A Shared Vision an Introduction to "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism"Author(s): Christopher LyonReviewed work(s):Source: MoMA, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 7-13Published by: The Museum of Modern ArtStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4381090 .Accessed: 02/10/2012 10:56

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A Shared Vision

An Introduction to

Picasso and Bra que: Pioneering Cubism

by Christopher Lyon

The dialogue between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque is unique in the history of art for its length and for the complexity of the interchange. Painters have worked together, but rarely over

so many years, and never in a manner that produced, out of a collaborative give-and-take, an entire style. This style underwent a development of the most extraordinary sort over a period of six years, during which the two artists' contributions became so intermingled that at certain points we can't separate them.

One of the ironies of art history is that while there is a larger literature on Cubism than on any other modern movement, we actually know less about it in some respects than we do about most movements of modem art. This is particularly true of the relationship between Picasso and Braque. The chronology of their works is often in doubt, particularly in relation to Braque. We know that an intimate dialogue took place between them, but we don't know its precise terms. In their letters and in a few later statements, the artists allude to their frequent discussions, but they don't tell us what was said. So we can only look at the work. In a sense, the exhibition Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism is being mounted in order to answer such questions.

Left: Bra que in his studio at 5, impasse de Guelma, c. early 1912. Right: Picasso in his studio at 11, boulevard de Clichy, autumn 1911.

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A Closeness of Opposites Picasso and Braque met in the spring of 1907 but their friendship really did not get fully underway until late in 1908. The two painters were even closer in the years 1910 to 1912, a period that represents the height of the collaboration and its most inventive period. In 1913 the dialogue seems to have slowed a bit. World War I brought it to an abrupt finish, though it might have ended soon afterwards under any circumstances.

The closeness of the two artists during this time was due to the fact that they were sharing the same "painting problems" in the development of the language of Cubism. It wasn't a closeness of similar personalities, but of opposites, who contributed to one another precisely because they were differ- ent. They worked on problems in similar terms, however, and attempted to solve them in ways that transcended their individual personalities. So, for a while, they produced a pictorial language probably more daring and inventive- and certainly different from-what either of them would have produced indi- vidually. The period from 1910 through 1912 provides an especially clear revelation-in the accumulated advances made by each artist in his work, and in the network of linkages between them-of what can be called pictorial thought.

The discoveries Picasso and Braque had made together during 1911-12 began to lead them in somewhat divergent directions by the end of 1913. When war broke out in 1914, it spelled an end to their collaboration. Braque, a French national, was immediately drafted into the army, left for the front, and shortly after that received a massive head wound. The two saw each other occasionally afterwards, but it wasn't the same. Braque, who resumed painting in 1917, had remained a Cubist; Picasso was exploring neo-classicism and other styles, and had begun to move in a different world, the world of the theatre and ballet. The essential differences in temperaments and personalities came to outweigh what had drawn the two painters together. When Picasso said to his dealer, Daniel- Henry Kahnweiler, that after seeing Braque off in 1914 at the Avignon station, he "never saw him again," Picasso meant, of course, that he never again saw his Braque, the Braque of the Cubist collaboration.

The two worked together at a moment when there was a tremendous optimism about the possibilities of painting. All the old rules seemed to have been thrown out. That optimism ended when Cubism's pioneer phase ended, with the outbreak of the First World War. The war concluded an entire period in modern intellectual and artistic life, the last phase of which may be better embodied in the work of Picasso and Braque's Cubism than in the work of any other artists.

Sometimes it is asked whether Braque or Picasso invented Cubism. There is no single answer to this. Two major sources of Cubism were the Africanism of Picasso-that is, the art that Picasso had made in 1907 and early 1908 that was influenced by tribal models of art-and, perhaps even more importantly, the art of Paul Cezanne. To the extent that you consider Cezanne's model the germi- nal element in Cubism, Braque was more its inventor than Picasso. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine Cubism having been created had not Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 and in one painting, so to say, swept away the whole nineteenth-century tradition.

Mfricanism and Cezannism would seem to be totally unmixable and yet the two fuse in the crucible of Picasso and Braque's painting of 1908. That's part of what is remarkable about the history of early Cubism. One might say that if it had not been for Braque, Cubism would not have gotten the same structural

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underpinning from Cezanne that it did have. On the other hand, if it had not been for Picasso, it might have been just a kind of neo-Cezannism, an intellec- tual Cezannism. So it was necessary for Picasso and Braque to be engaged in this dialectic, in which all solutions were tested, broken apart, and bounced off one another, for the thing to come together as Cubism.

The difference in temperament between Picasso and Braque can be ex- pressed in many ways, but one of the most evident was certainly the passion of Picasso and the velocity of his actions and his work-the way he approached life and painting-and the meditative detachment of Braque. Braque worked in a slower, more deliberate way, and, as a result, produced far fewer pictures. Despite their differences, Picasso and Braque tried to achieve a kind of anonym- ity in formulating the Cubist language. For at least a few years, they liked to think that their work could not be distinguished as being by one or the other, and they did not sign the front of their canvases during this time. This search for a common language, for a sort of anonymity, had to do with a desire to focus the spectator, not on the personality of the artist, as it comes through in his particular hand, but on the problems of structure and conception that are the common concern of all painters.

Essentials of Form The name Cubism is a misnomer-but that's not unique. Many art movements have been named inappropriately. "Impressionism," for example, seems to imply a very subjective kind of thing, but in fact Impressionism was a very detached way of looking at the world. "Cubism" is wrong, first of all, in suggesting that the style is more geometric than it really is. It is true that certain early Cubist works have fragments of cubes; it would probably be more accurate to describe these early Cubist pictures as fundamen- tally schematic, simplified, and generally geomet- rical. But insofar as the word "cube" actually suggests a freestanding, three-dimensional form, that is precisely what we do not find in these pictures.

When an Old Master painter makes a house standing in the middle of a field, he wants to give you the illusion of a freestanding, three-dimen- sional form. The Cubist painter does not want you to feel deep space, but only the projection of forms toward you, the spectator. One may describe this as a kind of "bas-relief" approach to structure and to space, and contrast it with the representation in Old Master painting of figures and buildings, which might be thought of as simulacra of sculp- tures in the round.

An Old Master painter wants to give you not simply the impression of the forms, but of the relative spaces between the forms. In Cubist painting, these forms elide with one another, meld with one another, and move toward the fore- ground of the picture. If you look at Braque's Houses at L'Estaque ([August] 1908), which is the

Above: Pablo Picasso. Female Nude. Paris, lautumn-winter 19071. Pencil and watercolor. National Gallery, Prague. Below: Georges Braque. Houses at L'Estaque. L'Estaque, [August! 1908. Oil on canvas. Kunstmuseum Bern. Hermann and Margrit Rupf Foundation.

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picture that actually gave Cubism its name, you don't really sense the backs of the houses or the space between them. The houses seem to elide into one another and into the trees. This space is, finally, more shallow and more elliptical in char- acter than the space of Old Master pictures.

When Braque presented this painting to the Autumn Salon of 1908, it was rejected. Matisse, who was on the jury, made an unflattering remark about "les petites cubes," the little cubes, in the picture. That phrase rang in the ears of a French critic, Louis Vauxcelles. When the picture was exhibited somewhat later, he wrote a review in which he used the word "cubic" as an adjective, the term's first appearance in print. By the time "Cubist" came to be used as a name for the move- ment, the simple geometric schemas that we see in Braque's Houses at L'Estaque had ceased to be of interest to Braque or Picasso, whose works had become much more complex.

The paintings remained schematic and grew increasingly abstract from 1908 to 1910. The art- ists were interested in reducing the contours, the framework of the world of people and objects, to more simplified schemas, but these schemas were never closed geometrical forms. They were always interlocking with one another on the picture sur- face. This aspect of Cubist composition recalls Braque's deep affinity with the art of Cezanne. Cezanne's opening-up of the contours of repre- sented objects so that they bleed into contiguous areas-elision or passage-made possible the first art in which the integrity of the motif, of what is represented, was sacrificed to the autonomy of the composition as a whole. Elision is thus one of the crucial concepts behind Cubist painting.

The absence of color in Cubist work up to 1912 is a function of a reduction of the picture to those aspects that are less immediately emotional and more intellectual. Picasso and Braque had to brush color aside, at least temporarily, in order to concentrate on certain aspects of space, light, and structure. Color would have hopelessly complicated their task at a time when they were trying to cut away to essential aspects of form. Only later, toward the end of Cubism, when they had absorbed all of this into their vocabulary, do we begin to see color playing an increasing role-in a small way in the spring of 1912, in Picasso's Souvenir du Havre, and even more over the summer in a picture such as his Landscape with Posters (July, 1912).

As the transition from what we call Analytic Cubism into Synthetic Cubism is completed, color breaks out all over. Analytic Cubism is the more rigorous art that begins in 1908 and ends around 1912, becoming during that period increasingly complex and abstract, and almost entering the world of non-figurative painting. By the end of 1912, what was left of the shallow space inherited from Old Master paintings had disappeared. The pictures had flat- tened out totally, and, with the elimination of atmosphere and of suggested

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Above: Georges Braque. Violin anc Pitcher. Paris, learly 1910/. Oil on canvas. Kunstmuseum Basel. Gift of Raoul La Roche, 1952. ? Colorphoto Hans Hinz.

Opposite, above: Pablo Picasso. Souvenir du Havre. Paris, (Mayl 1912. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Opposite, below: Pablo Picasso. Woman with a Mandolin. Paris, learly 1914/. Oil, sand, and charcoal on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of David Rockefeller.

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dimensional illusion, it was possible to have simple, flat panels of color. This is what is seen in the pictures of 1913 and 1914, and is usually referred to as Synthetic Cubism. This can be called a kind of decorative Cubism in compari- son with the earlier, more stern and intellectual Cubism. It is made up not of fragments of the visual world that have been broken down and rearranged, but of synthetic symbols or signs that the artist devises for the subjects in his painting.

The Nature of Looking All Cubist art is inspired directly by things in the real world. Even when Picasso and Braque were painting in their most abstract modes, it was essential for them to feel a contact with the world of actual objects. Neither accepted that painting could be made without a motif from the actual world. These motifs differed from those typical of Old Master paintings insofar as they had to do with objects from the immediate world of the artist. The subject matter environment of Cubism, so to speak, is the artist's own studio and its contents: the glass, the book, the pitcher, and other still-life objects, the people who came and went. They painted landscapes to some extent, but these played a lesser role than the still-lifes and renderings of figures.

Braque was essentially a painter of still-lifes, and this expressed his detach- ment, a kind of classical detachment in which the more intense human experiences played only a small part. Picasso was just the opposite. His fascina- tion with the particulars of human experience comes through in the fact that he was much more drawn to painting figures than was Braque. In fact, Picasso developed an area of Cubist painting, the portrait, that does not exist in Braque's work.

Cubists' subjects, compared to those of the old masters, are not only personal and intimate, but much less charged. A picture of a deity, a hero, the president of the republic, is one of an important and highly charged subject. The subject is much more important than the means by which it is rendered. But in the nineteenth century, beginning with Edouard Manet, we find a transition. We move from a context of representing an important subject toward not simply representing a more intimate, less important subject, but toward a consideration of how we represent. That is what Cubism is ultimately about. It is less about the object than how we represent it-which is another way of saying, how we understand the world. That Cubism could provide, over the years of its development, hundreds of different ways of looking at, of analyzing, a simple object like a wine glass, suggests that it is not the essence of the wine glass that is being searched for, but the nature of looking and understanding.

Some Inventions The difference in temperament between Picasso and Braque can also be seen in the ways they contributed to the artistic inventions that emerged from their collaboration. For example, Braque had been trained as a house painter and many of the contributions he made derived from his apprenticeship in what we could term a "popular" or lower art form than easel painting. It was Braque who introduced stenciled letters, in Hommage a J. S. Bach (Paris, early 1912). These stenciled letters were part of the traditional training of the house painter, as was the faux bois, the imitation wood graining that Braque as a

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Georges Braque. Homage to J. S. Bach. fCeret, autumn 1911.1 Oil on canvas. Collection Carroll and Conrad Janis, New York.

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Georges Braque. Fruit Dish and Glass. Sorgues, early September 1912. Charcoal and pasted paper. Private collection.

young apprentice leamed how to do with the special combs that French house painters used to create the illusion of wood on plaster walls or on wallpaper.

The popular craft aspects of painting that Braque brought into Cubism were all picked up and used by Picasso, and this is true of Braque's inventions as well. One example is the so-called construction sculpture, which originated in the work of Braque in 1911, when he began to make sculptures out of paper, which he then painted and affixed to a background so that they constituted three-dimensional reliefs. Picasso was very amused by these sculptures when Braque first made them and, because the scaffoldings of these paper sculptures reminded him of the biplanes of the Wright brothers, he began calling Braque "Wilbourg," his rendering of Wilbur Wright's first name.

Braque thought of these paper sculptures largely as aids to painting. That is, he often painted not from a real glass or bottle still life object, but from his paper sculpture of it. Only in 1912 did Picasso begin to make construction sculptures, but in so doing, he radicalized what Braque had been up to. His first construction sculpture, Guitar, which he made first in paper form and then recreated in metal, has a kind of cutaway structure that permits you to see the inside and the back of the form simultaneously. Picasso thus effectively intro- duced an entirely new conception of sculpture, neither modeled nor carved. The cutaway, see-through method provided the basis for what would become the three-dimensional, in-the-round metal sculpture of Julio Gonzalez and David Smith.

Two other inventions, papier colle and collage, demonstrate how the differ- ent personalities of Braque and Picasso reflect fundamental altematives in the making of art. The term papiers colls refers to pictures made out of pasted papers, and sometimes people confuse the term with "collage." The difference is worth considering. The word collage, which comes from the French verb coller, "to glue," means anything that is put together with glue and can refer to three-dimensional objects. Papier colle refers only to pictures that are made entirely out of paper. This unity of materials is an aspect of classicism, as opposed to the mixing of materials, which characterizes collage. The collage

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idea is very much the property of Picasso, who made the first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning, in the spring of 1912, and this idea is based upon a notion of contradiction, interruption, an anticlassical attempt to break through re- ceived ideas.

In this picture, Picasso begins with a simple still-life on a table, with a glass and other elements that are typical of his studio still-lifes. He inserts-glues on the surface-a piece of oil cloth printed with the pattern of chair caning. The mixture of materials is itself an anticlassical thing. We now have a picture that is not made just of canvas, of paint, but has a piece of oilcloth in it. Even more radical than the mixing of materials is the mixing of styles, insofar as the piece of oilcloth contains an image of chair caning that is almost photographically realistic. The mechanically produced, photographically realistic image is juxta- posed to the loosely brushed, highly personal, and abstract imagery of the rest of the still life. This kind of contradiction is very characteristic of Picasso.

Papier colle, on the other hand, is a more classical medium, in which we not only have one kind of substance, paper, but-far more important-only one style throughout the image. As you look at Braque's first papier colle, you can see that the lettering, the image of the glass, and the wallpaper-a form of woodgraining is applied to the surface-are all on approximately the same level of abstraction, so that this picture has a kind of unity, which the Picasso Still Life with Chair Caning does not.

The difference between pasted papers as a classical invention of Braque and collage as an anticlassical invention by Picasso reflects broader inclinations of each artist. Braque loves order, stability, constancy, the aspect of experience that is continuous. Picasso, on the other hand, hates stability. He is likely to put a joker in the deck of his imagery, or into the structure of his painting. He doesn't want you to settle in and experience the picture comfortably. The cross-fertilization of these two ideas is very important in Cubism.

The nickname Wilbourg, or Wilbur, that Picasso gave Braque reflected a friendship between two artists who were working very closely together, sharing ideas in the manner of the Wright brothers. The name also reflects the idea that these painters are inventors, that they're breaking into new areas of experience, new methods. After all, paper sculpture and the metal sculpture that developed from it was something unknown in the whole history of art, and as radical in that history, you might say, as the first flight of the Wright brothers in the history of science.

Among modern painters, Braque holds a very prominent position; in the case of Picasso, comparisons must be sought in the most exceptional masters of the Renaissance. But though Picasso's contribution to Cubism-under the pressure of the dialogue with Braque-may be considered the greater, what Braque brought to the interchange was not less of the same. One purpose of Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism is to make more clear the way in which the two artists' differences, in personalities, intellect, and pictorial gift, contributed to a shared vision of painting. m

Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (through January 16, 1990) is the first exhibition to trace the unfolding of Cubism exclusively through the works of its inventors, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Presented are approximately 390 paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings, and prints. The exhibition was organized by William Rubin, Direc- tor Emeritus, Department of Painting and Sculpture. It is sponsored by Philip Morris Companies, Inc. Additional support has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. An indemnity for the exhibition has been received from the National Council for the Arts and the Humanities.

Pablo Picasso. Maquette for Guitar. Paris, (October! 1912. Construction of cardboard, string, and wire (restored). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist.

Pablo Picasso. Still Life with Chair Caning. Paris, (May! 1912. Collage of oil, oilcloth, and pasted paper on canvas, surrounded by rope. Musee Picasso, Paris. ? Succession Picasso.

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