly to the mask forms Picasso studied at the Trocadéro. Picasso, and other European artists who looked to Africa for ways out of the cage of representation, have been criticized -- along the lines of Edward Said's Orientalism thesis -- for a sort of cultural colonialism, by which the cultural capital of non-Western peoples was conscripted, without permission, into the West's struggle to reinvent itself. "[T]hey were not interested," writes MacTaggart, "in the true religious or social symbolism of these cultural objects" -- such objects were treated, instead, as "subversive elements that could be used to attack and ... refresh the tired tradition of Western art." The language of "subversion" and "attack" calls to mind the work of the Italian Futurists, in particular F.T. Marinetti, who published the first of several Futurist manifestoes in 1909.

Analytic Cubism
Adapting Cezanne's flattened picture plane, and the geometric formalism of African masks, early Cubist paintings presented figures, faces, and still lifes of common objects (newspapers, bottles, glasses, musical instruments) in altered but recognizable forms. Viewers confront an image without perspective, a scene "dissected ... into a multitude of small facets ... [and] then reassembled, after a fashion, to evoke those same figures or objects." Picasso described the compound image that resulted as a "sum of destructions." In this first, "analytic" stage of Cubism, objects were presented as if from several standpoints at once. Thus, in Braque's "Candlestick and Playing Cards on a Table" (below), the cards, the ace of hearts and the six of diamonds, are seen as if from inside the image, where a player would be seated at the table. As MacTaggart writes, a Cubist painting "will show you many parts of the subject at one time, viewed from different angles, and reconstructed into a composition of planes, forms and colours. The whole idea of space is reconfigured: the front, back and sides of the subject become interchangeable elements in the design of the work."

From 1910 to 1912 Analytic Cubism entered what is now sometimes called its "hermetic" phase. Forms grew more abstract and geometric, less recognizable, and the palette narrowed to a range of browns, grays, and blacks, so as not to interfere with the "purely intellectual perception of the form." Perhaps in an effort to avoid monotony, both Braque and Picasso began to work letters, words, and other sign systems (e.g., musical notation) into their compositions. This rudimentary collage practice anticipates Synthetic Cubism, as well as similar work by such Futurist painters as Carlo Carra and Gino Severini, whose "Interventionist Demonstration" and "Red Cross Train Passing a Village" call attention, in different ways, to the pictorial qualities of the written word.

Essentially, Analytic Cubism does in space, with colors and forms, what Gertrude Stein, a friend and patron of Picasso, does in time with words. As Cubism throws into doubt the unitary "I" sustained by perspective -- giving one the feeling of standing in several places at once -- Stein's //Tender Buttons// unsettles the "I" by making the objects of awareness fluid, transient, and untamed. (While Cubism has been broadly accepted as foundational to modern art, Stein's works still incite hostility in many quarters. Experiments in compositional meaning seem to encounter special resistance in the medium, language, of daily social intercourse.)

Synthetic Cubism
Picasso, experimenting in the winter of 1912-1913 with collage (by means of [|papiers collés]), initiated the shift from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism. "With this new technique of pasting colored or printed pieces of paper in their compositions," writes Rewald, "Picasso and Braque swept away the last vestiges of three-dimensional space (illusionism) that still remained in their 'high' Analytic work." MacTaggart describes the change as an "attempt to revitalise" Cubism "and pull it back from total abstraction."

As the contrast between the terms "analytic" and "synthetic" suggests, the image is now devoted not to breaking a scene into its constituent elements, but to assembling a scene out of diverse elements, a scene at once abstract and representational. So Picasso gathers, out of wavy lines (hair), black ovals (eyes), red and black arcs (arms), and a black-and-white rectangle with wiggles (a book), an image, somehow recognizable, of a young female student, pictured at left. She wears a crown of laurels, or oak leaves, or cartoon hands, or tulips. They are, at least, undeniably green. The image offers a visceral and emotional, as well as a cerebral, encounter, thanks in part to the return of color to the scene.The painting is also thick with the sort of compositional meaning that Gertrude Stein and the Dada artists were exploring in language. It meaning also remains indeterminate. In Juan Gris's //The Open Window//, pictured to the right, the cloud floats both outside and inside the window; the window itself is implied by the shutters. The grapes, as Williams points out in //Spring and All//, are "part of the handle of the guitar." For Williams, this painting, in rejecting perspective and skewing representation, expresses a "unity" of which only the imagination is capable. "Here is a shutter, a bunch of grapes, a sheet of music, a picture of sea and mountains (particularly fine) which the onlooker is not for a moment permitted to witness as an 'illusion.' One thing laps over on the other ... the mountain and sea are obviously not 'the mountain and sea,' but a picture of the mountain and the sea."

Williams' encounter with Gris (as well as with Charles Demuth and Guillaume Apollinaire's //The Cubist Painters//) was crucial in his pivot from the Imagist lyrics of //Sour Grapes// to what Marjorie Perloff calls the "Cubist style" of //Spring and All --// which, with its "fragmentation and superposition of planes," recalls the Cubist "tension between compositional game and representational reference" that also characterizes the work of Gertrude Stein. That both paintings post-date the spans usually assigned to Synthetic Cubism suggests, perhaps, the arbitrariness of such distinctions.

=Influence and Descendants=


 * To come. Rough notes follow.**

Perhaps the most obvious influence of Cubism was on Futurism.

Gino Severini came into contact with Cubism before his Futurist colleagues. Following his visit to Paris in 1911, the Italian Futurists adopted a sort of Cubism, which gave them a means of analyzing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism.

What MacTaggart writes of Cubism is maybe even more true of Futurism.

[ARTY] Artists needed ... a 'new way of seeing' that expanded the possibilities of art in the same way that technology was extending the boundaries of communication and travel. This new way of seeing was called Cubism - the first abstract style of modern art. Picasso and Braque developed their ideas on Cubism around 1907 in Paris and their starting point was a common interest in the later paintings of Paul Cézanne. [/ARTY]


 * Armory Show poster - and discussion of show's importance. **



=External Links=

A virtual tour of the Armory Show

**Add links to Cubist collections - Met, MOMA, Musee D'Orsay.**

=References=

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