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Movements

in

Modern Art

CUBISM

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Movements

in

Modern Art

CUBISM
David Cottington

Cambridge
UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The

Pitt Building,

Trumpington

Street,

Cambridge cbi

irp,

United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh

Cambridge CB2 2RU, United Kingdom

Building,

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40 West 20th

Street,

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ny

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USA

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10

Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne,

3166, Australia

Tate Gallery 1998. All rights reserved.

David Cottington has asserted

his right to be identified as the

author of this work

This book

is

in copyright.

to the provisions

Subject to statutory exception and

of relevant

reproduction o{ any part

collective licensing agreements,

may

no

take place without the written

permission of Cambridge University Press.

by Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd, London 1998

First published

Cover designed by Slatter-Anderson, London

Book designed by Isambard Thomas

Typeset

Adobe

in

Monotype Centaur and

Franklin Gothin

Printed in

Hong Kong

by South Sea International Press Ltd

Library of Congress Cataloguing- in -Publication

catalogue recordfor this book

Measurements

is

Data

is

available.

availablefrom the British Library

are given in centimetres, height before width,

followed by inches in brackets

Cover:

Robert Delaunay, Windows Open

Simultaneously (First Part, Third Motif),

1912. (detail; see fig.49)

Frontispiece:

Pablo Picasso, Majolie (Woman with

(detail; see fig.55)

isbn o 521 64610

Zither or Guitar), 1911-12.

Introduction:

Modern Times

Avant-Garde and Avant-Guerre

12

2
Languages of Classicism

32

3
Contents
Perspectives on Simultaneity

47

4
High and Low

64

Conclusion: After Cubism

73

Further Reading

78

Index

79

Modern Times

Introduction:
The decade

before the First World War was an extraordinary period in the

history of Paris.

Newly

refurbished by the massive

development launched by Baron Haussmann half

programme of urban

a century earlier, the

reputation as the capital of luxury and entertainment was at

city's

its

height,

had drawn fifty million

department stores and the

sealed by the Exposition Universelle in 1900, which

visitors,

by the rapid expansion of

proliferation

of

glittering facade
itself

was

its

its

theatres, music-halls

of

this

belle

riven by conflicts

capitalism that was driving

and cinemas. Yet beneath the

epoque spectacle, Parisian society

like

France

and contradictions. The dynamic of

its

booming economy exacerbated

already

sharp social inequalities, and met with mounting resistance from working
class

men, organised

in the

new movements of Socialism and

women

(or trade unionism), and from

feminist movement.

The

syndicalism

in the increasingly vociferous

rapid growth of the city

itself,

and of

its

new

forms of mass transportation, consumption and entertainment, threatened

existing, often rural, industries

and ways of

life

to

which there remained

deep attachment. Meanwhile international competition for colonial

possessions and markets fuelled a spirit of nationalism which, ignited

by clashes with Germany over

its

Moroccan

protectorate in 1905 and again

of 1914.
Within this complex and dynamic society developed the diverse
community of the artistic avant-garde. Drawn to Paris by its cultural
prestige, young aspirant artists from across Europe made this the largest,
in 1911, led inexorably to the conflagration

most

diversified

and most

influential artistic

flourished in the early years of

community

this century. This

of

all

those that

was the context of the

emergence and development of Cubism, perhaps the seminal movement for

the history of Modernism in all the arts, and certainly one of the most

complex and contradictory of the many 'isms' that it spawned. It was

initiated between 1907 and [910 within two quite distinct milieux of the
avant-garde on the one hand that of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque,
centred on the studios of Montmartre and the art dealers

them, and on the other the left-bank

circle

who

frequented

of Albert Gleizes, Jean

Metzinger, Fernand Leger, Henri Le Fauconnier and Sonia and Robert

Delaunay, oriented towards the annual exhibitions of the Salon d'Automne

and the Salon des Indcpendants.This pioneering phase of Cubism

as a style

movement, however, was brought to an end by the war. That summer

of 1914, Picasso was painting with Braque and Andre Derain in the south of
France, and took his friends to Avignon station at the beginning of August
and

to join their regiments;

times, but by this he

'I

never saw

meant

them

again, he said. In fact he did,

many

that their relationship was never to be the same;

the Cubist adventure was over.

Yet

it

had been approaching

the style and the

movement

its

some months,

end, as an adventure, for

diversified

as

through the work of increasing

numbers of adherents, and as its originators began to go their separate ways.

Already, in the autumn of 191 3, the critic Roger Allard had noted the
disappearance of an identifiable group style, and declared the
dismemberment of 'the Cubist empire' to be fait accompli'. The outbreak of
war both confirmed this dismemberment, as military duties claimed some
of Cubism's key players, and ushered in a decade of consolidation, and
contestation, of its achievement.
Two works made in the spring of 1914 summarise between them much of
that achievement and indicate the diversity of the concerns that the Cubist
movement subsumed over the previous five years. One of them, by Robert
Delaunay, a former leading member of what we can call the 'salon' Cubist
group, was public in its address if not large, still big enough to hold its
own in a crowded exhibition hall, with a recognisable and contemporai
indeed topical, subject matter and an attention-grabbing motif. The other,
'a.

by Picasso, the principal

scale

and

'gallery'

self-effacing, even

one of the small group of

Cubist, was correspondingly private in

humble,

clients

in

appearance,

and friends who

its

putative spectator

visited the artist's studio

or the premises of his dealer. Together they also suggest

ways

how

this arcane avant-garde style

economic and

The

social

dynamic

was anchored

subject of Delaunay s painting

Political

Drama Sg.i was a

on 10 March

his office,

the wife of Finance Minister foseph

to publish

some

campaign to

aillaux.

and

Figaro,

discredit the politician,

of his early love-letters to a

recent

[914, oi the

Gaston ( almette, In
(almette had lor some days

editor of the leading conservative newspaper Lt

in very different

of pre-1914 Pans.

spectacular scandal: the shooting dead

been conducting

in the political.

and was threatening

former mistress. This was no

straightforward crime passionnel, however, lor the reasons for

almette's

animosity were profoundly

political,

and

his

orchestrated by President Poincare himself.

campaign was,

The

first

it is

thought,

of his motives was

of conscription for military

Caillaux's opposition to the extension

service

from two years to three, a measure of preparedness for possible war which,
in the wake of the second clash with Germany over Morocco in 191 1, became
for the growing nationalist majority something of a litmus test of
campaign against the Three Years Law

patriotism. Caillaux's

leading

up

to

its

enactment

in

August

1913 aligned

him with

in the

months

the

antimilitansm of the Socialists and syndicalists, and against the rest of-the
republic.

idea

On top of this, he was proposing to

of which was anathema to the middle

militancy on the
upheaval.

To

and even

its

left

was leading many

introduce an income

class, at a

moment when

tax, the

political

in that class to fear a revolutionary

the opinion-formers of the Third Republic such as Calmette

President

he

was

clearly a liability.

Le

Petit

Journal
Robert Delaunay
Political
Oil

Drama 1914

and collage on

cardboard

88.7x67.3(35x26)
National Gallery of Art,

Washington.

Joseph

H.

Gift of

Hazen

Foundation,

Inc.

Front cover, Le Petit

Journal,

29 March 1914

Bibliotheque Nationale

de France

Delaunay s subject therefore brought together two of the

issues

of that decade: nationalism and

third, for

class conflict. It also

salient political

suggested a

Mme Caillauxs action in defence of her husband could not have

been without significance for what was termed

'the

woman

question at a

moment of increasingly vocal demands by women for political and social

equality. Not that he chose it directly for these reasons: it appears, rather,
that he was struck

by

newspaper

was published some days

artist's

later (fig.2), in

'impression of the incident that

which

Mme Caillaux's attack was

pictured against a window, her pistol-shot creating an aureole of

light.

This

happened to be the very motif that Delaunay had been exploring in his
recent paintings, as he experimented with the constructive and symbolic
potential of spectral colours arranged in relationships of complementary
pairings. In Political Drama, based clearly on this illustration, he turned the
aureole into an implicit target that expands to

fill

the picture surface in

concentric, quartered circles

of bright colour

almost identical

a pattern

to that of another work he made around this time, the extraordinary

Disc (fig.3), which has some claim to be counted among the first-ever

Works

abstract paintings.

innovation in 1914,

and

as

like the latter

were

at the leading

edge of

First

artistic

such were almost ccrtainlv incomprehensible to

the salon-going public; as his letters of the time reveal, Delaunay was kccnlv

aware of this

fact.

assassination was,

His choice of such

it

notorious incident as Calmette's

seems, not fortuitous but deliberate, an attempt

keeping with other works

made by Delaunay and

his wife

in

Sonia before 1914

Robert Delaunay
First
Oil

Disc 1914

on canvas

134 (52X) diameter

Private Collection

to use a popular subject as a vehicle for his pictorial Innovations so as to

make

the latter accessible to a public beyond that of the avant-garde

community. The problems

raised by such a

experimentation and public address we

significant that such an attempt

the

new

should

combination

oi esoteric

shall explore later,

haw

been made

technologies of newspaper photography

,\n^\

but

at a

it is

moment when

newsreel film were

taking over from painting and illustration the role of documenting historic
events,

The

and were dictating the terms

response of most avant-garde

to turn

from such

of visual representation of public

artists to this

issues to questions

development seemed

of form and colour

for their

life.

to be

own

sake.

yet

Drama can be seen

Political

an ambitious attempt, from within the most

as

aesthetically radical avant-garde

reasserting paintings public role

movement, to challenge it, by both

and modernising its means of

communication.
If
Life

Its

Delaunays picture suggests

construction

and

same

some

and arranged to look

wine

on

glass

scraps of

its

way, this

Still

little

wood and

tasselled

of bread and sausage,

like a slice

implies

a cafe table beside a wall

behalf. Yet, in

its

Picasso's

spring, suggests the opposite.

not only of the traditional materials of art but of

claiming on

Cubism,

lofty ambitions for

in that

of humble materials

collection

braiding, painted
a knife

made

(fig.4),

that

all

a rejection

Delaunay was

work embodies

quite as

fundamental an engagement with questions of the representation of

modern

and the

life,

not only those

role

common

of

of the spectator. Through

space

a fictive

physicality

that of a

it,

as Political

Drama.

Its

materials are

their likeness to such objects they at

cafe table

and

call it into

once create

question by their sheer

and by dispensing with the usual mediating devices of frame and

At the same

pedestal.

art within

to everyday objects, they also jut out into the space

time, likeness itself

is

called into question: for if the

bread, sausage slices and knife look real, the glass has something of the

character of a diagram,
arc

of

from above, and parts company with the

supposedly standing on it.

downwards,
is

transparency and volume implied by the

its

as if seen

combining

In thus

wooden

at right angles to its elevation; while the table-top slopes

its lip,

different conventions

Pablo Picasso

glass that

Still Life

Painted

of representation, Picasso

upholstery fringe

points to their conventional character. Indeed he does more: for while the
spectator

may not

1914

wood and

25.4x45.7x9.2

be fooled by the bread and sausage, which are identiflably

(10x18x3'/*)
Tate Gallery

made of wood,

the braid

is

braid,

of

just the

kind that edged many a

tablecloth in 1914; thus the border between fiction

what

is

art

and what

the object as art

evidence of

is

is

not

is

also

is

reality

between

compromised. Moreover, the

status

of

guaranteed neither by the materials themselves nor by any

skill (at least,

of any traditional

instead, the pathos of the poverty

of the

and

latter are offset,

artistic

kind) in

its

fabrication;

of the former and rudimentary character

even highlighted, by the wit of their juxtaposition.

It

the inventiveness with which Picasso has both conjured this fictive scene

out of so

work

its

little

and

charm;

at the

it is

same time revealed the

as if the artist has

artifice

of

art,

that gives the

transformed the dross of these cast-

off materials into the gold of art through the alchemy of his creative

imagination.

Such alchemy drew,

in 1914,

upon

culture that was rapidly growing

features

of

and diversifying

modern commercial
new methods of

as

mechanised production met burgeoning demand for consumer goods. The

braid tassels in particular were an imitation of materials and techniques that

belonged to

a pre-industrial, luxury craft tradition,

appropriated for more

vulgar use as mass-production brought their price within reach of the

majority. Their

deployment

here, to designate a table

of fake food against

wall with real but conventionally illusionistic trompe-l'oeil moulding, was in

keeping with the masquerade of materials that characterised modern decor.

10

But such components of Picasso's construction were distanced from their

origin by the play of ambiguity and ironv around which the wit of the
Still Life

turns.

He

juxtaposes

'real'

tablecloth against trompc-Voeil bread and

drawn in short-hand, in a Cubist code thai refers this work back to

the series of paintings, collages and constructions through which it had
been elaborated over the previous two wars. If the adoption of the cast -oils
of a degraded commercial culture was for Picasso a means of subverting
the conventions of academic art, this private game of wit And inter-reference
a glass

enabled this

Still Life

to maintain, against

To resist absorption by that commercial culture.

its

burgeoning pressure,

space for reflective and

critical art.

In truth both Picasso

and Delaunay had moved, with these two works.

some way from Cubisms

reference.

and

original starting-points

initial

frame

of

Delaunay had publiclv distanced himself from the salon

group eighteen months

earlier,

and

Political

iubisl

Drama exhibits neither the

juxtaposition of different

viewpoints nor the fragmentation

of forms that have come to be seen

hallmarks of the Cubist

as the
style.

these qualities are

If

residually present in Picasso's

construction

diagrammatic

of the

in the

glass

table his

scrap materials

and the slope

conjuring with
three dimensions

opened up implications

for

sculpture that, as we shall

called

see.

Cubism's own premises into

question. Yet neither work would

have been possible without the

collective experience of the Cubist

movement. In

their

combination of the popular and the

foregrounding of the devices of illusionism

programmatic demonstration of the constructive

through

his

game of make-believe

different ways,

on

esoteric, in then-

Delaunay

via his

somewhat

role of colour. Picasso

these artists draw,

if

in radically

ideas and pictorial practices that had been consolidated

over six or seven years of shared experimentation, as the following chapters

will

show. Fundamental to that experimentation was awareness

conventional character of visual representation

did not imitate the visual world, but represented

devices, such as perspective

and that

it

and modelling,

could only be modern

acknowledged. Like the words

if

of a

in

a
it

of the

recognition that painting

through conventions and

ways analogous to language,

this linguistic character

were explicit

Iv

language however, what such

conventions and devices meant depended on their accent or inflection, And

modernity' was

word painted and sculpted

within the Cubist movement,

as

we

in

many

different accents

shall discover.

11

Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon 1907

Avant-Garde and Avant-Guerre

Little in their previous acquaintance either

Oil

with Picasso's painting or that of

other aesthetically radical artists in Paris in 1907 could have prepared those

who viewed
a shockingly

was

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon that year for the experience (fig.5). It

unconventional work,

its

quintet of brazen, naked whores

two of them monstrously deformed and two others implacably unblinking

lined up

to confront the spectator across a claustrophobically flattened,

angular space. Even after almost a century, this picture remains unsettling

both

in its

raw sexuality and

illusion, figural integrity

in the violence

and compositional

it

does to conventions of spatial

unity.

Although

it

was not

exhibited publicly for almost another decade, the painting gained immediate

notoriety in the artistic

a tour deforce

growing

community of Montmartre

a fact suggesting that

of some kind was already anticipated from

whose prodigious

talent

in the milieux

that appeared to turn

young Spaniard

of those who were making and collecting new

its

art.

that expectation, however, with a painting

back on that

go out of its way to look

works appearance. His dealer Daniel-

talent, to

horrid, was itself as unexpected as the

Henry Kahnweiler

was obvious, and whose reputation was rapidly

That Picasso should have met

later recalled that, to

everyone

seemed 'something mad or monstrous', while the

who saw
artist's

it,

the oainting

friend Gertrude

Stein reported that the collector Sergei Shchukin had almost been reduced
to tears by the loss for French [sic] art.
Picasso's motivation for painting such a shocking picture appears to have

come not only from an

12

on canvas

96x92

appetite for iconoclasm and a profound sense of his

(243.9x233.7)
The
Art,

Museum of Modern
New York. Acquired

through the
P.

Bliss

Lillie

Bequest

own artistic ability qualities that have come to be associated with his very
name but also from an attitude that was substantially a product of that
pre-First World War decade: avant-gardism. A spirit of rebellion against
academic convention and bourgeois

taste

artistic practice in Paris since early in the

had characterised

a strand

nineteenth century.

From

of
the

individualism and technical brio of the Romantics such as Eugene

Delacroix, through the ironic and oblique observations of

on modern

city life

and painting's relation to

it.

Edouard Manet

to the Utopian visions of

Vincent van Gogh's sun-drenched Provence and Paul Gauguin's Tahitian

paradise, artists had engaged with And represented on canvas a deepening
13

culture

of alienation from the

of modern

social,

moral and aesthetic conventions

of the nineteenth century

became more acute and found institutional support.
Increasing numbers of aspirant artists and writers, flocking with stars in
their eyes to Pans as the cultural capital of Europe, found their paths to
a glittering career the state art schools, the juried salon exhibitions and
their hierarchy of prizes, the established newspapers and literary magazines
choked by overcrowding and obstructed by hidebound protocols.
capitalist society. In the last years

that alienation both

In response, they turned increasingly to alternatives, exhibiting together.in

informal groupings, networking between their multiplying cafe-based

milieux to promote, compare and contest

they wrote about in ephemeral

slowly growing

number of

investment in their work.

and

1880s,

little

new

and

practices,

which

magazines, and discovering a small but

private art dealers

From

ideas

and collectors willing to

risk

the Impressionists' exhibitions of the 1870s

through the foundation of the unjuried Salon des Artistes

Independants in 1884, to the pioneering dealerships of Paul Durand-Ruel,

Ambroise Vollard and the brothers Bernheim-Jeune,

this alternative

infrastructure steadily expanded.

It

was not until after the turn of the century, however, that

artistic

garde

of

this unofficial

population became the counter-cultural community of the avantor

more properly

avant-gardes, since by

now

numbered thousands
nearly ^0,000 new

it

writers; one critic estimated in 1911 that

would be shown in Paris that year, while nearly 200 small literary
and artistic magazines, each declaring and promoting a different 'ism', were
founded between 1900 and 1914. Such numbers were themselves a reason
for this consolidation; another was the widening of its market base, as
more dealers and collectors began to speculate m new and unorthodox art.
In 1904 the Societe de la Peau de l'Ours (Skin of the Bear Society), was
founded expressly to invest in such art and then sell it after ten years. The
Society's name came from La Fontaine's fable in which two hunters sold the
skin of a bear before they had even tried and failed to catch the animal.
(Unlike these unfortunates, the Society realised a handsome profit from the
sale of its collection in 1914.) By 1909, indeed, the contemporary art market
was buoyant enough to support a new kind of art dealer. Opening his
gallery in 1907, Kahnweiler began two years later to narrow his purchases
to the work of only four or five artists, and in particular that of two
Braque and Picasso. From the spring of 1909 he undertook to buy almost
everything they produced a move that was at once a major gamble and
a vote of confidence in the extraordinary Cubist pictures they were
artists

and

paintings

beginning to paint.

A third factor was

the growth in Paris

of consumerism,

at the centre

of

which were the rapidly expanding department stores, and with it the
emergence of modern marketing techniques. Newspapers gave steadily
greater space to advertisements, billboards appeared

all

over both the city

and the surrounding countryside, and people across France, as elsewhere,

were bombarded with promotional hyperbole in all media. The appearance
of
14

Italian poet Filippo

Tommaso

Marinetti's 'Founding Manifesto

of

Futurism' on the front page of Le Figaro in February 1909 signalled the

appropriation by artists of such techniques, for which a
salon and gallery publics of Paris

new

art as

if

critic

From around

coined the generic term 'Futurist publicity'.

became accustomed

inevitably

this time, the

to the presentation of

were another form of novelty commodity, as artists without

it

and writers without publishers resorted to the proclamation of

manifestos and movements, and the founding of magazines as the means of
dealers

elbowing their way to the front of the race for

a reputation.

fourth factor was a change in the political temper of the French Third

Republic.

The new

liberal intellectuals

century had opened on a spirit of collaboration between

and

artists,

on the one hand, and the

including the organised working

and symbolised

by the 'Bloc

on the

class,

Its

political left,

was founded on

des Gauches', a coalition between Socialist

and Radical parties that gave the centre-left

parliament.

other. It

working majority

in

beyond government, however, into the cultural

belief in the progressive social purpose of art, and

reach went

arena, fostering

both

range of initiatives through which this purpose was promoted: art study

groups, evening class institutes and the

When

like.

the Bloc collapsed in

19056 under the pressures of mounting nationalism

Moroccan

and working-class protest

crisis,

parliamentary Socialism,
end.

As

much of this

in

response to the 1905

of
came

at the ineffectiveness

inter-class collaboration

to an

the politically organised working class withdrew behind the

stockade of trade unionism, their former intellectual and

artist

reciprocated, exchanging aesthetic for social militancy and

artistic elitism in place

of

comrades

promoting

political solidarity.

The term 'avant-garde' appears to have been first applied at this time to
and by aesthetic groupings seeking to distinguish themselves from more
orthodox

artists

and

styles.

On one level it was a badge of membership,

on the part of artists alienated and

marginalised by mainstream society and/or its dominant cultural
institutions, and, for many, expressing a commitment to aesthetic renewal
expressing a sense of collective identity

On another it stood for the

that replaced their former social activism.

panoply of self-promotional strategies and devices that helped to

distinguish an artist or aesthetic innovation

marketplace.

of progress

from the many others

in art, the belief that

only

new

aesthetic ideas

it

was

a significant factor in the

idea

and practices were

adequate to the representation of the experience of modernitv.

these levels

in the

On a third, it represented a common commitment to the

On

all

of

emergence and subsequent

history of Cubism.

Thus
deeply

the Demoiselles d'Avignon was the result of,

felt

commitment on

formal conventions and the enhancement of

took

his cue in this partly

from Cezanne's

painting that would lay bare

viewer the complex process

important

in this respect

female bathers

in

among

other things,

Picasso's part to the overhaul of paintings

or

at least

its

expressive potential.

efforts to fashion a

open up

way

He

of

for exploration by the

of pictorial representation. Especially

was Cezanne's extended

which relationships

of

series of paintings of

colour and

line, figure

and ground,
15

mass and plane

are so orchestrated as to

monumentality of
construction

their massive

(fig.6).

moment when

the

Painted in the year after Cezanne's death and at

latter's

picture was, characteristically, less a

The abrupt

secured by a big retrospective

d'Automne was greater than ever, Picasso's

reputation

exhibition at that years Salon

challenge.

emphasise both the timeless

nudes and the means of their pictorial

homage

to the 'master of Aix' than a

changes in the manner of depiction of the

and the violent distortion (and contortion) of the squatting

five

nudes,

figure at the

lower right, in particular, were both an acknowledgement and a critique of

Cezanne's painstaking efforts to reconcile the juxtaposition, in a single

painting,

of different perspective schemas with the requirements of

and

verisimilitude

pictorial

harmony. Although apparently

quotation from the seated figure in Cezanne's Three

a direct

Bathers (fig.7), this

squatting nude entirely disregards both requirements, and the in-your-face

quality

of her

stare

provided the most disconcerting confrontation for the

JBESr
i

^^^^

am

<

ft'/

Jfaf

&

-rrr

viewer since Manet's Olympia over forty years

There were other more immediate

earlier.

rivalries,

however, than that with

Cezanne, or indeed Manet. At the 1907 Salon des Independants Henri

Matisse exhibited his Blue Nude ('Souvenir de Biskra) and Derain a Bathers work,

both painted
figure

earlier that year (figs. 8, 9). Plainly related to

compositions

Matisse

at that

Cezanne's great

time owned the Three

Bathers

these

two works also represented a striking development beyond the classical

frame of reference of the latter, in drawing on the example of nonEuropean, and

in particular African, cultural

explicitly in the case

models. They did so not only

of Matisse (Biskra was then

a military

outpost and

nascent tourist oasis in sub-Saharan Algeria, which he had visited the

previous year) but also implicitly. Though the figures of both paintings were

posed

in a

manner reminiscent of

classical sculpture (and, in the Blue Nude,

redolent of the central figure in Matisse's

own

idyllic Bonheur de Vivre

of

19056), their physical features clearly connoted Africanness'. For

Europeans such
16

as

Matisse and Derain

and

Picasso

this

quality stood

far left

Paul Cezanne

Bathers
Oil

1898-1905

on canvas

127.2x196.1

(50Xx77X)
National Gallery,

London

left

Paul Cezanne
Three Bathers

1879-82
Oil

on canvas

52x55(20^x21^)
Museedu
de

la

Petit Palais

Villede Paris

Henri Matisse

Blue

Nude

('Souvenir

1907

de

Biskra')

Oil

on canvas

92.1x140.4
(36Mx55J4)
The Baltimore
of Art.

Museum

The Cone

Collection,

formed by

DrClaribel

Cone and

Miss Etta Cone of

Baltimore, Maryland

Andre Derain
Bathers 1907
Oil

on canvas

132.1x195
(52x76/)
The Museum of Modern
Art, New York. William
S. Paley

and Abby

Aldnch Rockefeller

Funds

17

for an 'otherness' that they at once

embraced and

Like Gauguin and the Japonistes a generation

feared.

of

earlier, artists

this

emergent avant-garde sought to pioneer a new aesthetic vision by looking

beyond Europe

far

that

for examples

would endorse

own

their

of

pictorial

and sculptural representation

empty

dissatisfaction with the

virtuosities

of academic Naturalism or sentimentalised Impressionism that dominated

from

the salons. Artifacts

central

and west Africa were flooding into the

ethnographic museums of Europe (spoils of the unseemly and often brutal

scramble for imperial possession of territories such as

Congo
a

Dahomey and

basin) (fig.io).Thcy appeared enticingly exotic and primitive

dominant

societies as

colonialist

and

racist perspective that

the

from

viewed non-western

both Europe's opposite and Europe's childhood: undisciplined

by reason and

scientific

understanding, in thrall to superstitions and to an

unconstrained sexuality that western civilisation had learned to master.

and

If such mastery

rationality were the

marks of Europe's

superiority,

they also had their limitations, and in the decade before 1914,

and

non-western culture

in particular, 'orientalism'

was

for fashionable Parisians a sign for hedonistic but

dangerous excess. The main vehicles for their fantasies were

the

sumptuous

spectacles

of Sergei Diaghilev's

Ballets

Russes such as Cleopatra (1909) and Scheherazade (1910).

Black, or sub-Saharan, Africa was distinct in crucial
respects, however.

Unlike the countries whose

cultures fuelled the

myth of

orientalism,

yet unassimilated into the French

European

colonial

or

framework, and

it

was

as

indeed

of depravity

tales

and outlandish customs among Africans, brought

back by those engaged in their subjugation in the

name of France

(or Belgium, or England) served both

to reinforce a stereotype

and thus

of black peoples

as savages

justify that subjugation and yet

to heighten

European fascination with the 'dark continent'.

As the paintings by Matisse and Derain suggest, this fascination had a

for male Europeans that is: Africa's 'otherness', for
its 'savage' quality, was like orientalism characteristically female and

strongly sexual element

all

erotically charged.

The

left-wing satirical magazine

this plain in the year that Blue

L'Assiette

au Beurre

made

Nude was painted, remarking with withering

innuendo that the recent brutal conquest of Morocco and the proliferation
of brothels that followed it showed that 'the principles of Peaceful
Penetration and the

Open Door' were

colonialists. In this context Matisse's

strictly

observed by French

achievement in his souvenir painting

was thus, on the one hand, to give Africanist fantasy an aesthetic legitimacy,

and on the other to spice up the weary theme of the

dangerous exoticism of 'Africanness'.
Les Demoiselles dAvignon was,

achievements.

Fauvism
18

He had known

at the 1905

among

odalisque

with the

other things, Picasso's riposte to both

of Matisse since the controversial launch of

Salon d'Automne, and encountered him warily

at

Gertrude

following year; mutual recognition of their very

Stein's the

grudging rivalry, and from

on they maintained an obsessive interest in each other's painting.
Already embarked on the Demoiselles project (which, as the unprecedented
number of preliminary studies indicates, was by far his most ambitious
work to date), Picasso took Matisse's picture as a provocation, not only in
its stylistic boldness, but also in its open reference to Africa' and. perhaps
different abilities immediately created a sharp if

that point

just as

importantly

in

because of the outcry

the context of self-promotional avant-gardism,

it

caused on

have been to go beyond Matisse

His response appears to

exhibition.

its

appropriation of African cultural

in the

models, and to deepen his acquaintance with African and other nonwestern artifacts
African masks

theTrocadcro

in

Museum

in Paris.

He

had previously seen

and figure sculptures in Matisse's studio, as well as those of

Derain and Maurice de Ylaminck,

in late

museum

the Blue Nude and his subsequent

1906 but, until his encounter with

visit,

either in the dark continent or in adopting

had shown

little interest

summer

cultural forms. In the

its

of 1907, he did both, and the result was the harnessing of the supposedly
magical and fctishistic connotations of tribal masks and figures in the
production of what he

'my

later called

first

exorcism painting'.

Like the paintings of Matisse and Derain, the Demoiselles images an

'otherness' that

Barbier-Mueller,

artists

contrived

'a safe,

Anna

masculinist

pornotopia' whose Jr/550// of barbarity was, for contemporary audiences,

alleviated

Geneva

an amalgam of sex and race. But as art historian

Chave observes, where the other

10
Babangi mask from the

Musee

is

by

classical reference

and pastoral location, Picasso composed

a dangerous, masculinist dystopia set in a

111

r
rans
abruptly invaded by
1

elements of black Africa'. If that invasion contributes strongly to the

aggressive
that

is

and disturbing character of the

picture,

paramount; ultimately, however, the two

it is

the sexual charge

are inextricable.

For

Sigmund Freud, white women were themselves 'the dark continent';

many men of his generation would have agreed with a metaphor that
expressed both the mystery and the threat that

women

understanding of the world, and that precipitated

in

many European

societies during the years

presented to their

a crisis of masculinity

around 1900.

At the turn of the century women across Europe and north America
were laying claim to

new opportunities

capitalist societies: social mobility,

placed within reach by liberal

democratic citizenship, educational

and professional advancement and

in

France were starting to win some

equality in the middle-class professions, in the proletarian workforce And

even, in

The

some

respects

response from

but not that of voting rights

men

of

all

classes

and

was both

political allegiances

to stress the uniquely domestic and maternal role of

develop complicated theories to argue that

before the law.

this role

women

indeed to

was biologically

determined), and to consolidate those cultural forms And leisure activitu

that were exclusively male,

team sports
action.

The

like

from anti-feminist

were no exception to

Duncan observed

in a

pioneering

a cult

this, for as

article,

And plays to

soccer And rugby, which were underwritten by

artistic avant-gardes

historian Carol

treatises, novels

of

the art

'from this decade

19

dates the notion that the wellsprings of authentic art arc fed by the streams

of male libidinous energy'. Collectively, the

new

'defines a

around

his instinctual needs'.

was typical of the 'bohemian'

The

work of

these avant-gardes

but poetic male, whose

artist type: the earthy

rejection

lifestyle

of

of bourgeois

their

organised

life is

social habits that

members thus had

as its

corollary a return to pre-bourgeois sexual relations, and the exclusion of

women

as equals in the collective

else, as

Duncan

what

unique

is

in the life

special perceptions
It

of the

artist

of nature, the

its

prototypical

member,

after the Demoiselles d'Avignon

project.

his

avant-garde community,

Picasso, that the next stage

should have been pursued

of

his career

as a collective

This extraordinary seven-year adventure, out of which emerged

paintings, was

the

and most of

in close

its

major

bande a Picasso, including

poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Andre

Jacob and

art

embarked upon with the support of

small group of friends

later

studio, his vanguard friends; his

avant-guerre,

many of the defining features of Cubist

artist,

than anything

he walked, the cafes he frequented'.

streets

was thus characteristic of that

and of

More

vanguard endeavour.

noted, 'the art of this [pre-war] decade depicts and glorifies

Salmon and Max

partnership with another (male)

Georges Braque. Each of the two principals

described their relationship in a memorable

phrase, Braque recalling that they were like

two

climbers roped together on a mountain, Picasso

remarking that the former 'was

my wife'.

metaphors indicate the closeness of

Both

working

partnership that even led them, for a short time in

and

191

1912, to efface their individual personalities in the

joint exploration

of new

pictorial

means, making

almost identical paintings to which they put no

signatures. Neither phrase, however, captures the spirit

of

rivalry that

W*T2

accompanied the partnership and

fuelled the daily dialogue

between the two over nearly

four years, from 1909 to 1912.

The

dialogue began slowly. Braque, digesting the lessons of the Demoiselles

more quickly than most, in late 1907 made a drawing of Three Nudes of which
two were fairly closely copied from Picasso's painting and whose overall
composition attempted to follow the

and depth, to produce an

illusion

latter in the interlocking

of low

relief that

is

of surface

He

almost sculptural.

then worked the drawing up into a single-figure painting, Large Nude, in time
for the Salon des Independants in the spring of 1908 (figs.n, 12). Less

successful than the drawing in

figural distortions

of the

accommodating the

Demoiselles,

radical flatness

and

Braque's painting appears tentative,

combination of views of the

its

and back juxtaposed

unconvincingly with the more or less conventional space in which the figure
is set. As in Picasso's work, there is a good deal of Cezanne in this picture;
startling

figure's front

unlike Picasso, though, Braque was less concerned to challenge the latter

than to learn from him. Thus they differed in their adoption of one of
20

Cezanne's kev devices, that of passage

the use of parallel short, hatched

diamond- or lozenge-shaped patches, to

ease and disguise the transition from shallow to deep space in a picture, or
to soften the contour boundary between solid and space, figure and ground
strokes

of

(as, for

example,

paint, often arranged in

11

Georges Braque
Three
Ink

Nudes 1907

on paper

Reproduced

in

Architectural Record,

Boston,

May 1910

British Architectural

Library, RIBA,

London

12
Georges Braque
Large
Oil

Nude 1908

on canvas

140 x 100
(55Mx39*)
Private Collection

in the

National Gallery's

Bathers,

heads of the central and right-hand figures

passage

tends to

breast area

call

attention to

of the top

itself

right nude, a

as a

the areas around the

In Picasso's

adoption

of

it.

device; thus in the Demoiselles, in the

hatched diamond shape reads both

21

anatomically and as arbitrary shading. Braque's use of

more

in

by contrast,

it,

keeping with Cezanne's, areas of passage serving

mediate between the figure and her surrounding space even

the uncompromisingly
It

was over

flat

as

is

Nude to

in the Large

they imitate

shapes of Picasso's picture.

this terrain that the

two

artists

drew

steadily closer in the

course of the next two years. As Picasso sought to avoid the traps both of
the orthodox formulae of current painterly practice and of his

extraordinary

own

absorbing the examples of marginalised or

facility,

disregarded art (not only African, but also the painting of self-taught

independents such

as

with which to express

artistic identity,

Henri Rousseau)

in the search for a

and to

feelings

exorcise

with the formal implications of the

showed

that they

about

he kept coming back to Cezanne.

his sexual

and
13

And

Braque wrestled

as

Henri Rousseau

he found on the one hand

Demoiselles,

way beyond Cezanne

the

formal vocabulary

The Banks of the Bievre

to a radically self-referential kind

of painting that could place the conventions of

near Bicetre
Oil

pictorial illusion at the

1904

c.

on canvas

54.6x45.7

centre, as

it

were,

method provided

and on the other hand that Cezanne s

sheet-anchor against the dizzying exuberance of

of the
a

The

Picasso's iconoclasm.
clear

from

Houses

picture,

differences,

and the

similarities,

comparison of two paintings made

at L'Estaque

and

in

15).

The Metropolitan

between them are

August

Picasso's Cottage and Trees (figs. 14,

(21)4x18)

1908: Braque's

its

motif, and the hatched

passage.

brushwork with

its

Field,

of

Houses at L'Estaque

occasional patches of

of contradiction, and underscores

light

and shade; rooflines

fail

to

1939

14

1908
Oil

arbitrary distribution

New

Georges Braque

Yet unlike Cezanne, Braque pushes the juxtaposition of different

perspectives to the point

of Art,

Painted in

Cezanne country, the Braque resonates with reference to the master of Aix:
in its colour scheme in particular, but also in the geometric simplifications
of

Museum

York. Gift of Marshall

it

with a quite

meet

walls, spaces

on canvas

73x59.5
3
(28 /x23^)
Kunstmuseum, Bern.

and solids

are elided, buildings are stacked

up

against

one another

playing cards, and in the absence of a horizon the landscape

into the space
a village in the

motif

is

of

low

relief.

He de France,

The
is

is

like

Hermann and

Margrit

Rupf-Stiftung

compressed

Picasso, painted in La-Rue-des-Bois,

comparable

many of these

in

respects:

identical, its palette equally reductive; buildings, walls

15

its

Pablo Picasso

and

trees
Cottage and Trees

are

remarkably alike in

this case the effect

is

style,

disposition and (arbitrary) lighting. Yet in

quite unlike that of low

emphasised the juxtaposition of viewpoints

and pushing the house up

as if

opening

relief: instead,

pulling

a pair

of jaws

(La Rue-des-Bois)

Picasso has so

the garden wall

that the

Oil

down

and

style

its

volumetric simplifications

independently emphasises each element

shade

even

at the

(fig.13),

Pushkin State

effect

If the increasingly close

is

and

to

of the painting.

engagement of these two

and that of Cezanne was changing

Braque's Large Nude was his

of Fine Arts,

Picasso

line, plane, light

expense of compositional unity. The effect

maximise the dynamic

other's painting

volume,

first

artists

their

with each

working practices

ambitious figure painting, while Picasso

painted more landscapes in these years than ever before

they

still

remained

quite distinct. Braque was continuing the interest in painting modest-sized

landscapes and

still lifes

Picasso followed
22

up

that

had characterised

his

Fauve

92x73
(36X x 28%)

space

between these features yawns wide. Borrowing Rousseau's sharp, surface-

hugging linear

1908

on canvas

years, while

the Demoiselles with further ambitious, large-scale figure

Museum

Moscow

23

projects.

Although Picasso withheld

befitted a rising star

his work from salon exhibition,

of the avant-garde he made his major pictures

as

according to a 'salon rhythm, progressing each project through a series of

whose accumulated conclusions were then carried into the final

A series of works made in the winter of 19078 on the theme of
nudes in a forest eventually resulted, after several months' toiling and a
complete repainting, in the huge Three Women (fig.16), which Picasso finished
studies

painting.

16
Pablo Picasso
Three
Oil

Women 1908

on canvas

200x185
3
(78 / x 73)

Hermitage,
St Petersburg

in late 1908.

efforts to

An

evident successor to the Demoiselles,

absorb and

resist the lessons

Though monumental and

and more

radical than

its

it

also registers his

both of Cezanne and African masks.

magisterial, in formal terms

predecessor,

it

was the

both more resolved

last figure

group that

Picasso was to complete for several years, for in the middle of his next

major

project, his

working procedure abruptly changed.

In the winter of 19089 Picasso began preparatory drawings and sketches

for a big picture
24

of

^vve figures

seated at a drop-leaf table

m a cafe, being

served by a sixth standing figure bearing

bowl of

fruit.

Before

it

could

progress to completion, however, the project, provisionally entitled Carnival

underwent an extraordinary transformation. Bv the spring of

had ended up as Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, in which only the table

at the Bistro,

1909

it

remained, while the items depicted on

napkin, upturned coffee bowl

eerily

it

loaves of bread, dish of fruit,

echoed the disposition of the limbs

As art historian William Rubin

of direction, which he summarises as
a shift from a narrative* to an 'iconic' approach (roughlv. from questions of
identities and relationship to questions of representation), was related to
Picasso's growing preoccupation with the pictorial issues that Braque was
drawing out of his study of Cezanne, and the associated realisation that the
elaboration of complex figure compositions was superfluous to these issues.
But it was also related to a fundamental change in his material and
of

its

previous occupants

(figs. 17, 18).

argues, this decisive mid-stride change

professional circumstances.
It

was

moment

at this

that the art dealer Kahnweiler began to narrow the

17

Pablo Picasso

Study

for 'Carnival

at the Bistro'

and

Ink

1909

pencil on paper

24.1x27.4
(9K

x 10 /)

Musee

Picasso, Paris

18
Pablo Picasso

Bread and

Fruit

Dish on

a Table 1909
Oil

on canvas

164x132.5
(648x52X)
Offentliche

Kunstsammlung

Basel,

Kunstmuseum

range of his acquisitions, undertaking to buy from Picasso and Braque.

agreed

rates,

every picture they painted.

faithful clientele

had become

of

collectors,

sufficient to

though

support such

the emergent speculative market for

He

still

did so for two reasons: first, his

numbering fewer than a dozen,

a policy.

new

art,

Second,

in the

context of

the prospects for Picasso's

stock in particular were very promising, even though diminished

of some by

his peculiar

since the hesitation

risk-takers,

of

new

paintings

of other players

whom

indeed

in this

because

the eyes

they were diminished.

market created opportunities for

Kahnweiler was certainly one.

both Braque and Picasso were more than

at

financial,

he consequences for

confirming their own

sense of the importance of the pictorial dialogue on which they were

embarked indeed

the latter s case they were even greater, for

Kahnweilers support removed self-promotional avant-gardism from the

of motivations
projects.

From

set

that lay behind the series of large-scale, figure-group

the spring of [909 Picasso no longer painted for

salon public, but for the small audience of those

who had

putative

already invested
25

enthusiasm,

money

or both in his art

Kahnweiler s collector

Braque,

the bande a Picasso and

His working procedure changed accordingly:

would progress, not from project to project, but

clients.

for the next four years he

from painting to painting in an extended dialogue with Braque in which

each work was a fresh point of departure for a sustained exploration and
interrogation of the conventions of pictorial illusionism.

The

results

of

these interrogations were paintings accessible only to this small audience of

initiates, for

they were dense, difficult to read, elliptical in their inter-

reference (figs. 19, 20).

This so-called 'hermetic' or 'analytic' phase of the Cubism of Picasso and

Braque thus emerged both out of their collective painterly experiments and
the change in their professional circumstances, which replaced a putatively

19

Georges Braque
Bottle
Oil

and Fishes 1910

on canvas

61.6x74.9
(24^x29!*)
Tate Gallery

20
Pablo Picasso
The Dressing Table

1910
Oil

on canvas

61 x 46 (24 x 18K)

Whereabouts unknown

on the profoundest
more general avant-gardism whose emergence
I outlined earlier. The ways in which these complex and mysterious
paintings called the very basis of pictorial representation into question,
revealing its linguistic and conventional character, owed much not only to
Cezanne but to the symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme (184298), whose
often arcane and difficult writings sought to suggest what he called the
incantatory power of words, the 'magic of letters'. 'To evoke purposely,
in a shadow, the silent object, with words that are never direct but allusive,
subdued to an equal silence, requires an endeavour close to creation', he
once wrote in what could serve as an explanation of Picasso's 1910 work,
public audience with a private one; but
level,

it

also reflected,

the nature of that

The Dressing Table (fig.20). Picasso in particular shared Mallarme's belief in

26

27

a reality

beyond appearances, to whose truths the artist and the poet had
Nothing could have been further from the Third

privileged access.

Republic's confidence in an acquisitive and scientific materialism

was what you could

belief that reality

aestheticism,

and

of avant-garde

That

lay

your hands on

decade before 1914

in the

it

became

than

the

such an

a defining

component

identity.

more sharply defined during the pre-war

decade, as the social activism in which many artists had been caught up
during the years of the Bloc des Gauches was succeeded by aesthetic
militancy, a development that was reflected on one level in the proliferation
of self-promotional tactics by young and/or anti-academic artists. Picasso's
series

as I

of

identity became, indeed,

large-scale figure projects was,

among

other things, one such

tactic,

have suggested. Another was the attempt by a group of artists to obtain

a distinctive profile within the salon itself; in the

Salon d'Automne of 1905

Matisse, Derain and a few other painters of brightly coloured, loosely

painted pictures had been singularly successful in

themselves the central foyer or

notorietv as the 'wild beasts'
notorious, five years

later,

cage in

this,

obtaining for

the exhibition-rooms and subsequent

lesfauves

of contemporary art. Even more

was the public launch of salon Cubism. Drawn

together during the course of 1910 by the discovery of a shared set of

aesthetic interests,

by the evident similarity of the pictorial concerns

displayed in their entries to the Salon

d'Automne of

that year,

and through

the efforts of sympathetic critics Guillaume Apollinaire and Roger Allard,

five

Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger,

Leger and Robert Delaunay who, unlike Picasso and Braque,

painters

Fernand

had no regular access to

a private gallery,

decided to exhibit their work

together at the Salon des Independants in April i9ii.This required

the

abandonment of

the Independants' policy of exhibiting

entries in alphabetical order,

and then the allocation of

its

room

first

(unjuried)
largely to

themselves. After a carefully organised campaign of lobbying, they secured

both.

The

resulting exhibition-within-an-exhibition in

room

41

was

a gratifying succes de scandale.

Such self-promotional

tactics

were more than a matter of jockeying for

publicity, however, for they played a

key part in the construction of the very

of the avant-garde

they helped settle the question of

identity

artist. First,

gender: such attention-seeking, career-advancing behaviour was

women

appropriate for

artists in the regressively sexist

gardes than was the display of sexual appetite.

no more

milieux of the avant-

It is significant that,

Sonia Delaunay was the

artistic as well as marital

room

41 (indeed, in these years

although

partner of Robert, she

when he was first making

his name, she abandoned painting for decorative art a move that we shall
explore in a later chapter). And while there were female participants in room
found no place

41

Mane

in

Laurencin and Maroussia Rabannikoff their inclusion was

at

the insistence of their partners, respectively Apollinaire and Le Fauconnier,

rather than the result

and those of the

Second, such
28

of any perceived resemblance between

their paintings

others.
tactics

helped to determine crucial qualities of the art that

they were used to promote: the size of the pictures these salon Cubists
painted,

how

each of the

they painted them, even what they chose to paint. For

five

room

41,

and continued to show

painted his largest picture to date

progressively larger works in every subsequent salon for the next two wars

While

artists

nn

large scale gave to a picture's visibility

scale

was also

crowded exhibition

declaration of serious intent

with the Demoiselles

the more

when

so

it

hallowed by tradition and,

wake

in the

avant-gardist purpose (not to speak

of

as

was also

it

wall,

such

Picasso's case

was the vehicle for addressing

self-evidentlv ambitious subject.! he female

of

had been aware for several centuries of the advantages that

nude was

i)nc such,

Cezanne's achievements,

of avant-gardist

both

virility). It

marker

was thus

no coincidence that again like Picasso three of the salon Cubists made
their group debut with paintings on this subject. Of these the most
celebrated at the time was undoubtedly Le Fauconnier's Abundance fi^.21).
Hxtraordinarily, since to modern eyes it appears a ponderous and awkward
treatment of a thoroughly conventional theme, this was perhaps the best-

known Cubist painting in the prc-1914 period, exhibited in cities from

Amsterdam to Moscow, and its author was regarded for a brief moment
one of the most radical painters

as

in

Europe. That

should have been

this

so was due in part to the painting's articulation of a set of concerns that

will

be more fully discussed in the following two chapters: the relevance for

contemporary cultural practice of the

values,

and the question of how,

burgeoning forces and

if at all, this

principal

two
in

figures,

force,

mother and

whose

writings

it

by presenting the

child, in juxtaposition

with the fruits

vitalist ideas

on the importance of the

were then widely influential in Parisian literary and

Moreover,

it

associated

could be reconciled with the

an implicit representation of the

Henri Bergson

its

of modernisation. Thematically anchored

effects

to that tradition, Abundance also sought to update

of nature,

and

classical tradition

sought to represent

this vitalism in

formal

of philosopher
elan vital,

or

life

artistic circles.

as well as

iconographic terms, by endowing not only these figures but the picture
surface as a whole with a density

of

fruitfulness, drawing, like

brushwork and device of passage

The

in particular

to the

theme

on Cezanne's

for the purpose.

its

formal motifs adopted

by Leger and Gleizes. Leger's Nudes

an uncompromisinglv bold,
the

in 1908,

evolution of Le Fauconnier's painting was closely followed by the

other salon Cubists, and

of volumes appropriate

Braquc and Picasso

if

m
///

room

their

the forest

41 entries

\\^-~-

was

not altogether coherent, attempt to maximise

dynamic potential of he Fauconnier's technique. Gleizes's Woman with

more static and monumental effects with the same

Phlox (fig.23) sought

volumetric and heavily painted means.

in

these stylistic features

fragmentation

of

forms into shapes

canvas, and unified by

consistently

bright or sharply varied hues

It

was their

common

interest

quality of physical density, conveyed by the

that

that are evenly distributed across each

sombre colour scheme

both drew these

artists

that

avoided

together and

Cubism its distinctiveness, in the eyes of the critic- who saw

and wrote about room 41. It was also the overlap between such concerns

gave salon

29

30

,.

and those of Picasso and Braque two or three years earlier that laid the
foundations for the broadening of Cubism into a movement that

encompassed both

gallery

and salon orientations, and

historians to see the latter as derivative of the former.

however, these overlapping concerns were arrived

different, if

convergent

mapping was
and

the

and

promotional

pictures

and

of the art

art,

whose

but also of critics

artists

or getting sympathetic critics to do

collective exhibition.
its

Such

activity

of

big,

was

so,

ambitious

had been an integral part

beginnings, but the surfeit of aspirant writers and

around 1900, together with the revolution

in

merchandising

techniques, provided propitious circumstances for

it

pre-war decade. Marinetti's launch of Futurism

1909 showed the way,

his manifesto in Le Figaro ensuring that the

before any concrete examples of this

Jeffrev

(if

41

by an

term had wide currency long

the market, and as

term coined two vears

art public alreadv

in

advance

primed to seek out

only to ridicule) fresh novelties. By the spring of 1909, prompted

perhaps by the cubic shapes

in Braque's Houses at L'Estaauc

Henri Le Fauconnier

Kahnweiler the previous November

a

in

to flourish in the

new 'ism' were on

Weiss has shown, 'Cubism' was

of the group debut of room

on canvas

by routes that were

strategy, alongside the painting

market since

artists in Paris

Oil

s* e,

theorists.

a third

Abundance 1910-11

shall

across an aesthetic terrain, moreover,

work not only of adventurous

For writing about their

21

at

many

that has led

As we

synonym

for stylistic excess.

the

exhibited

by

term had acquired currencv

Le Fauconnier

in particular

as

was quick to see

191x123

the promotional potential of such a situation, in 1910 writing a personal

(75Kx48K)

manifesto, couched in impressively obscure pseudo-scientific jargon,

Haags

among

Gemeentemuseum,

which circulated

The Hague

pan-European avant-garde network that had mushroomed over the

first

previous decade, earning

probably for

his friends

him

and subsequentlv across the

instantly the status

this reason, rather

of

theoretician.

that Abundance was taken as paradigmatic

of Cubism

gardism was not only capable of making

a reputation,

also be the cause

of an

artist's

It

was

than because of his prowess as a painter,

in 191

1.

Such avant-

however;

it

could

downfall.

31

Languages of Classicism

A national literature, a renaissance of classicism; from 1908 to 1911 these

notions were passionately debated everywhere', wrote the literary historian

Michel Decaudin, adding 'but they were often mixed with

that modified at once their

meaning and

their resonance'.

political options

Those options

were explicitly understood at the time: as early as 1905 the

critic

Camille

Mauclair, writing on 'The Nationalist Reaction in Art', tellingly criticised

the current vogue for classicism as encoding cultural snobbery
to democracy.

A love of M. Ingres

...

and aversion

of pastiches of Greece or the 17th

century, goes together unfailingly with reactionary opinions', he declared.

is all

a matter of "good behaviour".' For some those who

joined Charles

Maurras's monarchist, antisemitic and ultra-nationalist Action francaise

was more than

that: a return to the principles

century of Louis

XIV was

the Camelots du Roi

classical culture

it

of the

imperative if France was to be rescued from the

disastrous consequences of the Revolution.

thugs

of the

'It

who

And,

intimidated

its

for

its

squads of young

opponents

in the university

quarter of Paris from their foundation in 1908 until the war, 'good
behaviour' had nothing to do with

Maurice

Barres, however,

inclusive,

embracing the

it.

For other

traditionalists such as

both nationalism and classicism were more

political settlement

of the republic and

contemporary cultural innovations, since as he argued, 'if one is a

traditionalist, and submits to the law of continuity, one must take things
one finds them'. Indeed, he defined nationalism
classicism:
32

'it is

in every field the incarnation

as itself a

of French

form of

continuity.'

as

In the closely overlapping circles of the literary and artistic avant-gardes

of

preoccupations were widely shared.

Paris, these

questionnaire offered readers of the Mercure

When

it France a

in 1905 a

choice between

as the model for contemporary

most chose Cezanne, whose achievements they understood in
terms that were summarised by the former disciple of Gauguin, painter Paul
Serusier: 'If a tradition is to be born m our time, it is from Cezanne that it

Gauguin, Henri Fantin-Latour and Cezanne

painting,

will

come', he replied. 'Not

the

classicism, in all

two

further, in

van

Gogh

as

His

new

but

art,

resurrection of purity, solidity,

friend, leading art theorist

Maurice

)enis,

went

influential articles interpreting the paintings of

iauguin and

preparing the way for the exemplary classicism of

.e/anne. and

declaring that
for order.

arts.'

'in literature, in politics,

The

the younger generation has

return to tradition and to discipline

He championed

is

passion

unanimous.'

the cause of Action francaise as an answer to 'the present

needs of our sick and divided society.'Young art

critic

(and, from

191

1,

editor of the influential Nouvelle Revue Francaise) Jacques Riviere declared the

same

allegiance:

'I

prefer Action francaise,

none of whose

stupidities escapes

me', he wrote in 1908 to a friend, 'to the radical-socialist league, for which
I

feel a truly

physical repugnance'.

For young

artists

negotiating their way through the legacy of post-

Impressionism and Symbolism the

series

of major retrospective

classical

paradigm, underscored by

exhibitions of Jean-Auguste-Dominiquc

Cezanne in 1907, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot in

what each of them took from it differed
Glcizes and Le Fauconnier met in 1909 in the literarv milieu of

Ingres in 1905 and 1910,

1909 was
greatly.

inescapable; though

Montparnasse. Drawn together by

more

solid

and

common

search for an art that was

definitive than Impressionism, they

found

this in paintings

work of Jacques-Louis David and Ingres,

in joint exploration of the constructional
undcrlav this art, trying to fathom these by elaborating

of the Renaissance and the

and spent the next two years

principles that

endless compositional schemas, as Gleizes later recalled, adding that these

were visible

in their paintings of the time: 'lines

weights, symmetries and equilibria

and volumes, densities And

such were our interests and

aspirations.'

Le Fauconnicr's Abundance

(fig.21)

is a

structured as to place the main figure's

picture,

and other

salient anatomical

geometric axes.While

it is

product of these concerns.

abdomen

at

geometries' in most paintings

if

is

so

the exact centre of the

and vegetable features on

usually possible to find

It

all

its

major

kinds of such

one looks hard enough,

it

'secret

seems unlikely

that these placements were coincidental. .Artists and writers alike had. since

before the turn of the century, been exploring ways of expressing ideas and

emotions

in

painting or writing through abstract means: non-naturalistic

colour, or irregular verse rhythms

or geometrical systems of composition.

In the circles of writers and painters associated with the Symbolist

movement and

much

its

rejection of

dominant

materialist thinking, there

interest in the neo-Platonic tradition,

Greece

via the Renaissance,

which stemmed from

was

classical

And According to which, mystical truths were

33

revealed through symbolic geometries.

'golden section
in

The most famous of these,

was the subject of particular

ratio',

which Gleizes and Le Fauconnier met, and

among

it is

the

interest in the milieu

likely that

was

it

those constructional principles that they sought in classical and

neoclassical paintings.

The

arcane character of neo-Platonic thought corresponded well,

moreover, with avant-gardist elitism; Le Fauconnier's 1910 manifesto was

its numerological jargon, and this in turn was imitated by other
on emergent salon Cubism. Prominent among them was the-young

laced with
writers

poet Roger Allard,

who made

his

debut

as

an art

the 1910 Salon d'Automne. Singling out for praise the

Le Fauconnier and Metzinger, he declared

with a review of

critic

work of

Gleizes,

a beautiful picture to

other than a true equilibrium, an equivalence of weights and a

be 'nothing

harmony of

numbers'. But Allard added to this avant-garde classicism an interpretation

that was to prove influential.
'offer to the intelligence

The

paintings of these three, he declared,

of the spectator,

22

in all their pictorial plenitude,

this,

the essential elements of a synthesis situated in time'

he argued, was

because the equilibrium between their component forms took the spectator
a certain

amount of time

to discern. In an article the following year he

of Nicolas Poussin.

between the dynamism of

that gave his paintings a

was the balance that

It

his figures

living

and the

Allard argued,

Allard's
in

to understand

'is

human thought

has

emphases on time, movement,

on canvas

Kroller-Muller

of his compositions
must be intuited rather

to contain
vitality

23

vital forces that are in

it

it',

act of

Albert Gleizes

Woman

Oil

and intuition were,

on canvas

81.6x100.3
(32Mx39^)
The

Museum

Arts,

way in which those ideas caught, in several respects, the complex mood
of the moment. His emphasis on time (la duree) as the basis of reality on
the recognition that the world never stands still matched contemporary
the

awareness of the rapid pace of modernisation; his insistence on the

as against scientific analysis,

chimed with

growing anxieties over the urban and technological consequences of that

modernisation, for which scientific advances had been fundamental; and
his celebration

of the

elan vital,

nostalgia for a mythic,

of the seasons.
a variety

It

life force,

For the

ensured that Bergson's

circles in

significant in

all

reinforced a corresponding

rural France governed

by the rhythm

was a philosophy that could be, and was, used to support

of (sometimes contradictory)

this adaptability

who

or

pre-modern and

political

name

and

cultural platforms,

and

was, for a while, ubiquitous.

which the emergent salon Cubists moved Bergson was

some writers and

dynamism of modern urban society,

these respects, since they contained

were enthusiastic about the

and others who were

less

artists

sanguine. For painters on both sides, Allard's

Bergsonist interpretation of classicism reconciled their interest in moving

beyond Impressionism to
34

more monumental and

less

with Phlox

1910

whole'.

philosopher's extraordinary celebrity in the pre-war decade was due to

importance of intuition,

Museum,

Otterlo

1910 11, unmistakable references to the ideas of Henri Bergson.

The

the Forest

120x170(47/4x67)

this artist achieved

and possess nature, since by an

known how

in

1909-11

stasis

beauty, one that

than analysed. 'Thus to love the living work for the

genius a

Nudes

Oil

elaborated his ideas with specific reference to the seventeeth-century

classicism

Fernand Leger

anecdotal art with

of Fine

Houston. Gift of

the Esther Florence

Whinery Goodrich
Foundation

their

concern to represent (in both positive and negative ways) the dynamic

character of

modern

life.

These

qualities are discernible, in different

degrees, in the paintings that Gleizes,

room

41

of the

Forest (fig.22) is

191 1

Le Fauconnier and Leger showed

Independants. Like Abundance, the

both monumental and dynamic,

Nudes

latter's

of

trio

its

in

in the

classical

nudes

seemingly carved out of their pastoral setting, faceted into sharplv

juxtaposed planes and volumes by a patterning presumably derived from
the dappling of

woodland

light

and shade. Where Abundance seems timid

and awkward to modern eyes in
fragmentation of the picture

this

surface, however, Leger's painting

seems

at

once bold and incoherent.

three female figures are so hard

Its

to discern that

some observers

have found four, and others have

seen

them

as male,

even as

woodcutters; moreover, the

dynamism of

extraordinary

volumes

its

achieved at the

is

expense of anatomical credibility,

especially in the dancing figure at

the right,

whose limbs appear

to

be double-jointed and whose big

toe

is

foot.

on the wrong side of her

Gleizess Woman with Phlox

(fig.23) stands, stylistically,

midway

between the Nudes and Abundance:

the solid, even

monumental

figure

of the seated

woman

legible, vet in

an interior whose

is

clearly

spatial organisation

seems to have

sacrificed clarity for

dynamic

effect.

Like Leger

straining both to

it is

as

if.

maximise the

play of volumes and to lay bare the

illusionistic devices

from which

they are constructed. Gleizes loses

control of parts of the painting.

Whether
sought to follow the example of Le Fauconniers
stylistic,

both

as

terms

is

uncertain.

symbolising

We

these

two pictures

thematic, as well as

can interpret the subject of Woman with Phlox

harmony between humanity

dense play of volumes serves to underscore, and

as

<\nd nature,

which the

an anxious celebration of

women. This would certainly be m keeping with the

Abundance
as well as with some of the preoccupations of the
message of
the domestic role of

salon Cubists'

reworking of

circle.

But Leger's nudes seem to be simply

a traditional pastoral

a radical

theme. In this they bear comparison 10

35

engagement of Picasso and Braque with the

the

paintings from around 1908

drew them

and equally ambitious, had taken both the

Picasso, prodigiously talented

which

Dutch

Girls

and archaic

classical

initially

needed from

of the summer of 1905 ushering

art traditions

of simplicity and monumentality. The

led back to

them

was
in

partly by Braque's exploration

contemporary obsession with

consequence of the

many

respects the

in a

it,

some

phase

years

in

were plundered for their qualities

Demoiselles project

encounter with African art took him away from these

partly by the

seen,

and aspirations.

measure of that inheritance, and what he

earlier, his Three

we have

which each brought quite

steadily closer together, but to

different interests

classical inheritance, in their

in a pictorial dialogue which, as

and

its

qualities,

associated

but he was

of Cezannes painting,

classicism.

The former of these

latter, for

The Viaduct at

Oil

on canvas

65.4x80.7
(25% x 31%)

was appropriate. In his

efforts to

Georges Braque

L'Estaque 1907

contemporary

designation of Cezanne as a
classicist

24

The Minneapolis

'make of Impressionism

Institute of Arts

something solid and durable

like

the art of the museums', as he once

famously

25

Cezanne had turned

engagement with the

said,

away from

its

Nicolas Poussin
The Ashes of Phocion

contemporary world of urban

leisure,

1648

transport and industry to

Oil

the pastoral themes of classical

tradition,

and even

on canvas

116.5x178.5

(46x70^)

his depiction

of

Board of Trustees of the

National

landscapes with viaducts or factory

Museums and

Galleries on Merseyside

chimneys gave these the

air

of

(Walker Art Gallery,

monuments. In this, Braque

followed him closely, his brief

Liverpool)

participation in the Fauve

26

movement

in

19067 almost

recapitulation of

Georges Braque

a
Castle at La Roche-

Cezannes

Guyon 1909

apprenticeship in Impressionism,

Oil

Fauvist celebration of the dynamic

modern

city or

port for the

(31^x23^)

classical

motifs of the Mediterranean coast. Explicitly revisiting Cezannes motifs

around L'Estaque, he monumentalised and

classicised this

Marseilles both by repeatedly featuring the viaduct with

Roman

architecture,

and by scaffolding

its

tawdry suburb of

its

connotations of

forms within stable

rectilinear

geometries and rationally ordered perspectives reminiscent of Poussin's

severe

and abstractly conceived landscapes

(figs. 24, 25).

Art historian Theodore Reff suggests that

Braque's part, and the shift that

on perception

to one centred

it

this

implied from a

on conception, was

change of theme on

mode of painting
related to that loss

centred

of

confidence in modernity and withdrawal to the collective security of race,

nation and tradition, that the classical revival represented for many. This

may
36

well be so;

what

is

clear

on canvas

80x59.5

before he too abandoned the

from the paintings however,

is

that, like

Moderna Museet, SKM,

Stockholm

37

38

I
Cezanne, his pictorial concerns were not contained within the
paradigm. If Houses
space,

its

LEstaque

geometry and

(fig.14.. reprises, in its

its

framing

formula, in other respects

classical

The

solid

at

it

trees,

some elements

goes so far beyond this

inconsistencies and elisions, noted earlier, together

conventionality of painting

and the materiality of

its

that

is,

means. In

to the rules of

classical

anchor and order the radical disruption

was pioneering, but also
could

As

ol the

as to subvert

it.

attention to the

conceptual game
of that

summer

formula could be used to

of pictorial illusionism th.it Picasso

the rectilmeantv of classical composition

disrupt that illusionism, by functioning as a sign for the picture

itself

surface.

how

its

call

and other paintings

this

Braque learnt from Cezanne how the

classical

shallow relief-like

yet, in

Houses

the emphatic cube of

LEstaque, this possibility

at

the central

was onlv hinted

house more than holds

its

own

at

against

the flattening effects of the

picture's scaffolding.

however,

27
Georges Braque
Violin

and

Pitcher

1909-10
Oil

A year later

of paintings of

in a series

the emblematically French chateau

of La Roche-Guyon, fifty miles

north-west of Paris (fig.26), Braque

on canvas

armature

117x73.5

developed the

(46x29)

into a diagonal, linear grid, which

Offenttliche

Kunstammlung

he complemented with a pattern of

Basel,

Kunstmuseum.
Donation Drh.c. Raoul
La

classical

diamond-shaped patches of passage

brushwork. Together with

a further

Roche 1952

reduction of his already limited

Cezannian palette to
28

little

more

Georges Braque

than tonal variations of two

Mandora 1909-10

colours, this enabled

Oil

on canvas

71.1x55.9

to

relationships between solids and

(28x22)
Tate Gallery

him both

deepen the ambiguities of the

spaces

sometimes

shading from

its

even freeing

ostensible

function, to signify itself as a

device (as in the upper centre of

the Castle^

and

to enhance the illusion oi an overall low-relief space.

Over the following year Braque

capitalising on the ways in which

it

conjured from
its

it

The

signified a paintings surface even as

an image of depth. and the manner

subject to reconfigure

regularity.

refined his conceit of the diagonal grid,

it

in

terms of

its

own

which

properties of flatness And

interaction between these effects appears to be crucial:

paintings, such as the Mandora oi the winter of [90910

classical
is

fig.28

when

in

the

order and systematic character of the grid predominate, the result

and

a loss of tension

Pitcher

it

pulverised

it

completed

through the

hint of stylisation. In contrast,

early [910

fig.27

effort of reading the

it

is

less explicit, a

image across

in

the

tolin

structure

and

won

range of signifiers whose

degrees of self-referentiality are wittily counterpointed by the

trompc~l'oeil

nail at the top.

39

Picasso's response to the classicism that Braque thus referenced

and

explored for complex reasons was, characteristically, to maximise such

interactions and tensions. While his painterly dialogue with the latter
and thus with Cezanne not to speak of the ubiquity of classicist art

and debate

harmony of

order and

was not

disrupting

of

its

stylistic features

elisions

it,

he had

and

less

in the

framework to the point of

earlier, his

diamond

back to

classical art,

regard than Braque for the

summer

of 1909 his interest

exploring the ambiguities of shallow space so

in

of a year

drew him

Houses on

with the

faceting, a plurality

As

as in

in their paintings

Horta da Ebro (fig.29) shares a

the Hill,

Castle at

collapse.

much

gamut

La Roche-Guyoti: a limited palette,

of viewpoints. In place of Braque's subtle

of solid and space, however, these viewpoints

are juxtaposed

with

29
Pablo Picasso

Houses on the

Hill,

Horta da Ebro 1909

on canvas

Oil

64x81
(25 /x32)
3

The
Art,

Museum of Modern
New York

30
Jean Baptiste-Camille
Corot

Gypsy

Girl with

Mandolin (Christine
Nilsson) 1874
Oil

on canvas

80x57
(31)4x22!*)

Museu de

Arte de

Sao

Paulo Assis

Chateaubriand

31
Pablo Picasso

Seated Nude 1909-10

Oil

on canvas

92.1x73
(36X x 28 3/)
Tate Gallery

an abruptness and lack of logic

(fig.22),

of

with Leger's Nudes

in the Forest

both bold and bewildering. Unlike Legers painting, however,

is

the effect

that, as

is

not incoherence but recognition of the potential independence

pictorial devices such as linear perspective

descriptive function,

and chiaroscuro from

their

and thus of the possibility that they could themselves

be the subject of paintings. For Picasso this represented a deepening

interest in the linguistic character

ways that

its

Mallarme,

of

pictorial expression

both

in the

conventions and components functioned, and, following

in its incantatory

capacities. If Braque's

power and magical transformative

reworking of Cezanne was the stimulus,

it

was

the encounter with another classicism that set the tone for the paintings
that followed.
40

The

exhibition in 1909, at the Salon d'Automne, of twenty-five figure

paintings by Corot

came

as a revelation to

both

artists.

Less well

known

than his landscapes, their gravity and austerity, and their play of volumes
and spaces against plain studio backgrounds, matched not only the cultural

mood of the moment,

but also Picasso's current pictorial concerns, and

of figure paintings over that winter he absorbed their lessons

a series

(figs. 30, 31).

Reworking Corot's accommodations

painterly flatness through his

own

of sculptural

volume and

radical syntax of angular facets, abrupt

changes of viewpoint and the spatial ambiguities that

e/annian

passage

brushwork allowed, the Seated Nude develops the plasticity of the Horta
painting into a monumcntality that is as mysterious as it is austere, and
once contradicts

this,

opening out and flattening the contours

into the surrounding space.

to the deftness
passage,

in

and

That

the result

is

not incoherence

and beauty of Picasso's deployment

at

of the figure

is

due partly

of chiaroscuro

And

partly to the effect of the diagonal grid which, although only

implicit, marshals the faceted

forms of

figure

And ground into

unified

pictorial field.

These devices were key

year that followed, but

it

features of the paintings of both artists

(fig.32)

Cadaques

and other

the grid

itself,

the

was Picasso who. perhaps [earning from Braques

elaboration of the grid in paintings such as Manaoru,

use of them. At

pictures, he

Spain

took

in the
tin-

summer

made

the

more

radical

1910, in the Guitarist

extraordinary step of detaching both

and chiaroscuro modelling, from

leaving the former to function only

of

as a set of

their descriptive purposes.

co-ordinates by means of
41

which the picture s subject can be located, and the

pictorial field,

latter to articulate the

sometimes suggesting the volumes of the subject and

sometimes denying them. As

art historian

development can best be understood

Yve-Alain Bois has suggested, this

in semiotic terms, as a shift

from one

32
Pablo Picasso
Guitarist
Oil

1910

on canvas

100 x 73
(39 H

x 28%)

Collections

Mnam/Cci/Centre
Georges Pompidou,
Paris

33
Jean Metzinger

Two Nudes 1910-11

Oil

on canvas

Dimensions and

whereabouts unknown

kind of visual sign to another

from 'iconic' signs, which depend on

resemblance to their pictorial subjects, to 'symbolic' signs, which depend

on their place within the system of signs of which the picture

composed and the differences between them. Thus in the Guitarist,
instead

figure
42

is

legible

not so

much through

the resemblance of any of

its

is

the

features

to a recognisable image

of

from the relationship between

lattice; from these we
the top), arms (triangular shapes at each side

a guitarist, as

diagonal and circular forms set against a rectangular

read a head (the cylinder at

and

a guitar (the repeated arcs in the centre

degree of resemblance

round sound holes

distinction
a

but

it is

.There

is still

are pointed, for example,

a crucial,

residual

and guitars have

the placing of these elements and then-

from rectangular shapes

minimum,
In

elbows

system of signs reduced almost to

in a

that are decisive.

works such

took painting to the verge

as this, Picasso

Neither he nor Braque were interested

in

oi abstraction.

going further; theirs was an art

of realism not only because the question of representation of an external

reality was at the centre of their exploration of the linguistic character of
painting, but because

especially

simply too enticing to

let

for Picasso

that

external reality was

go of Braque s response was to

of iconic

signs: his

autumn of

Chardinesque

retreat to the use

and

Bottle

fishes of the

1910 (fig.19) reintroduces recognisable

motifs (fish heads and a bottle) within a classical

armature of verticals and horizontals, and even

perspective recession. Picasso too returned to iconic
signs

more wholeheartedly but as

now dominant grid that he detached even

anything,

if

a foil to a

more completely from any

function.
its

Thus

precise descriptive

in The Dressing Table (fig. 10^) the

key

in

hole (bottom centre), the mirror (top centre) and.

and

less legibly, a bottle

a glass provide visual clues

enabling the image to be read, while the grid extends

across almost the entire picture surface,

its

chiaroscuro

of neo-Impressionist brushstrokes conjuring up

interplays

and contradictions between volumes and

and opacity. Such loosening oi

spaces, transparency

the ties between signifier and specific signified

between the painted mark and the object

allows
level:

the imagery to be read on

thus the grid pattern also serves,

suggested, to hint at the absent figure of the

dressing table this

and her

sex.

may

be, the

mirror and keyhole

This multiple function

Cubist lexicon was to prove, as we

of the

denotes

more than one

wittily, to

denote the drawers and shelves of the painting's subject; even,

Rosenblum has

it

as

Robert

woman whose

slyly signifying her face

marks And devices in Picasso's

one oi its most fruitful And

shall see.

influential features.

Given Picasso's reputation among the avant-garde milieux,

inevitable that the explorations that led

Cubism

him And Braque

it

was

into the hermetic

of 191012 should attract attention, not only from their patrons And

friends but

from other

artists, critics

and hangers-on

convergence between their assessment and reworking

Cezanne, and that of the nascent salon

encouraged by sympathetic

critics.

ubist group,

Apollinaire

as well.

he apparent

oi classicism

And

was remarked on and

in particular.

From

early ign
43

both camps were aware of each other indeed there was one artist who
managed to have a foot in each, and whose work has done much to create
the mistaken understanding of salon Cubism as largely derivative of gallery

Cubism. Jean Metzinger was in one sense a stereotypical avant-gardist.

Gravitating, on his arrival in Paris in 1902, to the Montmartre community,
he put himself through a rapid apprenticeship to the most adventurous
styles of painting, from neo-Impressionism to Fauvism, and by 1907 had
met Apollinaire and, through him, Picasso. Keenly responsive to new ideas

and ascendant reputations, he was quick to imitate the neo-Symbolist

poetry of the former and the emergent

by

his friend

he both recognised the

gallery Cubists,

the

latter.

Introduced

affinities

between

their paintings

head of

autumn of

Picasso's

group. In an article written

this salon-oriented

upon

that year he capitalised

in 1910,

and those of the

and saw the chance to put himself, armed with

audacities, at the
in the

Cubism of

Robert Delaunay to Le Fauconnier, Gleizes and Leger

his

unique position

in

order to discern comparable qualities in the paintings of Picasso, Braque,

Le Fauconnier and Delaunay, praising both

their individualism

profound attachment to the tradition of the

'old masters'.

the Independants the following spring displayed, if nothing

absorption of lessons from most of these sources. Although

perhaps chosen to
his

is

(fig.33)

appears,

the only remaining record of

to classicism,

(fig.31).

else, his
its

own

subject was

it,

from the black-and-white photo

to have been indebted in particular

on the one hand and, on the

of a year earlier

their

Le Fauconnier's demonstration-picture Abundance,

rival

Two Nudes of 1910 11

that

and

His entry for

other, to Picasso's

nude studies

Metzinger's appropriation of both models, however,

appears mannered and superficial, the figures possessing

all

the gravitas of

fashion mannequins, and the geometries of their fragmentation serving

little

other than decorative purpose.

Over the months following the group debut of room

41

Metzinger

found, or positioned, himself at the centre of the salon Cubists'

By the autumn he was acknowledged

Le Fauconnier

in that role

both

as its leading figure,

in the eyes

of

activities.

supplanting

and within the

critics

group. This was especially true of Gleizes, whose Landscape, Meudon

(fig.34),

the product of a close working relationship with Metzinger over the

summer of

1911,

shows

a clear

debt both to the busy planar stylisations

of Metzinger's Two Nudes and, partly through

tradition
his

new

partner, this tradition stood for

Landscape,

his example, to the classical

of Poussin and Claude Lorraine. For Gleizes through, unlike

Meudon took

as its subject

the Seine southwest and

more than

aesthetic values.

an identifiable motif, the sweep of

downstream of

central Paris. In 1911, this area was

the site of rapid industrialisation, as the Renault factories spread across

much of the

right bank; yet Gleizes represented this

in clearly pastoral terms, the

expressive

of the

elan vital

dynamic interplay of

of nature rather than the

mushrooming suburb

its

planes and volumes

momentum of

automobile technology, and, together with the picture's

classical

composition, setting the cultural values of the country against those

of the
44

city,

the past against modernity.

In the context

of the

rising tide

of nationalism and

social unrest in the

years before 1914, such references as these by Gleizes had unmistakable

ideological implications, as will be examined

lew

the following chapter.

others in the Cubist milieux engaged so directly with identifiable political

currents, but as these milieux
1912, their

members

Duchamp

brothers

profound,

if

came

socialising

increasingly to overlap during [911

on Sunday afternoons

at

au<.\

the house oi the

34
Albert Gleizes

Landscape,

Meudon

1911
Oil

on canvas

147x115
(58x45M)
Collections

Mnam/Cci/Centre
Georges Pompidou,
Paris

in

suburban Puteaux,

variously motivated,

two wings of the movement met.

Common

was the topic of number and geometry.

range of applications:

it

it

was on the shared ground

commitment

to the discussions

Ins

was fundamental to

was
,\n

oi

.1

to traditionalism thai the

.i

subject with

interest in the

the fourth dimension, which the Cubists shared with

many

Puteaux

,u
.1

useful

concept

others,

oi

and
15

through which the

and mathematical developments of the recent

scientific

past were popularly assimilated;

also attracted those painters exploring

it

dynamism

the basis of pictorial rhythms with which they could address the

of the modern world. Most

interest at Puteaux, however,

was

in the

combination of traditional and avant-garde connotations outlined

earlier: numerical and geometrical systems as the vehicle for the mystical
Symbolism of the neo-Platonic tradition, as the underpinning of classical
pictorial composition, and as the pseudo-scientific basis for an art based
on intellect instead of sensation. Members of the group together read
Leonardos Treatise on Painting and other texts that discussed proportional
systems, and experimented with the use of the golden section ratio in

their paintings.

This

interest

its

most

substantial expression in the project of an

would comprehensively demonstrate the

exhibition that

common

found

strength,

Section d'Or (Salon of the Golden Section) was timed to

d'Automne, opening ten days

it

and the

concerns, of the newly consolidated grouping. The Salon de

after the latter in

was nevertheless impressively big for

October

rival

la

the Salon

1912. If far smaller,

group exhibition:

thirty artists

showed over 200 paintings and sculptures, indicating thereby not only the
range of work that the movement encompassed but also the number of its
adherents. As if the exhibitions title were not a clear enough signal of its
was hammered

traditionalist emphasis, this

editorial for La Section d'Or, a collection

accompany and support

was

itself a substantial

weight that

it.

With

analytical contribution,

stress

on tradition and gave

published to

contributions from nineteen writers, this

The

longest and

from Maurice Raynal, repeated Apollinaire s

this

equally significant
it

Apollinaire in his

carried in avant-garde circles.

most

partisanship

home by

critical essays

production, a demonstration of the considerable

Cubism now

What was

of

an explicitly

classicist interpretation.

m Raynals essay, however, was the

displayed vis-a-vis the currents within the Cubist

that were represented in the Salon.

classical tradition

movement

Of the Bergsonian reconciliation of the

with the dynamism of modern

life

that characterised

much of salon Cubism there was not a mention; instead, Raynal interpreted
Cubism in aestheticist terms that were clearly sympathetic to gallery
Cubism: 'What
one that

in

is

finer idea',

he asked, 'than this conception of a pure painting,

consequence neither descriptive, nor anecdotal, nor

psychological, nor moral, nor sentimental, nor pedagogical, nor finally

decorative?

Painting, in fact, should be nothing other than an art derived

from the disinterested study of forms

As the most ambitious contribution to the Section d'Or volume, Raynal's
essay marked a turning-point in the history of the Cubist movement, for
it

made

it

clear that here, as in the

project sprang, the aesthetic

in the ascendant.

46

and

Puteaux group milieu from which the

stylistic interests

of gallery Cubism were

Perspectives on Simultaneity
In the exhibition-within-an-exhibition that was

room

41 at the 191

Independants, the paintings of Robert Delaunav must have stuck out

sore thumb. For

all

like a

the radicalism of their representation, the pastoral

nudes, portraits and domestic interiors of his co-debutant salon Cubists

were traditional and time-honoured subjects; by contrast, Delaunav's three

citvscapes of Paris, in particular a dramatic view of the hiflel Tower,
signalled an
(fig.35).

embrace of urban modernitv and

a celebration of

If this was characteristic of an individualism

on the

its

latter

dynamism
pan thai

would lead him to split from the group and go his own way within little
more than a year, it was also an enthusiasm shared widely in the milieux of
the avant-garde, as new technologies and forms of mass entertainment the
automobile, aviation, electric lighting, cinema, cycling, team sports caught
the popular and poetic imagination alike.

term, 'modernolatrv', for this cult of the

he Italian Futurists coined

modern

that characterised the

first

of the new century, and the manifesto thai launched their movement
[909 was a o^^d example of it. 'A racing car whose hood is adorned with
great pipes ... a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more
years
in

beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace

stressed

its

social

declared

its

author Marmetti. And he

dimension, promising that Futurism

crowds excited by work, by pleasure. M\d by not: we

multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution

in

'will

sing of great

will sine oi the

modern

capitals

no prompting from Marmetti. and in the

of literary modernolatrv were
examples
decade of the century
Parisian writers needed

first

47

commonplace; Octave Mirbeau's The 6z8-E 8 of 1908, for instance, was

perhaps the most celebrated of a score of hymns to automobile dynamism
published around that time. In the context of the vogue for Bergson's
philosophy noted

earlier,

however,

it

was the distinctive character of modern

urban experience that drew the attention of many. His concepts of duration
(la duree),

embracing

which gave

vital,

past, present

a collective

and

future,

momentum

and of the

to the mental

life force,

life

of

or

elan

individuals,

provided a framework for imaginative interpretations o{ that experience.

cult of the modern, another term, 'simultaneity', was
became a buzzword of the period. It had a variety of
connotations. For the poet Jules Romains it signified the common,
immediate experiences of the teeming metropolis that bound its inhabitants

For

this aspect

of the

coined, and quickly

together.

His epic

lyric

poem

La

Vie

unanime (The Unanimous

Life),

published in

1908 to wide acclaim, celebrated the innumerable collectivities (of place,

occupation, custom) that dissolved the individuality of each, subsuming

of which was the

glutton

city',

if related,

that

is

city itself:

'I

am

like a grain

of sugar

he wrote. For the Futurist painters

the intoxicating aim of our

art',

your mouth,

in 1912, the

meanings: 'the simultaneity of states of

unprecedented dynamism of modern

in

mind

all

term had other,

in the

work of

art:

they declared. In order to capture the

life,

a picture

must be

'the synthesis

of

what one remembers and what one sees'.

Robert Delaunay met Romains, and encountered the ideas of the
Futurists, in 1909,

The

and

his interest in simultaneity overlapped

subject of the Eiffel Tower, which he

first

with

theirs.

painted that year, and to

which he returned many times, was for him both an icon of the modernity
48

celebrated by the Italians and the focus of that collective metropolitan

identity cherished by the poet, a defining feature of Pans shared

all of

simultaneously visible to

of

more purely

visual

inhabitants. But

its

and painterly

interest.

The

it

by

was also the object

vertiginous height of

the tower and the startling juxtapositions of scale and perspective that

repeatedly afforded as

it

loomed over

it

buildings, or was framed between

curtains, or closed a street vista fascinated

)elaunay; moreover, the

challenge that these visual sensations presented to pictorial representation

brought together the painterly

most interested him. Lacking any

issues that

formal art education, he had apprenticed himself

and then neo-Impressionism, learning from the

latter the basics of

was the joint encounter with the work

of

Henri Rousseau that proved formative. Like Picasso

at

science, but

it

Impressionism

Erst to

colour

e/.anne and

La-Rue-des-Bois,

he learned from these two painters lessons about the relationship

between the picture surface and the

informed

illusion of depth; his Impressionist-

him

first,

however, not to the conceptual

simplifications and exaggerations of the Cottage and Trees (fig.14) but to

35
Robert Delaunay
Eiffel

Oil

interest in colour led

Tower 1910

perceptual concerns

of the

interior

of

to

an exploration, in

of paintings

a series

on canvas

116x97

deep space and the

{A5% x 38M)

representation (fig.36).

Kunstsammlung

The encounter

Nordrhein-Westfalen,

Dusseldorf

a radical

in

1909

a Paris church, St Severin, of the visual sensation

role of colour

and mobile perspective

of

its

with Romains and the Futurists inspired Dclaunav in

development of these concerns, and one that shifted

their centre

of gravity from the perceptual to the conceptual. Substituting the tower

silhouetted against the sky and framed by curtains for the

36
Robert Delaunay

of St Severin, he constructed that silhouette out of

SfSeVew? 1909

the top of the tower seen

cardboard cut-out

Oil

on canvas

99.4 x 74

(39Mx29K)

The

Minneapolis Institute of

but to suggest a

effect

and

from the

broke

air,

down

column and

aisle

several juxtaposed views

the base splayed and flattened like

contours with shafts of

its

light,

not only to reduce drastically the illusory space of the picture.

is

new understanding of

its

representation. 'A profile

never

is

Arts

motionless before our

Manifesto of

1910.

eyes',

the Futurist painters declared in their Technical

'On account of the persistency

of an

Image on the

retina,

moving objects constantly multiply themselves ... lo paint a human figure

you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding
atmosphere.' Delaunay painted his picture as if taking his cue from this
very assertion, surrounding the tower with

juxtaposed views suggest not

all

the

whose

city's

inhabitants

subjectivity

is

its

one

its

mobility but

whom

of

is

ambience
its

simultaneous

visibility to

the salon viewer of the painting,

both signalled by the equation

window, and co-opted, by the combined

of light. Yet the

,\n^.\

of

picture surface with

superimposed views

of

the

tower, for Romains' unanimist collective of Parisians

If

Delaunays painting stood,

those of the others

common

in

room

in

thematic terms,

41. there

were evidently

some remove from

enough stylistic features

at

them all to warrant his inclusion in the group debut,

Metzingers Two Nu des shared its use oi broken contours, the paintings

of

Leger and,

them.

to

less boldly, Gleizes, its

distortion of perspective, <\nd

including Le Fauconniers Abundance,

its

dynamic plav

ol

all

volumes.

ol

Hiring
49

the next year, moreover,

all

but Metzinger followed him into an engagement

with the dynamism and simultaneity of

modern

life. It is

likely that

they too

were motivated in part by avant-gardist rivalry with the Futurists, though

not always to share their 'modernolatry'.The Italian painters visited Paris in

autumn of 1911, and met both salon and gallery Cubists; around the
same time, Le Fauconnier began work on The Huntsman (flg.37), a painting

the

37
Henri Le Fauconnier
The Huntsman

1911-12
Oil

on canvas

203x166.5
(80x65^)
Haags

Gemeentemuseum,
The Hague

38
Fernand Leger
The Wedding 1912
Oil

on canvas

257x206
(10r/x81M)
Collections

Mnam/Cci/

Centre Georges

Pompidou,

even bigger than Abundance. Exhibited at the Independants the following

spring and intended clearly as a sequel,
principal figures

from

it

incorporated not only the two

that painting but also the striking innovation

of

isolated vignettes (a railway bridge, a church, a villagescape) inserted

montaged,

as

spatially with

it

were

it.

An

into the scene with

a representation of 'states of mind',

50

no attempt

example of simultaneity

to reconcile

as the Futurists

them

understood

with the vignettes suggesting

it

Paris

remembered elements

of the scene depicted

Huntsman appears.

The

however, to stand for the very opposite of Futurism.

Burdened by

its

complicated and
firing a

shotgun

below him.
at least

It

author's theoretical ambitions, the painting

difficult to decipher.

at

over-

is

centre stands the huntsman,

its

mallard ducks, some of which are scattering above and

would seem

on one

At

that

Le Fauconnier intended

himself

level, for

or as

'tin- artist'

origin, formally as well as thematicallv, of the

explosive, destructive

this figure to stand.

he huntsman

dynamism

is

the

of the picture:

and disharmonious, accompanied not only by

gunsmoke and dead ducks but also by the figures of Abundance <\nd her
the representatives of a more mutually enriching relationship between

son.

humanity and nature. We can, therefore, infer an equation between the

huntsman and the modern world of violence and metal, in which the latter
is

mediated by the

artist,
its

who

discovers the visual language appropriate for

expression. Such an inference

is

supported by

certain details: the juxtaposition of the railway bridge

modern and

with the church (emblems of the

the

traditional); the emphasis, by isolation, of the firing

mechanism of the gun; the dislocation of

countryside into scattered fragments of
If this inference

correct,

is

and

if these

the

a landscape.

grandiose

ideas were indeed

Le Fauconnier's, they indicate

deepening of the

painter's

traditionalism, and

of

attachment to

pessimism

his

in the face of

modernisation.

On

one

in late 191

level,

and

the pessimism was perhaps justified

early 191 2. for the prospect of

imminent war with Germany had been brought

than ever by the second Moroccan

and

its

was

in

repercussions.

any sense

To

a direct

crisis

closer

of Julv ign

suggest that The Huntsman

response to diplomatic

tensions would be absurd, collapsing into

crude
1

binary relation of political 'cause' ,\nd

the complex cultural

was formed. Yet the

movement within which Le fauconniers

crisis, in

both heightening alarm

at

earlier,

art practice

the prospect of war

and giving further motivation to the projects of national

surveyed

artistic effect

self

-definition

could only have exacerbated the tensions between

traditionalism and modernism, nationalism and avant-gardism that

Abundance had inscribed.

Leger had no such qualms; he embraced both the visual dynamism And
the social consequences of modernisation. Borrowing from the but mists
the concept of 'states of mind', and from Le Fauconnier the means of
its

representation, his huge Wedding

Indcpendants, inserted views

of

its

participants

figures

fig.38

of the event

principal

also

shown

is

memory

of this

among whom
unanimisl

the [912

between the fragmented forms

can be identified the central

of bride and groom - suggesting thereby

represents

at

that

what

collectivity, a

th

painting

montage

of

51

recollected features, rather than the scene as directly observed.

complex and indecipherable

in its 'simultaneity'

as The

Huntsman

it is

more

Although

as

successful painting

because more controlled. Structured around oppositions

between hard and soft forms, curves and

and volumes,

angles, planes

its

kaleidoscope of images swept by smoke-like wedges (mists of memory?)

into a spiralling
'flashbacks',

it

motion

of Hollywood

that anticipates the dizzy-spin device

marks, more clearly than Le Fauconnier managed to convey,

the distinction between the conceptual and perceptual bases of painting.

The concept of 'simultaneity'

and the salon Cubists registered

as

understood both by the Futurists

on the role
of artistic invention in selecting and synthesising on canvas the mix of
remembered and seen elements of a subject, to represent the experience of
modernity. But the distinction also characterised another understanding of
simultaneity that was central to Cubism: the juxtaposition or combination,
in a single painting, of radically different and discontinuous perspective
schemas or viewpoints.
Eiffel

ideas

Tower of

room

this distinction, in its stress

suggested that Delaunay's use of this device in his

41 (fig.35)

was one aspect of

his pictorial response to the

of the Futurists and the poetry of Romains. But

too, in the paintings

Cubists

may

it

had

a likely source,

of Picasso and Braque that he and the other salon

have encountered for the

first

time

Kahnweiler's gallery in

at

the winter of 1910 11, through the agency of Metzinger (Delaunay's close

and Apollinaire. Metzinger himself had adopted the

device by then, as his Two Nudes (fig.33) demonstrates, the fragmentation of
the legs and shoulder of the right figure in particular juxtaposing, to no
friend since 1906)

great effect, different views

studies

39
Jean Metzinger

of these

of the previous winter

in a

manner

that recalls Picasso's

nude

Tea-time (Le Gouter)

(Woman

with

Teaspoon) 1911
on wood
75.5x69.5

Oil

(29 /x27 /)
3

Philadelphia

(fig.31).

Museum

of Art. The Louise

As we have

seen, the use

by Picasso and Braque of such perspective

juxtapositions in their paintings of 19078

(figs. 13, 14)

the devices of passage and inconsistent lighting, as a

attention to the conventionality of painting.

linguistic character

of

As

emerged, alongside

means of

their awareness

diagrammatic appearance. For both painters,

of giving greater prominence to

from iconic to symbolic

style,

took on

of

more

was part of that process

with the associated

and such perspectival

preoccupation in their own right. For
sympathetic critics, the device became

signs traced earlier,

other Cubists, however, as well as

of the

this

a scaffolding grid,

juxtapositions were only briefly a

a cardinal feature

of the

this conventionality grew, the different views

their pictures' subjects that were simultaneously visible

shift

calling

and the difference between conception and

perception a keystone of Cubist aesthetics.

It

was

first

autumn of

codified,

once again, by Metzinger. In his

1910 he discussed the Tree [and]

article

of the

mobile perspective' of Picasso,

and Braque's 'clever mixing ... of the successive and the simultaneous' in
terms of Bergson's notion of duration; the following year his painting
Tea-time (Le Gouter) (Woman with Teaspoon) (fig.39) at the Salon d'Automne was
a

demonstration exercise

in the distinction

between idea and sensation.

In French, 'gouter' means not only 'tea-time' but also

Christopher Green notes,

52

'to taste',

and, as

m Metzinger's picture the suggestion of the

Walter Arensburg
Collection

and

senses in a state of activation

young woman, her

the naked

touching the saucer, about to sip from the spoon

sensations are known, not

two

felt,

by the spectator.

is

fingers

acute. Yet the

,\nd the difference

woman's

between

underscored both by the diagrammatic juxtaposition of two

views of the cup and saucer, and by the rather pedantic geometrification
the

of her

is

face,

The

arms and

torso.

upon and elaborated by critics, lor by late

Cubism was notorious enough to be the object of widespread debate.
On the one hand many newspaper critics, succumbing to mounting
nationalist hysteria in the wake of the second Moroccan crisis, condemned
it as offensive and anti-French, some even equating
with the subversiveness
distinction was one seized

1911

it

of anarchism.

On

the other,

young

writers rallied to

cause

its

the

little

magazines, concerned perhaps as

much

to raise their

own

profiles as

to defend Cubist paintings,

offering interpretations of

aibism

own

that represented their

response to the heightened

mood

of nationalism and the aesthetic

positions that mediated

debate produced

was

it.

This

'Cubism' that

a critical construct, only rarely

anchored to the visual by

discussion of particular paintings,

m\

"V^

but underpinned by reference to

philosophical ideas or systems, ,\nd
articulating

more concerns than

aesthetic ones alone.

hus

early

1912 the voting critic Olivier

Hourcade saw

the Cubists' use of

perspectival juxtapositions

paintings as

embodying

their

distinction between the essence

and the appearance of the objects

they represented, as precedent for

which he cited Arthur Schopenhauer and Immanuel Kant.

argument both rested on

misunderstanding

of

explained nothing about actual Cubist paintings mattered

intellectually substantial rationale for

recruited for his

own

ubism which

race And

a locality,

little;

it

offered an

ubist paintings

and were thus part

oi the

patrimony of France,

Hourcade was soon followed by

others. In

also discerned in the multiple perspective

between the transitory appearance

this,

hat his

lourcade then

variant of nationalism, arguing that

revealed the essence of

cultural

Kant's philosophy and'

however, to

a classical

March

schemas

of objects

.md

of

[912 [acques Riviere

(

ubism

distinction

their essence; he harnessed

aesthetic ol stability And equilibrium, in

terms he ridiculed the 'mad cacophony' of

!ubist

works.

ike

whose

[ourcade he
53

made no
for

lack he castigated the Cubists was

ambiguities and contradictions that

was

and an intellectual coherence

won at the expense of the
made their work so fruitful. The result

reference to specific paintings

whose

a reductive interpretation that betrayed a certain disdain for painters

their craft, and whose ideological grounding is underscored by his

championing of Andre Lhote, the most traditionalist of Cubist painters.

and

Contrasting with the cold

Maurice Raynal's

critical

of

steel

debut

Riviere's logic

in the

summer

was the shotgun

of

style

of 1912. Drawing, yet again,

on purportedly Kantian distinctions between essence and appearance

in his expression, conception and vision Raynal offered a wide range of
additional references, from mathematics and contemporary scientific
discourse to the philosophy of George Berkeley and the painting of Giotto,
in

support of an understanding of Cubism

as

an art of conception, and

quoted approvingly Kant's dictum

that the beautiful
'finality

must be

without any purpose'.

40
Juan Gris

This argument for what he

Portrait of Pablo

called 'pure' painting, Raynal

Picasso 1912

elaborated in his contribution to

the Golden

Section

collection of

Oil

on canvas

74.1x93
(29M x 36 /)
3

critical writings that

autumn;

as

we

have seen, that essay was significant

for
its

its

stress

upon

tradition

and

in

The Art

Institute of

Chicago. Gift of Leigh

B.

Block

partisanship towards the

aestheticism of gallery Cubism,

41
Juan Gris

which he saw
such

as representative of

Man

'purity'. It

was significant too

Oil

in a third respect,

namely

championing of an

artist

in

a Cafe 1912

on canvas

127.6x88.3

its

who

in

(50M x 34 3/)
Philadelphia

the absence of Picasso and Braque

was, though a recent entrant to

of Art.

Walter Arensberg
Collection

Cubism's

lists,

the leading

representative of gallery
in the

Gris had

made

a startlingly

his salon

debut

accomplished

in the

Golden Section

Independants

Cubism

salon. Juan

earlier that year,

Portrait of Pablo Picasso (fig.40),

with

the fellow-

countryman whose painterly innovations he had been observing and

absorbing from the proximity of an adjacent studio in the Bateau-Lavoir
since 1906. Initially a cartoonist
LAssiette au Beurre,

and

visual

he had begun to paint in

economy

their severely

working for

satirical

1910,

magazines such

as

deploying the graphic

flair

characteristic of the illustrator in paintings that, in

geometneised compositions, emphasised the conceptual

aspect of the gallery Cubist conceits of scaffolding grid and juxtaposed

viewpoints. If at

achievement
Picasso are

with
54

a wit

first

the

these qualities

reticulations

seem to have

a visual inventiveness that

on

his

Portrait of Pablo

they were soon tempered

also owed much to his earlier

perhaps too stylised and formulaic

and

set limits

and complications of the

Museum

The Louise and

career. Thus

Man

Cafe of 1912 (fig.41), one of his entries in the

in a

Golden

Section salon, at once deflated the bombast oi Metzingers Tea-time with

humour, and dazzlingly elaborated upon

viewpoints, setting

display oi juxtaposed

its

top-hatted subject into impatient

its

appearance and gestures inferred by the spectator

face, cravat,

hand and hat from the jigsaw

making sense
as this, as

of their relation.

dimensions

at once',

he argued.

'

piecing together his

And

of profiles depicted,

Conception

Raynal emphasised. 'We never,

movement -his

is

fact, see

an object

herefore what has to be

in all its

done

the gap in our seeing.

gives us the means.

makes us aware
would not be
if

is
C

to

fill

in

Conception

Conception

of objects that

able to see

we

And

so.

the painter succeeds in rendering

the object in
achieves a
is

in

the key to inferences such

of

all its

work

of

dimensions, he

method which

higher order than one

painted according to the visual

dimensions

only.'

Gris was, for Raynal, 'the

of the

fiercest

Golden

purists' in the

Section salon. His intellectual

approach to painting was

ideally

suited to the role in which he

found himself from

late [912, of

mediator between salon and gallery

Cubism, taking over from

Mctzinger the codifying And
disseminating of the pictorial
principles that were implicit in the
latter

now,

as previously noted,

the ascendant

and

elaborating

over the next few vears

Cubism

that

variant of

was both supremely

individual and profoundly

influential

the

on other members

of

remained close

movement,
And Braque, however,
1

le

to Picasso

and

work of the two years before the war in particular continued to

some of its points of departure from their exploration
linguistic character of pictorial representation. While the artists and

his

track theirs, taking

of the

critics of the

Puteaux

contesting the terms

these

circle

were comparing notes, sharing enthusiasms And

which

their

new paintings were to be understood,

two were pursuing that exploration with a single-mindedness that, by

them close to submerging their individual artistic

mid-1911, brought

identities in the shared painterly style of hermetic, or analytic,

abandoning

for several

months even

ubism,

the signature oi their respective

55

paintings in an apparent effort to establish an

anonymous

art.

This

effort

had been one component of the aestheticism of the poet Mallarmc who,
his celebration

of the 'incantatory power' of words had envisaged

effacement while they took the

collision

of

fire

of

initiative, as

in

his self-

he wrote, 'mobilised by the

their inequalities, kindling reciprocal reflections like the flashes

between precious

But such self-effacement seems

stones'.

uncharacteristic of Picasso especially, for

whom the

display of his creative

individualism was, as the Demoiselles project indicated, of fundamental

importance.

profound

It is a

measure of the

significance that the

Cubist adventure with Braque held

for

him

allowed

that he should have

its

imperatives to push that

individualism, however
temporarily, into second place.

in

One moment of this adventure

particular three weeks of

working almost side by side

August

191 1

resulted

of paintings

in

which

difficult to tell the

Man

with a Guitar

and the

in

in a series

indeed

it is

Braques from

Among them

the Picassos.

in

of France,

Ceret, in the south

are the

by the former

Accordionist

by the

latter

Although there

are

(figs.

42, 43).

some

differences between these

two pictures

Braque's

commitment
relief space

greater

to an overall low-

and

his thicker

handling of paint, as against

Picasso's

enjoyment of abrupt

spatial discontinuities

and

his

deftly-created play of overlapping

transparent planes, for example

the remarkable similarities are just

as significant.

Each takes further

than ever before the reduction

of representational

means

to a

minimum of signs, moving

radically than in the previous year

away from resemblance

yet

more

(in semiotic

terms, iconicity) in the creation of a lexicon of graphic marks and painterly

motifs whose representational meaning

is

primarily dependent

on

relations

of difference and position within the picture as a whole (in semiotic terms,
symbolic signs) in each case, the play of diagonals and triangles against a
rectilinear grid.

Yet both

artists rely, crucially,

on

isolated iconic details

loop of curtain rope, the fretboard of a guitar, the bellows of an accordion

- as
56

clues, or cues, to the

reading of their paintings. Here the juxtaposition

42
Georges Braque

Man
Oil

with a Guitar

1911

on canvas

116.2x80.9

(45/x31X)
The Museum of Modern
Art, New York. Acquired
through the
P.

Bliss

Lillie

Bequest

43
Pablo Picasso
The Accordionist 1911
Oil

on canvas

130.2x89.5

(51Xx35X)
Solomon

R.

Guggenheim Museum.

New York

57

of perspective schemas plays

key

role, at

once revealing the conventional

character of pictorial perspective itself and giving the painter greater

freedom to position these

illusionistic coherence.

and

chair in

without regard to the demands of

both paintings, the

in

denoting two chair-arm

right,

enough,

angle, are

details

Thus

in

combination with

which the musician

differences between circles

sits,

and

spiral shapes lower left

scrolls each pictured

and

from

a different

their positioning, to suggest the

also function as units in a system

straight lines in

variously for sleeve cuffs, collars, eyelids, soundholes and so on. Yet

painting there

of

also a surfeit

is

of

which the former stand

m each

illusionistic space; Picasso in particular

plays with the devices of illusionism

in a

way

that, if

between them

reflections

of Mallarme,
with

kindles reciprocal

it

still

in the spirit

threatens his picture

illegibility.

Picasso found a way beyond this

tension between symbolic and iconic

signs for spatial depth through a

second encounter with African culture

the following year, which was as

important for him

as that

which had

much to Les Demoiselles

the summer of 1912 he

contributed so
d'Avignon.

In

bought, in Marseilles, a Grebo mask

from west Africa

(fig.45).

Kahnweiler was the

this

first

to observe,

mask 'bore testimony

conception

As
to the

that art aims at the

creation of signs.

The human

face

"seen" or rather "read" does not

coincide at
sign,

which

all

with the details of the

details,

moreover, would

have no significance if isolated

The

is

epidermis of the face that

exists

seen

only in the consciousness of

the spectator,

who

"imagines",

who

volume of this face in front

the
plane
surface of the mask, at the
of

creates the

ends of the eye-cylinders, which thus become eyes seen

thus recognising in this

mask

representing space, adopted

as hollows.' Picasso,

it

the rudiments of a non-iconic system for

in his little

cardboard Guitar of October 1912

sound hole protrudes and the

engendered non-mimetically by a

(fig.44), in which, as

Yve-Alain Bois argues,

virtual outer surface

of the instrument

network of contextual oppositions'

is

'a

in other words,

of symbolic

signs.

If this analysis tends to overstate the abruptness and completeness of the

transition
after
58

all,

from iconic

in

to symbolic signs

our reading of the Guitar

it

resemblance

plays a large part,

helps us to understand, and locate

autumn of 1912, the end of the hermetic, or analytic, phase of

Cubism during the course of which that shift was explored and its
to that

implications assimilated.

And

stage of Picasso and Braque's

it

also helps us to distinguish

Cubism,

which

in

from

this lexicon ol

What

has

become known

and manipulation of

their invention

as 'synthetic'

its

iubism began with

pasted paper

papier-collc

the next

it

Cubist signs

provided the point of departure for each painting, rather than

destination.

gallery

enabled them to transfer to two dimensions the system

medium

This

ol non-illusionistic

signs for spatial depth, surface and transparency, which the cardboard Guitar

had

first

posited in the three dimensions of sculpture. As we shall see

next chapter, however, there was

more

in

the

than such formal

at issue in papier-colU

concerns alone.
Picasso and Braque were not unique, within the

pursuing their explorations

Puteaux

circle.

from that

from the beginning of

pictorial concerns

in

from the talking-shop

in relative isolation

Robert and Sonia Delaunay began

collective

movement,

aibist

working independently on

1912,

whose

of the

measure their distance

to

starting points were very

44

from those of

Pablo Picasso

different

Maquette

paralleled in key respects

for Guitar

Cubism,

gallery

its 'linguistic'

1912

Both the differences and the

Construction of

summarised

vet

which

explorations.

similarities were

term 'simultaneity' and the

in the

cardboard, string and

meanings that

wire (restored)

65.1 x 33 x 19

this held for

Roberts picture of the

them. As

Eiffel

Tower

at

have said,
the 1911

(25/ x 13x7!4)
The
Art,

Independants brought together

Museum of Modern
New York. Gift of

the experiences of

the Artist

modern

citv

his

enthusiasm for

and

life,

painterly

engagement with questions of the perception of

deep space and

45

as

he

felt,

its

representation, which he shared.

with Cezanne and Rousseau. While these

Grebo mask, west

concerns were also evident

Africa

Musee Picasso,

that he exhibited

Paris

room

in the

41.

other two cityscapes

they did not constitute

the ambitious statement clearly presented by the

Tower; yet

it

was from

initially alone,

radical

these, rather than the latter, that he

but subsequently

in

developed

partnership with Sonia

a distinctive,

and influential approach to the pictorial representation

of

modernity.
The City N0.1 (fig.46), probably painted early in
irregular series of

from

compositions begun

in

[909

1911,

An<.\

of an

view taken

picture postcard: the Eiffel Tower seen from the top of the Arc

deTriomphe (fig.47).The
perspective as before, but

subject afforded the

same experience

with greater emphasis

o\)

buildings; here, Delaunay has exaggerated the view

elaborated on the conceit of the picture as

enhancing

own

was one

based on

its

down on

to these .\nd

window, with the

plunging

of

(he foreground

effect of

viewers' awareness of the picture surface as well as of then-

subjectivity. Crucial in

both respects

Imprcssionist brushstrokes that

windowpanc and

is

of aerial perspective

Recognising the potential

is

his use ol a screen of i)co-

suggestive

at

once

of reflections

breaking up the pattern

of this device,

>f

on the

rooftops.

)elauna) repeated n in his next

59

works

in this series,

December

191 1,

and

in

Window on

he established with

it

the

City No. J (fig.48), painted in

the

means

to a radically different

approach to the representation of simultaneity. In

brushstrokes, building

upon

this

work the

screen of

the pattern of light and shade created by the

roofscape into a consistently diagonal checkerboard, extends to cover almost

the entire picture surface, and overlays a larger checkerboard of squares

originating

from the same

features.

The

resulting

complex

grid, if

more

formulaic in appearance than that in the work of Picasso and Braque

(though perhaps comparable

serves a similar

purpose

in

in this quality to the latter

both formal and

Mandora, fig.27),

'linguistic' terms, tying the

and shifting the burden of

representation from iconic to symbolic signs from an image anchored
in illusion to one whose meaning is dependent on the disposition of
illusion

forms

of depth to the picture

surface,

in the grid.

Once

again however, as in 1909,

it

was Delaunays commitment to

questions of perception and modernity that distinguished his researches,

60

and

outcome, from the conceptual and formal preoccupations of

Cubism. In contrast to the paintings oi Picasso And Braque at this

their

gallery

time, colour plays an important role in Window on

the

City No.

}.

Although

derived from the complementary pairings oi sunlight and shade of which

the Impressionists

than these,

less

made

anchored

so much,
in

colour relationships are more arbitrary

imitation oi nature, animating the surface

pattern and, by the contrast of

recession independently

its

warm and

of perspective.

cool colours, creating spatial

In his paintings oi the following

months

)elaunay enhanced these

46
Robert Delaunay

qualities, taking the

The CityNo.2 1911

window/picture metaphor

Oil

verge oi abstraction in

on canvas

146x114

over

(57^x45)

Mnam/Cci/Centre
Georges Pompidou,

a scries oi

dozen works made

summer of

to the

the

in

Windows Open

1912.

Simultaneously (First part, Third Motif

Paris

(fig.49)

is

one of them.

)ispensing

with the screen oi neo47

ArcdeTriomphe
Eiffel

perhaps recognising

to

owned by

Tower,

Impressionist brushstrokes

Postcard of view from

its

superfluity,

given the constructive potential of

Robert Delaunay,

the device of a colour grid

c.1911

Dclaunav orchestrates
spectral colours

48

range of

around the

spatial

Robert Delaunay

recession from the foreground

Window on

orange curtains to the background

the City

No.3 1911

blue sky and the green profile of

Oil

on canvas

the tower.

113.7x130.8
3

(44 /x51'^)
The Solomon

in the

hermetic

R.

the representational legibility of

Guggenheim Museum,

New

As

paintings of Picasso and Braque,

the image

York

is

secured by the vestigial

iconic character of these motifs.

49

But unlike their exploration and

Robert Delaunay

celebration of the linguistic magic

Windows Open
Simultaneously

of painting for its

Part, Third Motif)

Oil

own

sake

(First

or perhaps

1912

a reality

on canvas

45.7x37.5

for

its

suggestion of

beyond appearance -

Delaunays bracketing

(18 x 14%)

oi his

complex and fragmented

Tate Gallery

representation of the citvscape between the external limit of the picture

frame/window and

the internal limit of the distant tower posits

an equivalence between the experience

of

deciphering the painting m^\

the active, constructive nature of visual perception thai

life in a

modern

city entails.

period Delaunay thus began to replace what \ irginia

Spate has termed the 'enumerative' simultaneity oi his previous paintings In his

works of

the multiplication
instance with

this

and juxtaposition

oi views oi the Eiffel rower, for

'perceptual' simultaneity engendered in the viewers

61

reading of

its

non-imitative signs. The development was supported by

research into colour theory, in particular the writings of nineteenth-century

Eugene Chevreul, whose 'law of simultaneous contrast of colours'

described the mutual enhancement of luminosity obtained when
complementary colours are placed together. During the summer of 1912
scientist

Robert and Sonia, working

this

new

realisation

closely together, fashioned an aesthetic

upon

of the constructive potential of colour that was

had metaphysical overtones. 'Without

no light or movement', Robert declared in notes
for an essay on 'Light', that summer; 'Light in nature creates the movement
of colours. The movement is given by the unequal relations of contrast
between colours that make up reality. When this reality is endowed with
anchored

in perceptual reality yet

visual sensibility [there

is]

50
Sonia Delaunay
Simultaneous Contrasts

1912
Oil

on canvas

45.5x55
(18x21 3/)
Collections

Mnam/Cci/Centre
Georges Pompidou,
Paris

depth (we see

becomes Rhythmic Simultaneity! It appears

realised in paint the implication of such an

as far as the stars)

to have been Sonia

idea: if light itself

who
is

first

what

is

it

to be represented,

and

this

with colour,

painting it was tantamount to non-representation. The series of Simukaneous

Contrasts that she painted alongside Robert that summer (fig.50) are

anchored to representation,

like his Windows,

the tower, but in replacing the

window

by

vestigial iconic signs

curtains with the sun

and

its

of
halo

she critically loosened their grip, placing her painting on the threshold

of abstraction.
In the following year she crossed that threshold, and at the same time

At the end of 1912

a young poet, Blaise

offered yet another interpretation of 'simultaneity'.

she and Robert were introduced by Apollinaire to

62

L.IWJ

Cendrars, whose enthusiasm for the

modcrnolatry' and 'simultaneity of

marched

theirs.

he wrote

long

Hiring the

poem

first

city life

months of

entitled Prose on

191

Trans-

the

and of Little Jehanne of France about the

memories, reflections and fantasies that pass

Siberian

through the mind

young poet on

of a

railway

journey across Russia with an even younger

French prostitute.

It

ends with tlnir

hymns

Pans, which Cendrars

world and of his

own

He

life.

it;

of the

and Soma

agreed that she should illustrate

they should publish

arrival in

hub

as tin-

it.

and

the result was

that

a vertical

paper panel two metres long that could be

folded concertina fashion

ffig.51

text runs the entire length

of the

iendrars'

right side, in

twelve typefaces of different colours, while

Soma's visual accompaniment appears on the

left, at

times

filling

gaps

51

unconventional layout.

Sonia Delaunay and

of

arcs, angles

left

by the poem's

syncopated rhvthm

and vibrant colours,

it

Blaise Cendrars

Prose on the TransSiberian

and of Little

Jehanne of France

counterpoints and complements the

text,

presenting, as the authors explained, a

'simultaneous contrast' such that the

poem

can

1913

be seen,

at once, as a

whole and

as a sequential

Paper

1922.6x35.6
(757x14)

set

of images.
Although they onlv managed to make 62

Tate Gallery

copies of the poem, Sonia and Cendrars had

planned to publish

150

it

amused them

that

unfolded, these could extend to the top of

the Eiffel Tower, which was both the

poems

closing image and the

a 'simultancitv'
it

emblem

of

whose many dimensions

encapsulated more succinctlv. and

yet

comprehensively, than any other product

of that period.

63

High and Low

Soon

after

marrying Robert Delaunay

in 1910,

SoniaTerk

all

but gave up

painting for two years. Although trained as a painter in academies in

Germany and

Paris,

and with

a solo exhibition already

behind her (in 1908

she showed works in a Fauvist, Gauguinesque style in a Left Bank gallery),

she turned instead to the design and making of objects of decorative art in
a

number of media: embroidery,

clothes.

The immediate

interior furnishing fabrics, book-covers,

reason for this change was her pregnancy and early

motherhood the couples son Charles was born in 191 which, it is

reasonable to assume, made more difficult the single-minded concentration
required by painting. But the fact that she had already made an embroidery
work soon after their relationship began in 1909 indicates that there were
other factors involved. As we shall see, these were significant for key aspects
of their art and that of the Cubist movement.
One was the issue of gender. As noted in chapter one, the regressive
1

52
Robert Delaunay
The Cardiff Team 1913
Oil

on canvas

195.5x132
(77x52)
Stedelijk

Van

Abbemuseum,
Eindhoven

character of the social relations of sexuality that was a feature of the early

twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes meant that

from participation

as equals; the

exceptions, were those of muse,

women

were excluded

only available roles for them, with rare

mother or manager of

Sonia was one of the exceptions, but she too

felt

their

mens

careers.

the pressure to conform.

'From the day we started living together', she later recalled, 'I played second
fiddle', and she never exhibited her paintings alone again until after Roberts
death. The responsibilities

to the
64

of motherhood were

making of decorative

art.

also extended, at the time,

In response both to the perceived threats

posed to the patriarchal order by the rise of feminism and the 'new woman'.
and to national security by France's declining birthrate, great emphasis was
placed by men, in all arenas of public debate, o\) the- domestic rot

women. Decorative

arts organisations

campaigned through the [890s

women .is makers of
I

return to the ancien regimes tradition of aristocratic

luxury crafts, reinforcing assumptions thai such

expected accomplishments of young

Ladies.

skills

around 1909, turning her own accomplishments

mother

was.

in this area to financial

advantage, designing floral embroidery motifs for

to

were pari oi the

hat Robert's

sale,

may

have contributed

Soma's turn to decorative work.

Such

turn was also

populism that was

\n

keeping, however, with

Following the collapse of the Bloc des Gaudies

anxieties over working-class unrest resulted

to democratise art,

strong current of

feature of the cultural politics of that avant-gutrre,

and widen access to

it,

19056, middle-class

in

among

in,

other things, efforts

by encouraging the manufacture

and consumption of decorative arts, especially those rooted m traditional,

provincial ways of life. As one of the leading promoters of such efforts.

Roger Marx, declared

class, for it

belongs to

in 1909, decorative art

all

'cannot be limited to

without distinction

rank or fortune:

of

of the hearth and the garden

city ... of the precious jewel

embroidery;

of the

it is

also the art

Delaunays, Robert

in particular

soil,

a single

and peasant

the race and the nation'.

Of

shared this populism, though not.

its

the art

is

it

the

initially,

associated enthusiasm for decorative

arts.

Rather, his unorthodox

he spent two wars as

art training

theatre decorators

apprentice in the working-class Belleville

district of Paris

led

him

to identify with

popular painting traditions, those

he put

it,

painters',

and

of. as

'fairground and barbershop

which he saw

as 'the unaffected

direct expression of those artisans'.

close friend of

years of the hitter's

lenn Rousseau
life,

in the last

he saw him as 'the

genius, the precious flower' of this culture.

(This and the above phrases

book on Rousseau

that he

are

from

began after

Lt

Douaniers death in 1910 but never finished.

In keeping with this populism. Robert

and Soma regarded the general public the

crowds

the unjuried Salon des

of

[ndependants, which, was the only salon

which they

showed

their painting that mattered most.

worried endlessly about the

Robert

accessibility

their experiments for this audience:

ourworl
[OI2,

he wrote to Kandinskj

think

in

as the audience for

the public has

As

in April

made

,\n

65

effort to get used to

it

unintelligible realities.

for [that public] these are, for the

am

sure,

primitive stiffness of the system

in the

way of

its

moreover, that this

is still

is

moment,

my own

fault.

The

for the public a stumbling-block

enjoyment'. They held back

more experimental paintings

such as Windows Open Simultaneously and Simultaneous

Contrasts, therefore,

the Independants, exhibiting these only in gallery shows

from

on the European

avant-garde circuit. For the Salon, they painted huge works on deliberately
popular,
devices

modern

and

subjects, applying with

pictorial

moderation and

schemas of colour construction

legibility the

first

elaborated in

the experimental works. Examples are Roberts The Cardiff Team, exhibited
in the

Independants of

(figs. 52, 53),

paintings

and dance-hall
to Bleriot,

1913, and Sonia's Bal Bullier of the same year

on the popular and modern themes of team sport

respectively.

and Sonia's

They were

Eleetrie Prisms,

followed in 1914 by Robert's Homage

celebrations

of aviation and

electric

we have seen, Robert was working on Political Drama (fig.i) when

war intervened. There is little doubt that they failed in this populist effort,
since it appears from the responses of newspaper critics who spoke for
their readerships as much as to them that these paintings met with as

lighting; as

much

public ridicule as those of other Cubists, but their intention to bring

avant-gardist experimentation within reach

of a modern mass audience

is

significant in itself.

Once

again

it

was Sonia

who found

aim. If her decorative art and design

character,

and populist

in intention,

a more fruitful way to pursue this

work was gendered in origin and

it

was

also, increasingly, a

product of

her interest in applying the pictorial vocabulary that she and Robert were

its principal subject

from a newspaper photograph of a rugby match had incorporated

evolving to commercial ends. Robert's The Cardiff Team

taken

the imagery of billboards, those already ubiquitous instruments of

consumerism.

It

was but

a short step

from there

advertisements themselves in projects such as posters for

other consumer products

modern

to designing the

Dubonnet and

thus from an embrace of commodified popular

culture to participation in

its

production, and the implicit collapse of the

distinction between that culture

and Modernist

manufacturers, the posters never

made

it

art.

Unsolicited by the

to the hoardings, but these projects

were the starting points for a post-war design career that Sonia Delaunay
sustained for over
66

fifty years.

Others within the Cubist movement were more ambivalent about

relation to both popular culture and the decorative arts.

Modernism's

their manifesto

()//

Cubism published

the

in

autumn of

1912,

In

Gleizes and

Metzinger, self-appointed spokespersons for the Puteaiu group, claimed an

unashamedly

elitist

role for the avant-garde artist 'Lei the artist

mission more than he broadens

deepen

his

they urged; 'Lei the forms which he

it',

discerns and the symbols in which he Incorporates their qualities be

sufficiently

remote from the imagination

which they convey from assuming

they dismissed decorative

moment

of

On Cubisms

croud to prevent the truth

general character'.

art as 'the antithesis of

some

publication,

d'Automnc were decorating

interiors that

of the

the walls of

Correspondingly,

die picture, let

at

of their pictures at the

a suite of

furnished domestic

was one of the most ambitious collective ventures

of the

Cubist movement. Orchestrated by Andre Mare, the project that came

known as the Cubist House had

members of the Puteaux circle, including

to be

the

Lcger, the

53

later

most

involved the participation of

and Laurcncin. Comprising an entrance porch,

wr\

the

Salon

of

)uchamp brothers
room dnd

hall, living

bedroom, the ensemble was,

for

Sonia Delaunay

visitors to that years salon, as

BalBullier
Oil

1913

unmissable

on mattress canvas

room

a feature as

had been

97x336.5

the

(38X x 132 H)

previous year, and gained the

of

Cubist paintings the

Collections

group greater notoriety than ever;

two weeks after the salon opened.

Mnam/Cci/Centre
Georges Pompidou,
Paris

Roger Allard noted

that the Cubist

House had already received more

54

insults than a Cubist painting

Andre Mare and

(%54>

others

In

Cubist House, Living

Room 1912

one sense the project was

direct response to the call for a revival of decorative art

not so

much out of populism,

for that revival

however, as out of nationalism.

had expressed alarm

at

191

5,

as a

means

Raymond Duchamp-Villon, one

contributors to the Cubist House, saw the

which the supremacy

iampaigners

once reigned supreme, calling

it

international exhibition to be held in

real contest in

earlier

Frances declining international

competitiveness in an industry where

eminence. Sculptor

mentioned

of the

main

risks: 'An Initiative of

of artistic taste

for an

of regaining that pre-

is at

stake

this
.

kind

is

.1

he w rote

shortly before the house project had been decided upon; 'we shall have to be

ready to defend our once unassailable reputation'. Andre Mare thus gave
clear instructions to his co-participants to
French,

'make above

all

something

\er\

to remain within tradition'. The objects that resulted, though varied,

shared for the most part the characteristics of (hat provincial classicism that

Roger Marx and others had sought

to encourage: bright colours, simple

lines, a lack of artifice.

The
arts

project was also

campaign.

If

foreign

response to

.1

less explicit

in particular,

aspect of the decorative

ierman competition was

perceived to be threatening the reputation of French craftsmen, the entrj of

67

women

into traditionally male trades was threatening their

even their jobs. For both reasons these industries were

a field

too important to be

left,

after

were shortly to change again (as wartime mobilisation and

once more drew

women

wage

rates

ironically

and

seen

as

women. Although circumstances

to

all,

its

consequences

into the workforce), there was briefly an effort to

art. In this effort, art nouveau, the style that had

dominated the previous decade, was rejected, and its curvilinear
ornamentation criticised for its unbridled excess and overt sensuality, both,
by implication, feminine. By contrast, the features that characterised the
contents of the Cubist House simplicity, severity, vigour were seen not

re-masculinise decorative

only as classical but as masculine as well. Given this context, the project can
plausibly be interpreted, as art historian

Nancy Troy

suggests, as an effort to redefine

decorative art

itself,

and the domestic

interior

in particular, as appropriate sites for men's

artistic activity

though one

perhaps vitiated

by the participation of Marie Laurencin,

whose four painted roundels of female heads

in the living room presided like muses over
the ensemble.

In one crucial respect the Cubist House

stood

in implicit opposition,

decorative arts campaign. For

provinciality

of

however, to the
all

the

their stylistic references,

its

creators (with the possible exception of

Duchamp-Villon) were little interested in

populist gestures. The work they designed
it

for

was not inexpensive everyday ware suitable

for

mass production, but luxury ware

involving intricate ornamentation and

expensive materials such as exotic woods, for

the comfortable middle class, to
well:

whom

it

sold

many of the components of the

ensemble had been purchased before the salon

opened, by the couturier Poiret

The
of

among

others.

rejection, implicit in the Cubist House,

efforts towards the industrialisation

of

art

and the democratisation of

beauty was not only a refusal of the populist appeal, however;

amounted

to an

it

also

acknowledgement of the pressures of debate within the

As the ascendancy of gallery Cubism was

consolidated in this milieu, the elitism of the groups collective venture
marked the force of the aestheticist critique of the attempt to democratise
art, to efface the distinctions between Modernist and popular cultural
practices. Such distinctions were crucial to them, if the former were not to
be overwhelmed by, and subsumed in, the latter. Yet if the populism of

Puteaux

circle

from

1912.

decorative art was a threat to their autonomy,

the
68

rising tide

of

a commercialised,

modern urban popular

culture

mass-produced, enticing yet

disposable visual culture of the everyday

as

- was

for

some

challenge, as well

an inspiration.
Picasso's

enjoyment of popular entertainment

well

is

known,

his visit

the circus and the cinema featuring prominently in accounts of his carefree

Montmartrc.This enjoymenl was complemented

early years in

representation

in,

an increasing engagement with

registered in the paintings he

and Braque made,

the developing hermeticism of their analytic

recalled that the

two

painters,

with

how

illegible

100x65.4

Art,

Bliss

itself

the

song then on everyone's

Museum of Modern
New York. Acquired

through the

work

painting was

(39!4x25^)
The

called

at

his

mechanics' blue overalls, doffing

girlfriend

my

/( )I II.

fig.^j.

pretty

Not

bottom

the

at

of

only functioning

and thus an ironic acknowledgement

of

words

were also the opening of a popular

on canvas

Oil

Kahnweiler

when they

unflattering this almost

Zither or Guitar)

1911-12

new

half-length portrait of his

as a title within the

(Woman

!ubist style.

stencilled lettering, appeared in their work. In the winter

of 1911 12 Picasso added the words A/1

'Ma Jolie'

kind of counterpoint to

calling

woodgrain and

Pablo Picasso

found

him 'boss'. Braque came from a family of" house

and from 1911 some of the tricks of tins trade, such .is simulated
and

their caps

55

in

as a

worker'

artists liked to play the

house for their regular stipend, dressing

by, or

vernacular that was

tin

Lillie P.

From

lips.

began to use

early in 1912 he

Ripolin enamel house paint

in

some

place of his usual oils in

Bequest

and that

pictures,

radical step

May

took the

of gluing on to

56

canvas a fragment of oilcloth

Pablo Picasso
Still Life

with Chair

Caning 1912
Oil,

oilcloth

with an industriallv printed

chair-caning pattern, thereby

and pasted

inventing

or

at least, for the first

paper on canvas edged

time appropriating for art practice

with rope

the

27x35
(10*xl3*)
Musee Picasso,

technique of collage

These

Paris

(fig.56).

features were not simply gestures of affection for popular culture

or of identification with

predominantly working-class consumers,

its

however. In the post-Bloc des Gaudies, post-Moroccan

when

noted

(as

earlier) the

communities

of the artistic avant-garde

those of the working class were each turned

the consolidation of an

not

a readily available

amounted

and

on themselves And engaged

identity, such cross-identification

position. In this context, the titling of

from everyday popular

culture. But

Ma

in

was

Jolu

it

was more than

this. In

the

the close collaboration between Braque and Picasso, supported by

small circle of friends And patrons, their

character,

and

as

all

connotations

art practice \^^d a

of

it

painters' tricks.

subcultural

were reworked, acquiring private

as part of a process of distinction

mainstream

subcultures, their borrowings of motifs, materials

and behaviour from outside

to

in

to a register of the gulf that separated the private concerns of

Picasso's art

wars of

autonomous

moment,

crisis

culture. In this reworking, the

and positioning

mechanics

over:

lis.

Ripolin enamel And collaged oilcloth stood for

in relation

house
rejection
69

of artistic orthodoxies
belle

peinture associated

notion of art
patte,

of

dependent on

as

outmoded 'bohemian'

an

sartorial style,

with vacuous academic and/or fashionable

craft skills

of the

art,

and on what was known

of the

as the

or paw, of the painter.

The

pictorial

borrowings were also instrumental to their explorations of

the linguistic basis of pictorial convention, their elaboration of a system of

signs that were less securely anchored in resemblance,
tied to spatial

wooden

and in particular less

illusionism. Simulated woodgrain was a means of signifying

object or surface without positioning

were by definition

flat,

and could be read

September

one stage

of wallpaper,

imitation woodgrain,
result, Fruit Dish

the

picture surface or

Braque took

this simulation

industrially printed with

and drawing over both; the

(pasted paper).

It

in Picasso's hands, however, that

the multiple levels of

a

to a sheet of paper

on the

and Glass (fig.57), was

first papier-colle

was

on

1912

spatially; stencilled- letters

either as

as within the pictorial space. In

further, gluing a piece

it

medium

its

potential as

were realised. For where

Braque saw the

illusionistic

and

compositional implications of the

technique, Picasso understood
papier-eolle

57

how

Georges Braque

could both translate the

Fruit

discoveries

of

(fig.44) into

his

cardboard Guitar

two dimensions,

signifying transparency

and

Charcoal and printed

paper on paper

spatial

62x44.5

depth non-illusionistically, and meet

(245*

ephemerality of popular culture.

Abandoning painting almost entirely

for several months from the autumn
of 1912, he plunged into a period of
hectic experimentation with the

new medium.
Glass and Bottle of Suze (fig.58)

is

one o{ the

a series using little

first papiers-colles

that Picasso

more than newspaper and

charcoal

drawing, whose making coincided with. the outbreak of a conflict in the

Balkans that threatened to drag

full

all

Europe into

war.

The newspapers were

made deliberate and

of this, and in this series Picasso appears to have

repeated use of headline references to

its

daily developments. Here, the

newspaper cuttings that cover half of the picture surface, encircling a blue
paper oval (standing non-illusionistically for a round cafe table-top seen at
an angle) consist of reports from the battlefront and an account of

These cuttings
demonstration against the war held in Paris by
form the formal ground, and their contents the figurative background of
events, for a private life symbolised not only by the objects on the cafe table
a white paper (i.e. clear) bottle of the popular aperitif, Suze, and a glass,
the former casting a black paper shadow but also by the esoteric manner
the Socialists.

70

x 17H)

Private Collection

the challenge posed by the vitality and

made, and one of

Dish and Glass

1912

in

which these

are depicted, their inaccessibility to

anyone outside

of the

subcultural group. Foregrounded by their position in the centre oi the

image, the contours of these objects are defined by

further cutting; this

is

taken not from war reports, however, but from the serialised romantic novel

The combination of visual and verbal skjiis thus reads as

juxtaposition of indeed, a dislocation between that discourse of
of the day.

public

58
Pablo Picasso
Glass

and

Bottle of

Suze 1912
Pasted papers,

gouache and charcoal

65.4x50.2

(25^x19^)
Washington University
Gallery of Art, St Louis.
University Purchase,

Kende Sale Fund, 1946

events and this private world oi creative play and affective experience;

dislocation that symbolised that existing

between the

artistic avant-gardes

more

generally, as

and working-class

have noted,

politics.

This semiotic play around the border between public .\n^] yvw.nc culture*
and experiences characterised not onl) the Balkan war series 'nit much of
Picasso's experimentation with papier-coUi through 1913.

hey reveal his

71

delight in the

way the medium could,

in his

hands, interweave with his

arcane formal explorations a multiplicity of reference

via scraps of

newspaper, wallpaper, cigarette packets and other printed ephemera

everyday
these

life in all its variety,

papiers-colles

yields accounts

of murders, suicides and burglaries

alongside witty and often scabrous word- and image-play.

many

to

banality and often, squalor. Close reading of

Common

to

of them, and increasingly to those of early 1914, was reference to what

separated these interwoven orders of experience, art and the everyday,

namely the conventions

Juxtaposing drawing
witty Pipe and

Sheet of

of materials,

styles,

playing with references to the

Music (fig.59)

of act itself.
frame as in the

context and language

and,

in the spring of 1914,

opening them

into the three-dimensional space of the viewer, as in the Tate Gallery's

Still Life

them

(fig.4),

little

Picasso called into question those conventions, and through

the status of an art dependent on them, replacing this with an idea of

art as imagination. Pierre Daix's observation

about the

first papiers-colles is

applicable to these works: 'Never before had the painter so completely

destroyed the mystery of his work, never before did he present himself to
the scrutiny of the spectator, not only without the tricks of the trade, but

using means that are within everyone's grasp.

asserted his

72

power

as a creator, as a

And

never before had a painter

poet in the strongest sense of the word.'

Conclusion: After Cubism

'I

never saw them again', said Picasso of Braque and Detain,

quoted

at the

Avignon station

in

August

in that

remark

this

book, after he had said goodbye to them

at

1914;

which was to say that with the outbreak

of

beginning of

war and the general mobilisation of French military forces, the

companionships of the previous decade had irretrievably ended, and the
Cubist adventure was
It

59

Pasted papers,

oil

and

26'/)

Museum

Arts,

pictorial ideas; Gris

Cubism

51.4x66.6
The

This was both true and

false.

movement, though

as a

a force to

severely depleted by

be reckoned with

after.

in the Parisian

Picasso himself continued to

extend, in three dimensions as well as two, the range auA complexity of his

charcoal

over.

because Cubism

avant-garde through the war years and

and Sheet of

Music 1914

(20!*

false,

the mobilisation, continued as

Pablo Picasso
Pipe

was

years.

and Metzinger evolved,

that was a point of reference in aesthetic debate for the next several

New

and innovative

of Fine

Houston. Gift of

Mr and Mrs Maurice

Rivera,

.\nd codified, a version of

among

others

artists

adopted

Henri Laurens, [acques Lipchitz, Diego

.\nd

extended the

style

and

its

implications. Indeed, as Christopher Green argues, post-1914

McAshan

some
But

respects

this

is

more important

another story.

he war was

combatant nations, dividing

and
the

social, life into 'before'

components

of the

to the history oi

.ill

and

wartime

pictorial

ubism was

Modernism than

watershed

in

pre-1014.

in the histories of

its

aspects of their cultural, as well as political

'after'

,\nd

August

1014.

and although main

of

post-war conjunctures weir present

in

the new circumstances threw fresh divisions into

that of the ovant-purrre,

o
relief, and old ones into the shade.

In

through ( ubism whole - was no longer

fault-line that ran

and the many milieux of the Parisian avant-garde

as a

~3

between salon and gallery orientations, but between combatants and non-

combatants

Kenneth

shown, had

its

cultural

dimension. As nationalism secured the terms

in

which

in a conflict that, as

as well as military

Silver has

Modernism, and Cubism its main exemplar, were to be assessed, a mood of

retrenchment and reaction came to dominate cultural discourse in Paris.
But that Cubism was over, and not just different, was also in a profound
sense true. This was not only because some of its original members had
already drifted away, and its collective momentum Allard s 'Cubist empire'
had in consequence already been dissipated, but more lmportantlybecause the assumptions that had governed its pictorial inquiries, whether
those of salon or gallery Cubism, were being called into question by artists

across Europe. In place

of an exploration of the

linguistic

character of pictorial conventions of representation

and conceptual

whether

in the

on the experience of urban modernity, or of critical

resistance to the seductions of its popular culture a generation of artists
who had themselves been formed by that exploration were making more
radical assertions either of the autonomy, or the social instrumentality,
of art.
Within a year of each other, on the eve of the war, painters across Europe
Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands, Wassily Kandinsky in Germany,
Kasimir Malevich in Russia, among others were, like Sonia and Robert
interests of reflection

Delaunay, crossing the threshold of abstraction, some placing painting in

74

the service of a

more thorough-going idealism than any Cubist had

proposed, others insisting on

inescapable perceptual And material basis.

its

In cities where revolution or the possibility of

debate,

art's role in

agenda. When Vladimir Tatlin returned to

constructions oi Picasso and Braque

made

then

it

had politicised avant-garde

a new world was on the

building as well as representing

Pans, the

both indebted to

(fig.6o) were

Moscow

and orthodox materials,

conventions of
life,

like

like Picasso's Still-Life

fig.4

but also

an invisible picture-frame or pedestal, from the

own

his

house

in

'real

same

rested. In the

had been made, repeated And elaborated

Puteaux. In nominating an everyday object,

work

Complex Corner Relief

1915

Oi still-

of the

materials in

Marcel

year,

in

discussions

without materially altering

of art

at

a bottle-rack, as a
it

in

the first of a series of ReodymoJes

(fig.61) he was not only, like Picasso.
any way

Reconstruction by
Martin Chalk
Iron,

world

to their logical conclusion the assertions of the coiiceptu.il

basis of art that

60

beyond the

words, they were an implicit rejection of the very

conception of art on which Picasso's work

Duchamp took

real

As

viewer, these reliefs stood for nothing but themselves.

Vladimir Tatlin

two dimensions

of

space that continued to separate that work

a fictivc

real space', inTatlin's

departure

a radical

from them. Stepping beyond not only the constraints

seeing the

constructions he

relief

And

theirs

in 1914 after

1979-82

rejecting the idea of art as craft but also,

aluminium, zinc

and mixed media

tinlike

78.8x152.4x76.2

him, proposing

art as idea as art

in itself.

(31 x 60 x 30)

Courtesy AnnelyJuda

Yet

gestures such

if

Cubism

these called

.is

Fine Art

into question, they were

made

in a

conjuncture of war and revolution,

61

Bottlerack 1914

which Modernism was an integral

Galvanised iron

that conjuncture ended, and with

59x36.8
1

14'/) at

moment

of profound threat to the social order of

Marcel Duchamp

(23 / x

part.
it

When

the

exchange between revolutionary politics and

base

Private Collection

the potentially revolutionary aesthetics of Cubism, the achievements of

the latter were fundamental

Modernism

that

fashioning, in

would represent and mediate

twentieth century. In film and theatre,

Cubism's insistence on the

reality has

been

all

in

the arts,

all,

Cubism's influence on the

latter

came

at

production

largely

from

a\]

ubism before

one of them, Raymond Duchamp-

member

circle.

His experiments

death

in

the war. related

and were closer

all

onh

in spirit to

killed at the front;

been

in sculptural

was

- though

unexpected quarter.

There were few sculptors even associated with

\ illon,

of

times, of principle.

painting and sculpture

\n

the social hie of the

role of representation in the

however,

lexicon for

music and the written word.

cardinal point of reference, indeed,

This has been so above

1014.

of the

and onh

Puteaux

form, tragically abbreviated by his

loosely to the concerns of his painter friends,

I fmberto Boccioni, also
Modernist sculpture would h

those of the Futurist

had these two

lived,

the richer. But most of the cai

ing-

and modelling-based

conventions And techniques with which they worked had ah. ady been swept
aside by Picasso's iconoclasm.

lis relief

constructions, growing out of

lis

75

experimentation with pictorial space, opened up a rich vein of possibilities

from Laurens and Lipchitz, through

and Louise Nevelson, David Smith and Anthony Caro has
been deeply and productively worked. The technique of collage that Picasso
and Braque introduced has had an even wider progeny, its juxtapositions of
for innovation in sculpture, which,

Naum Gabo

second-hand images and materials enabling (among other things)

explorations of

and

assaults

practice along a broad front,

Postmodernism.

And both

on

the

boundaries and status of

from Dada through Pop

the constructions

together with other features of Cubist

style,

fine art

art to

and collage technique, -

have continued

down

the

century to inform the work of the most innovative architects, from Le

Corbusier to contemporaries such

The
with

all

as

Daniel Liebeskind and Frank Gehry.

bracketing together of these three names underlines the fact that, as

such seminal movements, different

generations, have appropriated

some of which have enriched

artists,

groupings, even

and interpreted Cubism

its

in different ways,

meanings, while others have narrowed them

to suit the requirements of the cultural mainstream. In recent years, the

enthusiasms and achievements of Cubists other than Picasso and Braque

have

come

increasingly to be

history recognised.

It is

historical significance

76

acknowledged and the complexity of

important to hold on to these insights

and the lessons of Cubism

are to

if

its

the

be fully understood.

1
<

Photographic

Copyright

Credits

Credits

trustees, National

Courtesy Annely fuda Fine

Art (60);

1998 Tin. An

Institute

of Chicago (40);
Museum of Art

Baltimore
(8);

Bibliotheque Nationale

British

(16, 61);

RIBA:

Architectural Library,

iallery

Richard Carafelli

works reproduced

photo Martin Buhler

Basel:
18,

(1);

Kunstsammlung

OfFentliche

27

he Board of

Museums and

on

Galleries

Walker Art

Limited

Gallery)

11

Christies

Haags

Gemeentemuseum
Walter Klein,
(35);

1998 c/o
(21, $7);

)usseldorf

Krollcr-Muller

Museum, Otterlo

Metropolitan
Art,
I

i98iThe

Museum

of

New York (13);

Arts (24,

Museet,
(26);

36);

Barbicr-Miiller,

Geneva: photo
(10);

Moderna

SKM, Stockholm

Muscc

P. A.

Fcrraz/mi

Museu de Arte

The

lossaka (30);

Museum

Houston

(23;

of line Arts,

(6);

[ean-( ilaude Planchet (32);

9,

42, 44,

Board

Hichamp,

Metzinger:

and

Londoi

)\( s.

AI )\( IP,

Pans

Robert
I

Soma

)elaunay,

>elauna)

L&MSei

<
:

Matisse:
I

lenri

Succession

Matisse

Phototheque des Musees

P.

le

photo

Yille de Pans:

Pcrrain (7); Pushkin

(15);

RMN: photo R.G.

Ojeda

Picasso:

Picasso

DACS

Succession

RMN

Museum
(17,45);

(29, 56);

Tate

iallery

All other copyright

The

artist

works

or estatt of the

Photographic Department
4, 19,28, 51,49,

si

Museum
photo Gravdon Wood
Philadelphia

of Art:
59,

The Solomon R,

Guggenheim Foundation,

New York:
I

Laid

photo David

(43, 48);

StedelijkVan

Abbcmuseum, Eindhoven
(52);

Washington University

of Art

National Gallery,

London

du Mnam-Cci, Pans: photo

The Museum
Houston: photo

New York (5,

Iris,

B.V Amsterdam

41);

Du Brock (59); 1998

The Museum of Modern
54);

of Fine .Arts,

T.R.

Art,

34,46,

du Mnam-Cci, Pans: photo

de Sao

Paulo Assis Chateaubriand:

photo Luiz

Pans

Mnam50, ^

Phototheque des collections

de

he Minneapolis Institute

of'

Phototheque

)erain,

jlei/es,

Phototheque des collections

(zz);

Cci,

Braque,
(

Philippe Migeat;

Kunstmuseum, Bern: Photo

Peter Lauri (14);

25

des collections du

Beeldecht Amstelvcen

publishers apologia

omissions that ma\

inadvertanth have been made.

Merseyside

[3);

own

Trustees of the National

photo A.C. Cooper ^Colour

Images

been

ffort h.iN

trace the cop) righi

de France (2); Bridgeman

Art Library

of Art, Washington: photo

( 5 8)

of

77

Further
Reading

Duncan, Carol,

'Virility

Domination

Early

in

and

Spate, Virginia,

Twentieth-Century Vanguard

Painting in Paris

Painting', in The Aesthetics of

Oxford 1979

Cambridge

Power,

Golding, John, Cubism:

art-historical literature

on Cubism,

as

might be

and movement,

style

interpretation,

assessment of

19OJ1914,

London

and

significance,

Movements and Reaction

the century, however. This

and London 1987

to

Is Corbusier,

New

1991

Cubism

1916-1928,

in

Trench

The Popular

Duchamp and

Avant-Cardistn,

New Haven

and London

'994

is

Lcighten, Patricia, 'Picasso's

of

Collages and the Threat of

of

Jeffrey,

Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, "

written from the perspective

the intention

Modernism and

Haven and London

Weiss,

New Haven

Art,

a social history

Nancy J.,

Decorative Arts in Trance: Art

Nouveau

1959, 1968

Tunnies: Modern

its

have varied over the course of

introduction to

the

Green, Christopher, Cubism

its

and the
its

19101914,

is

Approaches to

extensive.

History and an Analysis

expected of such a pivotal

)rphism:

[993

Troy,

The

The Evolution of Non-Tigurative

art,

with

of presenting

broad and historically

War', Art
1985,

Bulletin, vol.67,

Dec.

pp.653-72

informed understanding of
the movement's development

and achievements.

A more

extended presentation of

may

the Politics

Modernism: Art and

Garde

in Paris

Invention of Collage,

the

New Haven

and London 1992

of

the

Avant-

/905 1924

Haven and London

Futurism and

Painting: Cubism,

it

be found in this author's

Cubism and

Poggi, Christine, In Defiance of

Reff,

(New

Theodore, 'The

Reaction against Fauvism:

The Case of

1998).

Braque', in

Several other authors are

William Rubin, and Lynn

mentioned

Zelevansky

in the present text;

their works, plus additional

Braque:

writings providing useful

1992

(eds.), Picasso and

Symposium,

New York

starting points for further

reading on Cubism, are listed

Robbins, Daniel, 'Jean

below.

Metzinger: At the Center of

Cubism',

and Troy, Nancy

Blau, Eve
Architecture

J.,

of Iowa

and Cubism,

Montreal, Cambridge, Mass.,

in Jean Metzinger in

exh. cat., University

Retrospect,

Museum of Art,

Iowa City 1985

and London 1997

Rosenblum, Robert, 'Picasso

Bois, Yve- Alain,

and the Typography of

'The

William Rubin and Lynn

in John Golding and

Roland Penrose (eds.), Picasso

Zelevansky

18811973,

Semiology of Cubism',

Braque:

in

(eds.), Picasso and

Symposium,

Cubism',

London

1973

New York
Rubin, William, 'From

1992

Narrative to "Iconic" in

Chave,

Anna C, 'New

Encounters with

Pes Demoiselles

d Avignon: Gender, Place,

and

the Origins of Cubism', Art

Bulletin, vol.76,

no.4, 1994,

Picasso:

The

in Bread

and Truitdish on

Buried Allegory

and the Role of

d'Avignon ',

Dec.

1983,

a Table

Pes Demoiselles

Art Bulletin, vol.65,

pp.61549

pp.596-611
Silver,

Kenneth

E., Esprit de

Daix, Pierre and Rosselet,

Corps: The Art of

the

Joan, Picasso: The Cubist Years

Avant-Garde and

the Tirst

19OJ1916,

London and

New

War,

Parisian

World

1914 192."), London 1989

York 1979

78

Index

fig. 1

The Viaduct

1 ;

36;

fig.24;

39;

fig.27

at l.'hstaque

StSeverin

and

Window on

Violin

Pitcher

hg.36;

49;
the

Gleizes, All

Cn

44.

601,62:

(Picasso

Part,

fig.18

25;

On Cubism

Third Motif

Woman

Abundance (Le Fauconnier) 29,

fig.21

51,33,35,44,49,51;

The (Picasso)

Accordionist,

56,

Action franchise

22,24,58;

66;

fig.53;

golden section

Came lots du

Prisms

66;

Prose on th

R01

32

)elaunay) 66;

Roche-Cuyon

Cubism
Cubism

analytic

see

hermetic

Jehanne of Prance 623;

Apollinaire, Guillauxne

10,

28, 434, 46, 62

architecture

76

x/anne, Raul 20-1, 11, 24,

Rathers

43, 49, 59;

fig.25

1314,15,18,

have,

Anna

City,

59;

Soma

Ral Hullier
66;

fig.io

)elaunay)

figs.56-8

movement

Balkan war 701

Ballets

Russes

Barres,

Maurice

Rathers

(Cezanne)

1516,21;

nW?m(Derain)

fig.9

16,18;

Bcrgson, Henri 29, 345, 46,

33,41;

Bcrnhcim-Jeune brothers
Bloc des Gaudies

Nude

Boccioni,

16,

Ronheurde

and

Vivre

fishes

Braque,

67-8;

r6

(Braque)

ieorges 7, 14, 202,

25-6,36,43,52,55-61,

6970,73,75,76;
26,43;

Rottle

Castle at I a Roche -Cuyon

3940;

fig.26;

and Class 70;

at I .'hstatjue

large

Fruit Dish

72

art

$89,

18, ><. >4. 61

64

)ominu]iu

Sigmund

Jacob,

19

Braque

Mai

lapomstes

20

18

fig.57

14-15. u,

31.

kahnwcilcr.

technical

47;

lenn

12. 14.

25-6,

Kandinsky.Wassir)

Kant, ImmanueJ

Gabo,

7, 28,

fig.46;

First Disi

>2. 96,

)elaunay

Manifesto 49

53

1^

cam 66;

Tower 47, 48-9.

423,

Ingres, |ean-Augustr-

^3

64-6, 67

The City

44.

galler\

Naum
ubisin

fig.52;

Gauguin, Paul
C

5$

9;

fig.3;

Mandora 39.41,60;

Homage to BUriot

fig.28;

Three Nudes

Drama 710.11.66;

66;

jo, 54,

Eiffel

s-.

fig.42;

10;

iconic signs

42

59;

The Cardiff

fig.14;

f'g-4s;

Dish and Gloss

47-52, 59-63, 64-6, 74-5:

Houses

fig. 12;

Vlaunay. Robert

fig. 57;

Cuitar 56;

28, j6, 44,

18, 22,

1415,

Delacroix, Eugene

auconmer

f\

6970

of

Founding Manifesto

decorat ive

Ebn

%3

Freud,

Dada 76

22,31,39;

Nude 202;

Man with a

lauvism

TirstDisc (Robert

Bruit

>ecaudin, Michel

fig.29

Impressionism

9;

fig.54

David, Jacques-Louis

lorta da

40:

Hunter Le

50-1,52;

Exposition Universelle (1900

70;

fig.19;

I he

fig.35

////, /

Delaunay) 66

31

(Marc and others)

)aix, Pierre

fig.14

the I

Picasso

Prisms (Soma

Futurism
75;

on

$3

62

fig- '5

term

of

66

lourcade, Olivier

EiffelTower (Delaunay) 47,

26,

fishes

14

lantin-Latour, Henri

(Picasso) 22,49;

Robert

to Rlcriol

)elaunav

Houses at UEstaaut Braque

enamel paints, use

fig.30

Cubist House

(Matisse)

(l)uchamp^)

Gypsy Girl with

Cubism, use

75

42,58

lomage

fig-4

31

Cottage and Trees (Ia Rue-des-Rois)

fig- 8

fig.61

and

41;

Durand-Ruel, Paul

48-9,52.59;

1415,

43-4,556,59,61,69

67-8, 75-6

Electric

fig.19

Rottlerack

hermetic < ubism

fig.6i

Mandolin (Christine Nibson)

14

28, 65

1819;

Umberto

Bois, Yves-Alain

43;

15,

('Souvenir de Riskra')

(Matisse)

b--t;

45,

fig.61;

75;

22, u,3o;

55

consumerism

rot

t:.

41;

Duncan, Carol 1920

fig.6o

constructions 1011,75;

George 54

Berkeley,

'

26,

/ louses

Corot, Jean-Baptistc-Camille

48,52

Rottle

75;

conception

41-^;

Girl with Mandolin

20, 556, 58

Complex Corner Relief (Tatlm)

32

Picasso

Chrism-.,

colour theory 612

18

fig.6

Rlue

Cubist

collective nature of

fig. 5

for

flg.2o

Rottlerack

45,

Guitarist

18

Duchamp-Villon, Raymond

6972, 76;

Maquette

58-9,70; fig.44

40, 41. 6n

^9,

Readymades 75;

3246

59,

S2

fig.9

Diaghilev, Sergei

fig.46

54

Portrar

7, [6, 19, 28, --,:

16, 18;

28,43;

collage

jus. fuan

Cuitar,

Duchamp, Marcel

classicism

S s

Vr.im. Andri

diagonal grid

The (Robert Delaunay)

fig.

Rathers

Chevreul, Lugcnc 62

66-7, 73-4

hi rii.

58;

hnstoplu

12-22. 24.

Denis, Maurice
I

Dressing Iable. The (Picasso)

chiaroscuro 41,43

18;

fig.7

16;

19

19-20,26,29,31,33,43-4,

Babangi mask

1516, 21;

Three Rathers

fig.6;
(

avant-gardism

56.58;

I. title

fig.51

rati

inaCafi 54-s: fig4U

(Picasso

25,26,29,33,36,39,40,41,

/li/w of Phocion, The (Poussin)

36;

Trans-Siberian and of

the

mask

Jehanne of

fig.51;

Demoiselles d 'Avignon.

Prose on

iogh. Vincent \.in

fig.50

fig.26

Cendrars, Blais< 623;

74

I title

623;

France

Electrk

Simultaneous Contrasts 62. 66;

(Braque) 3940;

34 5, 67,

7, 28,

and of

Siberian

fig.52

Caro, Anthony 76
Castle at La

fig.io

Roger

Allard,

Hullier

iaillaux,

1819,

16,

with Pi

7, 9. ie\, 59,

623, 646, 745; Ral

42, 33

African influences

Soma

Calmette, Gaston 7-9

The Cardiff Team Robert

fig.43

58;

Mine Joseph 7-9

)elaunav.

manifi

path Metzingei

61, 62, 66;

fig.49

43,62,745

abstraction

445; E

Ion

Open Simultaneous!

Rread and Fruit Dish on a Table

ape.

,VW5

Polttnal

ug.i;

lehry,

,.

\\.

rank

geometrj
(

7, 12-

55-9, 61, 68, 74

>

iiotto

Glass t

casso

auien,

Laurens, Hero

701;

79

I0
Le Fauconnier, Henri 7,28,

L^

J3-5. 44-

I^gtw^^^

29,31, 33,

gfflMMW MliS

3 9999 03667 257 2

neo-Impressionism

43, 44,

The Hunter 501,52;

Fernand

nco-Symbolism 44

Nm^5 hi

7, 28, 29, 35,

AWfs m

44, 4950, 67;

/braf 29, 356, 40;

Wedding 512;

//:c

35-

Fora/ ( Leger )

//)f

4;

29

On

69, 70;

67-8.75

Rabannikoff, Maroussia 28

16

Cubism (Gleizes and

Raynal, Maurice 46,

18

Lipchitz, Jacques 73, 76

J9

Romains, Jules 489,52;

56, 58,

49,52,55-61,69-72,73,75,

26, 28,

40, 56, 58

ZTk' Accordionist

76;

545;

fig.41

Guitar (Braque)

56;

fig.42

Bread and Truit Dish on

a Table

25;

59, 41,

&&

d 'Avignon

60;

fig.28

Olympia

13;

Les Demoiselles

5>

izzz, 24, 29,

26, 28, 43;

Table

fig.20;

701

Glass and Bottle of Suze

16

Mare, Andre; Cubist House

67-8;

fig.

Marinetti,

54

FilippoTommaso;

fig.58;

Guitarist

413;

fig.

Houses on

the Hill,

32

36,

The Dressing

fig.5;

56,58;

Manet, Edouard

HortadaEbro 40;

fig.29;

'Founding Manifesto of

'Ma Jolie' (Woman with Zither

Futurism' 1415,31,47

of Guitar)

69;

Maquette

for Guitar 589,

Marx, Roger

65,

Matisse, Henri
Blue

Nude

67
16,

1819, 2 &>

('Souvenir de Biskra')

16,1819;

fig.8;

Bonheurde

Vivre 16

32

Maurrass, Charles

32

Mctzinger, Jean

52, 55, 73;

Li/> w///>

On

44,

Cubism

(manifesto, with Gleizes)

67;

55;

with Teaspoon)

fig.39;

49,52;

52

Two Nudes 44,

Pip?

48

245;

fig.17;

Women 24;

fig.16

Raymond

Drama (Robert

fig.

11,

80

^2 3, 45,

53,

678,

54;

(Gris)

Poussin, Nicolas

la

34, 36;

and Pitcher (Braque)

Vlaminck, Maurice de
Vollard,

7,

289,

11,

Ambroisc

[9

14

55,

Wedding (Leger)

Weiss, Jeffrey

54-5

Salon des Independants

20, 28,

39;

31,

74
Section d'Or 46,

7, 14,

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Window on

the

512;

fig.38

31

City No.

(Robert

Delaunay) 601,62;

35,47,656

fig.48

Windows Open Simultaneously

53

sculpture 756

(TirstPart, Third Motif)

Seated Nude

(Robert Delaunay) 61,62,

41,44;

(1909 10) (Picasso)

66;

fig.31

Serusier, Paul

Woman

33

Shchukin, Sergei
Silver,

12

J5J

52,

62, 66;

fig. 50

Pcau de l'Ours

756

arfd colour

mind, concept of
12, 18

stencilling 69, 70;

Still Life

Still Life

589, 70;

61

Gertrude

29,

WorldWarl

Smith, David 76
la

woodgrain, simulated 69, 70

613

Simultaneous Contrasts (Sonia

Societe de

fig.49
with Phlox (Gleizes)

women 1920,28,646,68

Kenneth 74

simultaneity 48,

fig.55

(1914) (Picasso) 7,

10-11,72,75;

fig.40

Postmodernism 76
18

7, 16, 18, 28,

44, 46, 47-52,

Salon de

Stein,

Portrait of Pablo Picasso

74
Naturalism

Cubism

34,

52, 535,

5960

fig.27

34,41,46,67
salon

56, 58,
Violin

Salon d'Automnc

states of

populism 646, 6770

nationalism

fig.36

49;

Salmon, Andre 20

spatial illusionism

66;

(Braque)

fig.24

viewpoints, multiple

Spate, Virginia 61

Pop art 76

74

Viaduct at L'Estaque, The

(Robert Delaunay)

space, real

fig.33

49,52;

the Bievre near

36;

St Scvcrin

19

68

Two Nudes (Metzinger) 44,

Poiret.Paul 68

Nancy

fig.13

Delaunay)

36;

Delaunay) 710,

modernolatry 4750, 62
Pict

C7w!r Caning 69;

fig.59

72;

Political

74, 75

5////

<W 5/wf M5if (Picasso)

Poincare,

fig.33

Modernism

fig.4;

Studyfor 'Carnival

at the Bistro'

ZTira'
-j,

Mirbeau, Octave; The 628-E 8

Mondrian,

fig.56;

(1914) 7,

Three Dutch Girls

Tea-time (Le Gouter)

(Woman

Still Life

1011,72,75:

7, 28, 34,

Seated

fig.59;

Nude (190910) 41,44;

fig.31;

Mauclair, Camille

49-50,

Music 72;

zz;

Bicetre

fi^.n

Trocadero Museum, Paris

22, 49, 59,

The Banks of

36

(Braque) 20;

Women (Picasso) 24;

Troy,

48

Rubin, William 25

16,

fig.55;

Pipe and Sheet

fig.44;

70;

unanime

Rosenblum, Robert 43

65;

16;

fig. 1

Cottage

fig. 18;

(La Rue-des-Bois)

Trees

22,49;

Mandora (Braque)

56, 58;

fig.43;

and

33,534

Rousseau, Henri

5960

Picasso, Pablo 7, 14, 256, 43,

Malcvich, Kasimir 74

Man with a

52,535,

Vie

Three Nudes
Three

73

brush work 202,29,

perspective, multiple

69;

fig-55

Diego

Riviere, Jacques

La

(Cezanne)

Three Dutch Girls (Picasso)

36

67, 14

4i52

with

%*9

52-3,55;

rhythmic simultaneity 623

Rivera,

passage

'Ma folic' (Woman with Zither

Cafe (Qr\s)

figs. 57,

58

Paris

of Guitar) (Picasso)

702;

59,

(Woman

n g-7

Reft, Theodore
papier-colle

22, 52

Complex

(Metzinger)

Three Bathers

realism 43

representation of 62

Tea-time (Le Gouter)

Teaspoon)

fig.61

Liebeskind, Daniel 76

Mallarme, Stephane

54, 55-

Readymades (Duchamp^) 75;

Mctzinger) 67
Orientalism

lighting, inconsistent

59

55, 59,

Corner Relief 75; fig.6o

Olympia (Manet)

46

%55

in a

456,

46

33,

Tatlin, Vladimir 75;

Lhote, Andre 54

Man

synthetic Cubism

circle

52. 56,

58-9

Symbolism

fig.51

on

Treatise

lettering, stencilled

light,

'

Delaunay)

63;

fig.17

symbolic signs 423,

(Cendrars and Soriia

Puteaux

22

at the Bistro'

(Picasso) 24-5;

fig. 38

Leonardo da Vinci;
Painting

Studyfor 'Carnival

Ittlejenan^^^Btotue

numerical systems 456

fig.22;

36

25
th^iTmm^Sjhertan and of

Nevelson, Louise 76

fig.37

Leger,

The Ashes of Phocion

59 61
j

fig.21;

KUbLIL LlbHAHY

\l

<

fig.4

with Chair Caning

(Picasso) 69; fig.56

51

7,51,68,73,75

BAKES &

Movements

This series introduces the

twentieth-century

art.

Modern Art

in

most important

Each book

JinfsiKMiJIiKJKSJnlSmSJSnk

is illustrated

works

chiefly in colour with

from the Tate Gallery and other major collections around the world.

Cubism, perhaps the seminal movement

of the

most complex. Divided between the annual public

network of private
of

the

for the arts of the twentieth century,

galleries,

between French and immiqrant

decade before the outbreak

epoque'

of

war

in

exhibition

was

also one

and the emerainc

:he product

artists

1914. Behind the

le

of

'la

be

France was torn by inter-class and international tensions, caught betweei

excitement over the experience of modernity and anxiety about

David Cottinqton describes

artistic

its

consequences.

avant-qarde, and

Cubism

formed by that turbulent and complex moment. Analysing paintings by Picasso, Braque,

Robert and Sonia Delaunav and

le

of pictorial representation

modernitv, and of

the interests both of reflection of the experience

critical resi

story of Art at Falmouth Collegi

)avid Cottinqi

'ith

in

traces their exploration of

61 illustrations.

Also available

in

FUTURISM

Richard Humphreys

the series:

MINIMALISM David Batchelor

MODERNISM

Charles Harrison

POST-IMPRESSIONISM Belinda Thomson

REALISM James Malpas

SURREALISM

Fiona Bradley

CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
ISBN 0-521-64610-3.