Cubism

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CUBISM

Cubism is the name given to one of the seminal movements in modern art in the early twentieth century. There were two groups of cubists who interacted in various ways. The Spaniard Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), French artist Georges Braque (1882–1963), and their circle—including the poets/art critics Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) and André Salmon (1881–1969)—congregated in the Bateau Lavoir (Washboat), a building on the slopes of Montmartre where Salmon, Picasso, and the Spanish artist Juan Gris (1887–1927) had their studios. The second cubist group frequently met in Puteaux, a town on the outskirts of Paris where other key figures lived, including French artist Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) and the Duchamp-Villon brothers: Gaston Duchamp (pseudonym Jacques Villon, 1875–1963), Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876–1918), and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). The French painter Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) moved between these two circles. Metzinger lived in Montmartre from 1906 to 1912, and from 1907 on he frequented Picasso's studio and befriended Braque, poet Max Jacob (1876–1944), Salmon, and Apollinaire. In December 1908, Metzinger exhibited paintings alongside those of Braque and Picasso at Wilhelm Uhde's small Notre-Dame-des-Champs gallery.

These two groups differed in their exhibition practices and their choice of subject matter. The Puteaux group regularly exhibited paintings of epic and sometimes allegorical subjects in Paris's large public venues, such as the spring Salon des Indépendants and the fall Salon ?Automne. They became the public face of the cubist movement and are frequently referred to as the salon cubists. The critic Roger Allard identified Henri Le Fauconnier (1881–1946), Gleizes, and Metzinger as the progenitors of a new movement in his review of the 1910 Salon d'Automne. At the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, these artists proclaimed their allegiance to cubism by exhibiting together, with the addition of French painters Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), Marie Laurencin (1885–1956), and Fernand Léger (1881–1955). Typical works by these cubists include Delaunay's Eiffel Tower (1911), Gleizes's Chartres Cathedral (1912), Léger's The Wedding (1911), and Le Fauconnier's Abundance (1910–1911). Paintings by the salon cubists were frequently monumental in scale and

depicted public events or well-known edifices identified with modern Paris or the history of France. These subjects sometimes had a political inflection: for instance, Gleizes's paintings of Gothic cathedrals in 1912–1913 registered his allegiance to the French Celtic League, while Le Fauconnier's Abundance is an allegorical symbol not only of France but of French Catholicism.

In the heyday of cubism, Picasso, Braque, and Gris used a private dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979). From 1909 to 1913, Braque and Picasso developed their version of cubism in close collaboration, with small-scale still lifes and intimate half-length portraits as their preferred motifs. By 1912 Kahnweiler had signed exclusive contracts with these artists, restricting them from exhibiting anywhere in Paris other than their studios or his gallery. Kahnweiler also campaigned to exhibit his artists' work outside of Paris, where it was shown together with many of the salon cubists, for instance in exhibitions before 1914 in Lyons, Amsterdam, Munich, Budapest, Moscow, London, New York, Chicago, and Boston. Before 1912, the work of Picasso and Braque was also visible at Uhde's gallery, where Picasso had a show in May 1910; another Picasso exhibition appeared at Ambroise Vollard's gallery in December 1910–February 1911. Additionally, Braque until spring 1909 and Gris until 1912 exhibited their emerging cubism at the public salons.

A "second wave" of foreign artists joined the movement after 1911, including painters Louis Marcoussis (1883–1941), Alice Halicka (1895–1975), Francis Picabia (1879–1953), and sculptors Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964), Henri Laurens (1885–1954), and Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973). In 1912 Braque and Picasso took cubism in a new direction with their invention of collage. They now used glue to paste the detritus of everyday life, including newsprint, advertisements, cheap wallpaper, and other cut items into their cubist still lifes. Among their peers the Italian futurists took up the practice in late 1912, followed by Gris in early 1914. Scholars have also debated the political significance of Picasso's usage of collage, differing over whether the newspaper clippings in works like his Glass and Bottle of Suze (November 1912) indicate his anti-militarist opposition to the threat of war and the anarchist import of Picasso's avant-gardism, or his assimilation of such reportage into an artistic medium devoid of ideological punch.

What united the cubists was a revolt against the conventions of academic illusionism. Braque's Violin and Palette (1909) is exemplary of such cubist deconstruction. This painting shows a table with sheet music on a small music stand and a violin resting on a green cloth; behind this, a green curtain hangs on the right and an artist's palette hangs from a nail. Yet Braque makes no attempt to paint a naturalist rendition of the subject. The table itself is not viewed in perspectival recession, but has been tilted up nearly parallel to the picture plane. The edges of the violin are distorted and discontinuous with each other; one of the shoulders of the violin is rounded, the other quite cubic. The sound-holes appear as free-floating transitions between the disjunct upper and lower halves, while, even more obviously, the strings break in the middle over the bridge. And whereas these different areas seem generally to be seen from above, the neck and scroll of the violin are viewed at a more radical angle, twisting into an expressive arabesque at the top. Myriad details of light and shade contradict each other, with shadows cast for example onto the left side of the violin's neck, the right side of the lower right section, and none cast at all by the strings. Light is treated as arbitrarily as form, and chiaroscuro—the use of shadow and light to describe volume—no longer serves to help define the three dimensionality of the objects or their location in space. At the top of the canvas the highly legible nail and its cast shadow underscore by way of contrast Braque's bold departure from the painterly methods associated with the naturalist tradition.

The salon cubists worked in a comparable manner, but they alone justified their technique in terms of non-Euclidean geometry and the fourth dimension, and related theories of human cognition and subjectivity, most notably the conventionalism of mathematician Jules-Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), and notions of psychological time developed by the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941) and American Pragmatist William James (1842–1910). Interest in these thinkers emerged before 1910 among those artists and writers who attended the weekly soirées of the American writer and collector Gertrude Stein (1874–1946). Concurrently, poets and critics associated with the salon cubists openly articulated their debt to Bergson. Beginning in 1910 the salon cubists and their literary allies publicized these precepts, a practice that culminated in the first book on cubism, Gleizes and Metzinger's Du Cubisme (1912). Du Cubisme proved to be highly influential and was translated into English and Russian in 1913. Picasso and Braque did not articulate these concerns but were certainly aware of them, as evidenced by Picasso's close friendship with Stein, and their frequent interaction with Metzinger. The degree to which Braque and Picasso shared in these theoretical interests is subject to debate. Many scholars argue that their cubism was initially a purely empirical response to the aesthetic innovations of French artist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), as evidenced in Braque's Houses at L’Estaque (1908), and their exposure to African sculpture, which partially inspired Picasso's Les Demoiselles ?Avignon (1906–1907). Others have interpreted their manipulation of visual and verbal conventions, especially in the guise of collage, in light of the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), arguing that this theoretical orientation was qualitatively distinct from the philosophical preoccupations of the salon cubists. More recently scholars have argued for a middle ground, noting that any interest Braque and Picasso may have had in semiotics needs to be historicized before their motivations can be properly compared to those of their cubist peers.

The existence of a coherent cubist movement ended in August 1914 due to the geopolitical fragmentation of the international avant-garde caused by World War I. During the war cubism came under attack from cultural conservatives, and although Gleizes and art dealer Léonce Rosenberg (1879–1947) attempted to revive the cubist movement after 1919, it was a spent force. However, cubist precepts continued to have an impact long after the movement's decline: Marcel Duchamp's conceptual approach to art during World War I was a studied reaction to cubist theory, and in subsequent years collage would have a profound impact on movements as diverse as Russian constructivism, Dada, surrealism, and American pop art. In addition, the development of montage techniques in film and photography in interwar Europe owed much to cubist experimentation.

Cubism

CUBISM

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