Date: 21-10-1989
Owning Institution: MoMA
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999      
Subject:   20th Century    

Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews 'Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism' at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

IT IS a peculiar fact that while virtually everybody has a rough idea of what Cubism was, and of what a Cubist painting looks like, hardly anyone can name an example. That turns out to be a strangely appropriate state of affairs, and it also strengthens the case for an exhibition such as 'Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism', at New York's Museum of Modern Art, which gathers together more than 350 paintings, sculptures, collages and papiers colles produced by Braque and Picasso between 1907 and 1914. Cubism, which de-veloped with the irresistible momentum of a great philosophical argument, is well suited by such blanket coverage. It was never about this or that masterpiece (although it produced many), but about changing the way we see the world.

For Picasso and Braque, Cubism was also a way of life, an adventure, and the miracle of it is that the excitement of that adventure has not been dulled by the passage of time. It has been dulled by the carving up of the Cubist oeuvre among private collectors and museums. Curator William Rubin has managed, for a brief, extraordinary moment, to set Cubism's shattered bones, to restore it to something like wholeness. At MOMA, until January, the jigsaw puzzle comes together; all those small, mostly monochrome canvases that museum visitors tend to hurry past ('Oh, Cubism') come to life.

Cubism began, as this exhibition begins, with the savage outburst that was Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon. It is one of the great masterpieces of world art, but that is not to say that it has become respect-able. Its savagery survives intact: those five harpies still fix you with basilisk stares, a glowering parade of accusatory whores (Picasso's original title for the painting was 'The Avignon Brothel'). The ghosts of the past are present in the Demoiselles - Poussin's bacchanals, the Venuses of the Hellenistic tradition, Michelangelo's 'prisoners' - but they are there only to be exorcised. The angular geometries that literally squeeze the space out of the picture, flattening the five maenads to its surface, do away at a stroke with the inheritance of Renaissance perspective. The masks that the figures have for faces are based on ancient Iberian and African sculpture, a way of announcing - by way of means that Picasso undoubtedly thought of as both savage and primitive - the exhaustion of the Western tradition of easel painting.

Cubism would never, in fact, develop out of Picasso's femmes fatales. As Picasso and Braque em-barked on their joint enterprise, the problems that they chose to consider were simply too difficult, too knottily theoretical, to allow for the psychological and narrative complications that the figure brings to painting. The first phase of Cubism - Analytic Cubism, as it has been dubbed - would proceed by exploring, not the figures in the Demoiselles but the spaces between them: those extraordinary passages of painting where air itself, depicted as a kaleidoscope of crisscrossing, hard-edged planes, assumes the properties of solid matter.

'Notre avenir est dans l'air' ran a newspaper cutting Picasso affixed to one of his later collages; his nickname for Braque was 'Wilbourg', a reference to pioneering aviationist Wilbur Wright. Cubism's prime subject was air, or more precisely space. Braque would later say that Cubism was an attempt to 'materialise the new space', and it was he who took the lead in Cubism's earliest phase. His 1908 Houses at L'Estaque is one of the most cubistic of Cubist paintings, reducing its subjects to solid geometry whose solidity is simultaneously undermined by Braque's characteristic herringbone shading and multiple, contradictory light sources. The perspective is illogical; Braque has made it virtually impossible to determine whether one plane is before or behind another. Art's subject is no longer the thing that it depicts but the multiplicity of viewpoints from which it can be depicted, the infinite positions that you can occupy when you look at an object. This is Braque's new space, and it is the space of relativism.

Cubism, it has often been said, represented a new, alternative brand of realism in art: it was, according to this view, a way of painting things in the round, an attempt to capture the sense of solidity that you get when you circle an object, taking it in from many angles. But to think that is fundamentally to misunderstand Cubism which sought, rather, to demonstrate that the very concept of realism is based on a false premiss. Looking at the great examples of high Analytic Cubism, those difficult, hermetic paintings of 1910 to 1912, you encounter dense skeins of paint in which it becomes literally impossible to identify anything like the subject of a conventional representational picture.

These paintings, with their dense weave of crisscrossing lines, their mosaics of indeterminate painterly tesserae, throw up clues to real things - fragments of words, O-shapes that suggest the sound holes of guitar or mandolin - but little more. They are difficult, and were meant to be. They do not set out to picture the world but to create a visual equivalent to a theory about the way it is: these busy, flickering areas of paint come to look like metaphors for the secret, pulsating, molecular life of things. The subject matter of Cubism - tables and chairs in cheap street cafes, newspapers, bottles - was clearly selected for ordinariness, a way of pointing out that what was being painted was beside the point, that Cubism's true subject was vision itself.

What Analytic Cubism represents, paradoxically, is the unrepresentability of the world - or at least all those aspects of it, spatial and structural, that old-fashioned, illusionist art left out. Braque made this clear in his magnificent Violin with Pitcher of early 1910: a wall of fractured shards in which you distinguish the broken forms of pitcher and violin, absorbed into the Cubist geometry of dissolution, while at the top Braque has included - a perfect example of his dry sense of humour - a single nail and its shadow painted with exemplary illusionism. It is a detail that gives the painting the status of a summary, a declaration of just where, in 1910, Cubism stood: the nail and its shadow are there to post a reminder of all that Cubist space was not, of the old order of vision that it had set out to destroy.

The Cubists seem to wonder what the world might look like seen through X-ray eyes (solid objects turn transparent, dissolving into complex layers of intersecting planes), or under extreme magnification (air itself thickens, a place full of mysterious atomic energy, traversed by lines that look like sound- or radio-waves literalised). The connection between the Cubist revolution and contemporary scientific revolutions - they painted in the wake of Einstein's Theory of Relativity and on the eve of the great age of radio - has probably been overstressed, but it is intriguing none the less.

Picasso initiated Cubism's second and final phase (Synthetic Cubism) when he stuck a piece of mass-produced oilcloth printed with the image of chair-caning to his 1911 painting Still Life with Chair Can-ing. Collage - whose implications were swiftly grasped by Braque and explored in his great series of papiers colles - looks with hindsight like a natural development of Analytic Cubism. Picasso and Braque had already begun to envisage the texture of life as a form of collage - a rushing influx of images and sensations, overlaid one upon another - before they hit on their cut-and-paste technique. Picasso painted Landscape with Posters in 1912 in oil on canvas, but his vision of the city as a place of abstracted architectural planes, enlivened by sudden apparitions of vast, colourful logos ('Pernod Fils', 'Leon'), defines the modern metropolis as a vast three-dimensional collage, a place characterised by overlapping signage. As Synthetic Cubism gets under way, it develops into the first great art of the city. This is art that has found an equivalent for the fragmented, quickfire succession of experiences, the bombardment of visual imagery that characterised (and still does) modern urban life.

'Pioneering Cubism' offers among its many richnesses a crash-course in telling Cubist Picasso and Cubist Braque apart. Theirs was a marriage of opposites. Picasso was always more interested in disso-nance, in quirkiness, in what would later emerge as the surreal potential of Cubist fragmentation: it shows, even in the period of his greatest affinity with Braque, in the extra vehemence with which his planes tend to intersect, the attack of his brushstrokes, the suggestion that his structures are poised on the brink of violent collapse.

Synthetic Cubism marked the moment when their partnership - finally brought to a close when Braque was drafted to the Front in 1914 - began to dissolve. Picasso becomes ever more confident, as if he feels positively liberated by the sense of anarchy that is inherent in later Cubism. Synthetic Cubism's bitted world suits the nature of his imagination, which is essentially that of the fetishist - one who is classically transfixed by certain body parts at the expense of others - and it is significant that at this point Picasso finally feels able to translate Cubism back into an art of the figure. The figures that he creates are mad, demonic concoctions, such as Woman in an Armchair, her breasts a pair of torpedoes fixed by a pair of illusionistic tacks to the broad planes that make up the rest of her body. Already you begin to sense the possibility of late Picasso: those extraordinary, dislocated female anatomies of the late 1950s and 1960s are made possible by Cubism's assertion that we can only ever know the world in fragments.

Braque, on the other hand, seems troubled by the very anarchy he has helped to unleash. His works of 1912-14 gain their power - which amounts, in the end, almost to a form of moral fortitude - from the tension between his sense of an exploded world and his determination to forge from it artistic structures of magnifi-cent poise and lucidity. Braque's Synthetic Cubism is an art of rigorous control, governed by a system of compositional checks and balances, alignments of line and form to the rectangle of the picture plane, offering a classicist's reproof to Picasso's fertile eccentricity.

Cubism is still challenging, and it is some measure of the achievement of Braque and Picasso that their works - even at the end of a century whose artists have been virtually obsessed with the notion of radicalism - should still look more radical and extraordinary than any that have succeeded them. On the evidence as-sembled in this, perhaps the ultimate modern art exhibition, the thought occurs that we may - even at this late date - have only begun to understand the implications of the Cubist revolution.