TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100289/10028900.034

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.4 KB | 141 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 93

The Adam and Eve of Modernism


Picasso and Braque's "passionate adventure" in Cubism

By Robert Hughes


    Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism," which goes on view
this week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, is by
far the most demanding show MOMA has ever done. Whatever one's
stamina for comparing nuances of pictorial meaning, it will be
taxed by this long sequence of more than 350 mostly small,
mostly brown works of art that fill two floors of the museum
through Jan. 16. This will be the array of Cubist evidence at
which future scholars will look back. Curator William Rubin,
director emeritus of MOMA's department of painting and
sculpture, has called in all his markers. "Picasso and Braque"
is his retirement aria, the climax of a great career in
modernist scholarship.

    Cubism is the archetype of 20th century cultural movements.
Indeed, it is the reason so many people have come to think of
modern art as a sequence of movements, group activities.
Neither Pablo Picasso nor Georges Braque could have created it
on his own: it was a truly cooperative process in which Picasso
(for a short time) was relieved of the psychic burden of
egoistic creation -- the loneliness of the virtuoso -- and the
more cautious and measured Braque was spurred into radical
experiment. It marks, more clearly than any other, the point at
which modern art broke away from commonsense vision and split
its audience into a tiny coterie who "got it" and a large
majority who did not. By making the process of creation part of
its subject, it ushered in the self-reflexiveness of modernism:
art thinking about art.

    The American museum industry has long argued that
practically all later styles of 20th century painting and
sculpture can be defined through either their origins in Cubism
or their opposition to it. Abstract art comes out of the virtual
disappearance of the recognizable nude or still life from
Braque's and Picasso's work in the autumn of 1911. Pop art is
born in the letters, headlines and brand names they stenciled
and glued onto their surfaces. Constructivist sculpture descends
from Braque's paper constructions and Picasso's tin guitar.
Abstract Expressionism gets its originality from its struggle
to "escape the Cubist grid" -- which was never a grid anyway.
Cubism, from this simplified and patristic standpoint, becomes
the tree in the primal garden of modernism, and Picasso and
Braque its Adam and Eve.

    Hence whole pyramids and stupas of doctoral paper have been
raised over its site. No short period in the lives of two
artists -- about seven years from Picasso's completion of Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 to Braque's enlistment in the
French army in 1914 -- has been more analyzed by more hands.
Rather than try to boil down all this material for the general
public (a hopeless task), Rubin has taken a biographical
approach, focusing entirely on the give-and-take between the two
men, their bonds and differences, their mutual way of working
through what he rightly calls "the most passionate adventure in
our century's art."

    Cubism has never gone soft; it remains, after 80 years,
mysterious, challenging and resistant. Neither Picasso nor
Braque said much to explain what they believed they were doing.
Their Cubist work contains no ideological positions, dramatic
subject matter or easy anecdotes. It disdains narrative and
sentiment -- a severe test for Picasso, whose Blue and Rose
periods had been full of both. (On the other hand, both men's
paintings and collages were seeded with puns, sly allusions and
In jokes: when the fragmentary writing on one of Picasso's
paintings from 1912 declares that "Notre Avenir est dans l'air
(Our Future is in the air)," one remembers that the two men
liked to wear mechanics' clothes and compare themselves to the
Wright brothers, who had given flying shows in Paris in 1908,
and that Picasso's nickname for Braque was "Wilbourg" --
Wilbur.) It is difficult, subtle, cerebral and on the whole
quite unspectacular art, brimming with an inventiveness that,
simply because it has become so embedded in our very conception
of modernity, can sometimes be quite difficult to see in its
true quality.

    For Cubism was a response to a changed world -- a France
that was no longer describable in the semirural idyll of
Impressionism, a place whose emergent reality had more to do
with inventive technology, mass media and the density of the
great capital, Paris. Cubism is the urban art par excellence.
It celebrates the rapid stream of half-completed impressions,
the overlay and stutter of images and ideas, enforced by the
tempo of city life: it is the art of cultural compression and
flux. With its materials, subjects and techniques, it lighted
up the commonness of the modern world.

    Nowhere is its delight in the ironic life of overlaid signs
made clearer than in the use of collage, which Picasso invented
and Braque rapturously extended. The caning in Picasso's Still
Life with Chair Caning, 1912, is mechanically printed oilcloth,
and its presence in the tiny painting -- worked over with that
fierce slanting clutter of painted images, newspaper, glass, cut
lemon and so forth -- is a double play with signs, not the
insertion of something real into a fiction.

    It gets us nowhere to think that Cubism was meant as a form
of realism. That is what art historians like Douglas Cooper
thought -- Cubism aimed for "the solid tangible reality of
things" by representing them from several angles. But "solid
tangible reality" is hardly detectable in this show. You get an
overwhelming sense of plastic energy from Picasso's drawing of
volume, but that is a different matter. Neither he nor Braque
was out to propose a systematic alternative to one-point
perspective as the key to making things look real. There was no
system to Cubist shuttling and lapping. Which does not mean it
was anarchic, but rather that Picasso and Braque made up their
coherences from passage to passage, from inch to inch of the
canvas, rejecting the "timelessness" of traditional painting as
they went.

    To follow Braque as he patiently constructs his first real
masterpiece, Violin and Pitcher, 1910, is to watch a classical
sensibility throwing itself into the flux of uncertainty and
coming through intact. Chardin still lives beneath the silvery
buckling planes of the pitcher, and every one of the hundreds
of angles at which the shallow facets of the picture impinge on
one another seems both provisional and immutable. But this --
let alone the far more abstracted paintings of late 1911, in
which the thinnest of clues to the identity of objects (a
pipestem, a playing card) swims in a vaporous gray-brown flux
inflected by lines that break before they can become
architectural -- is a kind of visual cohesion that has very
little to do with how we actually deal with objects in space.

    It has, on the other hand, everything to do with proposing
infinite relationships between things and seeing how many of
them at a time can make visual sense. You still cannot walk into
the Cubist room. But that is partly -- or so the paintings
quietly argue -- because you are already in it. It is the space
of relativity, the benign and long-lost mental space of the
early 20th century, when newness still seemed paradisiacal.