One of my major complaints about the work of some modern artists is that too many of them seem to have discovered a signature image and caught up in the commercialism of the art world they have then gone into production and have devoted themselves to churning out product for the many well heeled collectors and museums in America. (For the sake of brevity I won’t mention names.) It might be that my earlier efforts at playwrighting impressed upon me the fact that a play is a well tuned transition from point A to point B during which progression variation adds spice to the mix. When I see an artist repeat himself ad infinitum without any sense of development, and with no excursions into different areas, I see the work of that lifetime as without drama and lacking interest. I often wonder: did he never want to draw the nude? Did he never want to paint a landscape or a still life? That said, it doesn’t require a genius to figure out why I love Picasso.
I don’t have that same intolerance with classical painting: classical painting has a fixed way of presenting and a fixed way of looking and the variations that arouse our interest are the expression of individuality within the tradition by each of the artists. But I do have impatience with the fact that after some five hundred years that tradition had begun to wear out, it had become decadent, and that some people continued to work in that tradition. Something different had to happen. It is because of that feeling and my understanding of art that I am drawn to the work of Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque, et al.
I believe it is generally accepted that the most profound break with the tradition was the development of cubism fostered by Cezanne’s achievement: an understanding of cubism is a portal to creating modern art and in museums one can see in their early works that almost every modern artist has gone through a period in which he has worked in that genre before discovering his own voice, his own penmanship. That cubism is valid is verified by the fact that so many young artists of the day, and since, have intrinsically understood its importance on first acquaintance.
I have to confess that despite all that I have read and been told about cubism I do not understand it. I don’t see that a cubist work simply presents multiple views of the subject. I understand that Cezanne was an influence and I believe that it was he who reconceptualized the painting as not a window into another world but as a surface that became an object in and of itself. He used the subject as the motif, the motive, for making a painting and in the process of making the painting he created displacements and distortions for purely pictorial reasons. Picasso and Braque used that freedom to create artworks that were a further remove from previous picture making. If that involved multiple views, so be it, but the multiple views alone were not the raison d’être of the procedure.
My understanding of cubism is that the subject is only the motif and that deciphering the subject is not the objective, seeing the whole of the work as a stand alone work is the objective: the uses made of the plastic elements have priority over the subject. Often this is difficult: we want to find the subject, as we have been trained to do. And while I can almost always identify the subject, which is always placed in the center, I cannot understand those other elements that mix with it nor do I understand what has been done with the surround that bleeds to the edge of the format. It generally reads as conveniently disposed of extraneous space and for some reason I seem to resist that interpretation as too facile. (In the cubist drawings the surround is generally left as blank paper.) For Cezanne there was no extraneous space, the whole canvas was the work, and I want to believe that the same was true of the two cubists.
This is not to say that I don’t like cubism, albeit with reservations. Beyond the fact of the paintings what most intrigues me about it is that Picasso and Braque were able to submerge their individual identities and create work in the service of art that is without ego. I find synthetic cubism far more interesting, perhaps because I love color, but in those initial works there is that same fascinating loss of ego/identity as well.
One of the interesting aspects of the partnership is that the two men came together from very similar/different backgrounds. Picasso was academically trained, by his father, from a very young age. Braque, at a young age, was trained in decorative painting by his father, and had some study in the local fine art academy. Thus there is in both phases of cubism a mixture of the academic and the decorative and I am not always certain if I feel that a particular painting is merely decorative or if it achieves the status of fine art. This is especially true with synthetic cubism, catalogue Plate 23, Guitar and Glass, (number 6 in the web site gallery.) being the perfect example. It’s a beautiful painting but if it were hanging on my wall would I become aware some day in the future that I had stopped being aware of it hanging on that wall in the same way that I might some day forget the color of the pillows on my sofa?
It was at the beginning of the 1920’s that the individuality of the two artists began to be expressed in their cubist works. Picasso continued in that style but in many other styles as well whereas Braque limited his work to those ideas for the next three decades. For the most part that thirty year development is the subject of this exhibition. It is a wonderful collection of paintings: it is a record of growth and development.
Beginning with his work with the fauves and including some of his early independent work exploring the achievement of Cezanne, it can be seen that for Braque subordinating his ego, his personality, is an integral part of his understanding of a particular stage of making art. In each genre it is not until he understands the central idea that he allows himself to speak with his own voice. Only then can he use the form to further the understanding of art. Of course this reflects the process of the academy wherein one learns to master the tradition before one is encouraged to “express himself”.
The exhibition catalogue essays are rich with the intellectual antecedents in his work and I have two opposing responses to them. First I deeply appreciate the analysis. Braque’s paintings are thick with content, his paintings are visually crowded and I agree that there is more happening in them than meets the eye. The essays are a great stepping off place for working one’s way into the thick of the matter. Some writers have claimed that Picasso was an intellectual and that if he did not read the intellectually current writings of his day, he at the least absorbed them through osmosis. It’s nice to have some of them named in these essays and I was especially struck by the inclusion of Henri Bergson, who of course was a very well known thinker of that time although he is no longer a household name.
On the other hand, I have heard much gratuitous art world babble and I have seen exhibitions of graduate student’s work at University art galleries which are often prefaced with overlong, many paged, guides to comprehension, printed copies of which are made available to the museum going public. My response to those manuals is always this: if a painting is not a visual experience, four hundred pages of verbal explanation will not make it so.
Braque’s paintings are visual experiences. If that experience needs to be elucidated I think that should include not only essays such as these but more biographical material as well. One experience of his work is that there is a persistence of black, not just in the well placed areas of black that balance within the compositions, beautifully balanced in Plate 31, Gueridon, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but in an overall pervasive sense of blackness in many of them. Herman Melville has so well defined the symbolism of white and the symbolism of black that a viewer of Braque’s work could not be faulted for suspecting that his black has a similar symbolic value. The first essay brings the blackness to our attention but does not offer a deep analysis of its origin or meaning.
What is the origin of that blackness? It might very well be the age in which he lived. After the interruption of World War I he resumed painting and not long thereafter witnessed world financial collapse, the rise of Nazism in Germany, then World War II, which he spent in occupied Paris, and following the war the advent of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear devastation…the whole of his adult life, his working years, were far from the utopian, rosy future predicted at the rise of the century.
Might it have been his war injury? In every biography we are told that he suffered a head wound in the war and that he was trepanned during his treatment. Nothing more is ever said about this. But there is the sense that he resumed his painting somewhat in isolation and outside the social whirl of the Parisian art world. I have not read in any source that he suffered any impairment from his war wound: speech impediments, impaired mental processes, or physical disability. Yet there is such an implied change in his character one is curious. Perhaps it was simply a more dedicated commitment to his work and his love of painting following a near death experience. I think because the war wound is so consistently mentioned, it needs to be clarified as to its effect on his life and work, either that it did effect the work or that it did not. If it did not, perhaps mention of it should be put to rest.
As for complaints about this exhibition, I have to say that I was very disappointed not to have seen some of his works from the last ten years of his life. It was at that time that he seems to have followed the advice of the apocryphal mentor to go out into the world, to forget everything he had been taught and everything he knew and to just paint. And so he did. But he painted landscapes, some really beautiful landscapes also seemingly rich with symbolic meaning. While he is known as a still life artist, those works are bookended with landscapes in his earliest and last works. I was sorry not to have seen some of the last landscapes here and to have had a sense of the fullness of his career. Despite all the good work in the catalogue and the opportunity to see these many wonderful paintings the full length portrait is incomplete.
Back in the 70’s I saw the Cubism exhibition a MOMA. The last Braque retrospective in the United States was in 1988. Those of us of certain years are not likely to see again in our lifetimes forty Braque paintings hanging in four large adjoining rooms. Ahem. Do I have to tell you to see this?
http://www.acquavellagalleries.com/exhibitions/2011-10-12_georges-braque/
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment