This is a wonderful collection of drawings
and paintings. They represent an overview of the cubist years and the various
forms in which it was manifest. And the works of Picasso and Braque
specifically have a wonderful quality of elegance; they can be looked at again
and again not for their historical importance but for the aesthetic pleasure of
being with them.
Leo Stein, who did not like cubism,
once took Picasso aside and said that he thought cubism was merely decorative
and that Picasso was surrendering his talent to his desire to be famous. Despite
the fact that Picasso began to give more serious thought to the work Leo Stein
stopped collecting it. Photographs in the exhibition show this collection as it
was installed in the Lauder Uptown residence, and in the catalog in other Upper Eastside residences, and we can see that Leo Stein
had a point: this work lends itself extremely well to decorating of the most
elegant kind.
Elegance is an interesting quality.
It is hard to define although one recognizes it when he sees it. Many modern
architects make beautiful and handsome buildings but only a few of them make
elegant buildings, Cesar Pelli foremost among them. At The Met Thomas Hoving
took the old, gray, dusty storage bin and turned it into a department store.
Philippe deMontebello gave the whole of it a wonderfully elegant patina,
boosting it from the aura of Macy’s to that of Neiman Marcus. Elegance in this
sense has to do with an attention to detail and the use of the finest
materials. But it can also be seen in the slap dash finish of a Matisse
painting; sometimes it’s just an attitude.
Seeing this elegant collection in
this elegant setting made me aware of the silent presence of the person who
always presented himself as the picture of elegance: D.H. Kahnweiler. It is to
Kanhweiler that we owe our knowledge of the history of cubism. At the age of
twenty three, practically still a boy, Kahnweiler hooked up with Braque and
Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck and eventually Picasso. And when Braque and
Picasso began working together exchanging ideas on the making of the art of
their time Kahnweiler cleverly stepped in and offered them a weekly stipend in
exchange for first refusal on their week’s output. As the works were brought to
him he catalogued and dated and photographed each one of them. He maintained
this practice for the whole of his working life.
Later, while sitting out WWI in Switzerland he
was able to write, from memory, the story of cubism as he had known it. Braque
and Picasso, who had talked at length on a daily basis during that period,
1909-1914, insisted years later that they had said things only to one another that
neither of them would ever remember. Kahnweiler had not been privy to every
word of this. Thus what cubism “means” is still open to discussion …as the
literature so aptly demonstrates.
Resuming his gallery in Paris after the war Kahnweiler found that his
two stars had, because of economic necessity, moved on to other dealers. Later,
he was able to be involved in some ways with Picasso, but never again with
Braque. He also still had the company of Juan Gris and after his death in the
twenties he wrote the authoritative Juan Gris monograph. He picked up as well some
of the other young artists of the day, among them Fernand Leger.
It was Kahnweiler who stated that
cubism, in its purist form, was defined by the work of four artists: Braque,
Picasso, Gris, and Leger. We need to remember that Kahnweiler was a businessman,
a very astute businessman I understand, and that all four of these artists were
represented in his gallery. Douglas Cooper used that definition as the basis
for forming his collection of cubist paintings. When he died and his works were
to be distributed on the market place, Leonard Lauder was one of the first
persons called to select works for his own much admired collection. Now the
interesting story here is that when he started collecting art in the early
1960’s, Mr. Lauder claims that he was a working man making only ten thousand
dollars a year. In the late 1980’s, after selecting the works he wanted from the
Cooper collection, he confesses in the catalogue that he had had to borrow
twenty two million dollars to pay for it. That’s a hefty loan to which a
“working man” was able to encumber himself. Having never been asked to buy into
a major art collection I don’t know if my credit was ever that good. But possibly
it was: I too was a working man.
This explains why this collection is
limited to the work of these four artists…from Kahnweiler to Cooper to Lauder.
And if I express myself as having reservations I mean exempting specifically
Juan Gris and Leger. As far as I am concerned cubism will always be only
Picasso and Braque and everyone else is just an interested bystander or a
hanger on or as is sometimes said, a salon cubist. I have always felt that Gris,
however nice a guy he might have been, was too eager to be understood and too
eager to be complimented. He was a good copyist with the ability to mimic what
his betters were doing: there is a wonderful pencil drawing here of Madam
Cézanne in a Red Armchair, the Boston portrait, with a slightly exaggerated
geometricizing that is another good example of that ability. In addition he had Kahnweiler to promote his
career. While some of his paintings are interesting they are never as good as those
of the two main players’. At his best, Still Life, Table, 1914…the collage series
with blue …he is just …very good. By contrast other artists also tried the
cubist vernacular …Diego Rivera, Matisse, Mondrian, Jackson Pollock …but only in
order to get inside of it and find their own way out.
In regard to Leger he illustrates
Kahnweiler’s short comings. After losing Picasso and Braque to World War I,
Kahnweiler never again had artists in his gallery who were world class artists
the likes of that first pair. And so what one has to reluctantly admit, being
deeply indebted to him for his record keeping, is that Kahnweiler was lucky at
one point to be in the right place at the right time, but that he was never
again quite so lucky.
Was Leo Stein right? Is cubism merely
decorative?
There are many books on cubism and
the majority of them are only concerned with its history and chronology. In
them there is much polite argument as to which painting was actually painted
before or after certain other paintings. Most of these books read like the
contre temps of art world insiders. And what is so surprising is that many of
these authors will admit somewhere in their discourse that they do not
understand cubism. (There is probably no other subject about which so many
writers write books claiming their ignorance.) The best book, because he had
access to all the Picasso drawings at MOMA and the Picasso
Museum in Paris , is by Pepe Karmel, Picasso and the
Invention of Cubism, 2003. (He is the author of one of the essays in this
catalogue as well.) Step by step he helps us to understand what Braque and
Picasso were doing, from a technical standpoint, its formal development, on an
almost day to day basis. And in the final chapter of his book he gives us an
intellectual history of nineteenth century perceptual psychology and nineteenth
century theories of language, synecdoche, etc. While this latter part is
interesting I don’t know that it is necessary for the understanding of cubism.
Like all paintings a cubist work is
a visual experience. And while the intellectual or possible intellectual
underpinnings are interesting they bear the same relationship to cubism as Aristotle’s
Poetic did to Greek tragedy: the art was not created as an illustration of the
philosophy; the philosophy offers only a partial explanation of the art.
Cubism is often hailed as a revolutionary
moment in art. It was not; it was a transitional period. No matter the style or
school of painting each painting has three plastic elements: color, line, and
form, or, and I think this was an insight for Braque and Picasso …shape. In a
flat painting form is represented by shape. Various devices are employed to
suggest that the shape is modeled, that it is a form. Thus every painting that
employs those devices creates a dual perception: the perception of surface and
the perception of depth created on the surface. Cézanne’s use of that dichotomy
created in his works a vibration that gave his paintings the sense of being
alive. Braque and Picasso followed suit.
Painting
in the west has a history of over two thousand years. Through the Late Gothic
period and into the Renaissance paintings were made in studios and they
depicted religious or mythological or historical scenes. Over time linear
perspective became more strictly adhered to. Eventually painters worked from
live models and made sketches of actual places. Then in the 18th and
early 19th centuries absolute verisimilitude, mimesis, came into
vogue…just as photography rendered it obsolete. The Impressionists turned away
from the well made academic painting, but they continued to be the eye that
records. Cézanne, removing linear and aerial perspective from his work came to
realize that with the dual perception created by a painting, a painting became
other than a window with a view; the painting was an autonomous entity. In
addition, to create a more visceral response to the objects depicted, he began
to distort the objects…that visceral response making them feel more real than
if they had been perfectly drawn and carefully painted. He displaced elements
within the painting: if a chair rail ran behind a table, he might place it
higher on one side of an object than on the other. This created a pictorial
dynamic.
Shortly
after his death the interview with Emile Bernard was published in which Cézanne
advised painters to look for the cube, the sphere and the cone. Working
independently Picasso and Braque began to make paintings in which the geometry
of objects was emphasized. It was in response to these village landscapes with
little square houses that the expression “little cubes” was first uttered.
Eventually Braque and Picasso met, agreed to work together, and they became
known as “The Cubists”…although soon thereafter neither of them made any more
paintings like those first proto-cubist works. Thus we can understand that
“Cubism” is a poor name for what followed and that it in no way describes or
explains that work.
Cubism
reclaimed painting as a studio activity. Taking the cue from Cézanne’s motif, the
reason for making a painting, the subject was located in the here and now …no
more history, religion or mythology …and was seen (deconstructed) as its three
plastic elements. Making a clean break from Les Fauves, they minimized color
and emphasized line and shape (form). They used all the techniques of picture
making …grids, scaffolds, paysage, hatching, cross hatching, etc. and
incorporated it into the finished presentation. From the ethnographic arts they
used simplification, synecdoche, and scarification. There was nothing new here
except the results of using the traditional in a different way. By including
everything in the finished presentation they sought to be more “honest”.
As
regards the subject the parts might be subjected to displacement and distortion:
a piece of it might be seen here another there if it enhanced the pictorial
dynamic. Just as Cézanne wanted to see how far he could go with the modulation of
color before he lost the identity of the object, so Picasso and Braque wanted
to see how far they could go with distortion and displacement of the form before
losing that identity. In this process, where the decisions are made by the
artist as a part of his feeling or thinking self, rather than conforming to what
the academy insisted one must do about that which sat in front of him, the
artist reclaimed the position as the creative force.
It
is often said that cubism is an art form in which multiple views of the subject
are presented simultaneously. While this does happen from time to time in some
of the works, it is not what cubism is about. Rudolph Arnheim wrote that if
cubism was only about multiple views there would have been no reason to invent
cubist sculpture. Cubist sculpture came about because Picasso wanted to see one
of his drawings in three dimensions. It was a drawing in which he had “pierced
the closed form” as Kahnweiler noted, showing us the outside and the inside,
the scaffolding that held it up and the layers of planes from front to back and
side to side.
In
the period known as analytic cubism Picasso and Braque chose an arbitrary
“look” and each committed himself to working in that style just as if they were
attending class in an academy. Each adhered to the discipline. Hence their
works look alike, just as academic nudes all look to have been made by the same
hand. And thus it can be seen that the work is purely a visual experience. It
does not really “mean” anything. It was, it is, play, the making of art with
the plastic elements. It begins with Cézanne’s achievement, paintings that are
a step away from verisimilitude, away from making a “picture” of something, and
takes them another step away...to making a painting. If it works as a painting
it doesn’t have to mean something.
In
synthetic cubism all of the elements were treated independently …color
independent of form, line independent of color, shape independent of color or
line…and greatly reduced to their simplest being. A piece of wallpaper glued to
the ground was simply a flat piece of paper on a flat ground: flat being the
key. This has nothing to do with Hippolyte Taine, Saussure, Einstein’s Theory
of relativity, X-rays, modern psychology, silent movies, etc. etc. etc: it was
simply a way of showing us what art is: a flat piece of paper on a flat ground:
if the drawing of a man was included it was a drawing: it was glaringly honest art
rather than the deceit of mimesis. (This is not a pipe.) I suspect that the
insistence on intellectual underpinnings is an effort by various writers to
give cubism depth and heft because without “meaning” it could simply be
…arbitrary.
In
the various modes of cubism, proto-cubism, analytic, and synthetic, each of the
paintings in the Lauder Collection has in common the look of being finished.
That is because the artists who made them, knowing how to make paintings, knew,
even though paintings like these had never existed before, knew when they were
finished. In the same way Cézanne’s portrait, Madam Cézanne in the
Conservatory, MMA, has a sense of being finished even though there are areas of
the ground not covered with paint and areas where the paint is more thinly
applied than it is in other places. There is nothing more that can be done to
that painting without marring it. Following Cézanne’s example, Cubism gave
artists permission to know their business and to make their own decisions.
The
problem with some of the cubist art and especially the art that followed the
cubist lead is that building a work out of the plastic elements too often can result
in work that is indeed purely arbitrary …this could be black or it could be
white, it could be blue or red …one could use the eye or the glasses or just
the mustache. If there is no artist’s passion in the art making, and in all of
Picasso and Braque there is much passion for making art, the felt arbitrariness
of the presentation engenders a sense of indifference in the viewer…art is no
longer a shared experience, a call for community, it is just something to pass
the time that results in …decoration.
Many
if not all of these paintings have been seen before …almost all of them have
been used to illustrate the various books on cubism and have been seen in
cubist exhibitions. This raises the question: are these good paintings or just
familiar paintings? Perhaps we won’t know until after they have stood the test
of time…if even then.
In
later years Kahnweiler described cubism as lyrical painting in that it is the
lyricism of form …or perhaps he meant …Shape. Certainly we can see that that is
true in the work that Georges Braque made after World War I and for the rest of
his life. For Picasso there is the lyrical as well, but there was always
something “darker” in his cubism, as if, as The Creator, he sat at the well
spring of the creative moment. Whereas Braque had an aptitude for the
decorative flourish, Picasso was always pure primitive. And thus, eventually,
the two of them, just those two, working from different places came to a
parting of the ways. And the cubist era was at an end.
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