TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/100289/10028900.034

Text File | 1990-09-18 | 7KB | 127 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.