On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
On Art THE BIRTH OF CUBISM BY JAMES R. MELLOW The year is 1907. Picasso has completed his monstrous "Demoiselles d'Avignon," a bizarre painting of five nudes, supposedly the ladies of a "house"...
...It is still in its beginnings, and is not yet as abstract as it would like to be...
...Marcel Duchamp, another young painter and illustrator who visits the gallery, later recalls that it was at Kahnweiler's that "Cubism got me...
...Kahnweiler, now 87, gave his 10 years ago...
...Characterizing his involvement with modern art and what he considers a brief flirtation with orthodox Cubism, he says, "I didn't just float along...
...After buying several paintings by Derain and Vlaminck from the Spring Salon des Independants, he meets the artists and arranges to show their work...
...Paris, with Kahnweiler's gallery as the focal point, becomes the center of a movement that will dominate modern art for several decades to come...
...Only then does he learn that he could have acquired his first pictures at a professional discount...
...Duchamp's recollections are filled with historical gems and some flashes of wit...
...Theirs is an entirely new plastic art...
...Seven or eight hundred early Cubist works--at today's values, he grudgingly estimates, worth "many billion francs"--were dumped on the market at low prices in four sales from 1921-23...
...The wallpaper hung in tatters from the unplastered walls...
...Wealthy uncles have given him financial backing with the provision that if the gallery does not succeed within a year, he must give up the venture...
...Duchamp provides an extraordinary glimpse of Apollinaire, a legendary conversationalist, in action with the Cubists: "It was a series of fireworks, jokes, lies, all untoppable because it was in such a style that you were incapable of speaking their language...
...It is one measure of his business acumen that while he vigorously promoted exhibitions of his painters --Picasso, Braque, Leger, Derain, Gris--in galleries and exhibitions abroad, he never troubled himself with reciprocal agreements for showing foreign artists in his own gallery...
...The picture is an uncomfortable amalgam of Cezanne and the African sculpture that is enjoying a certain vogue with Parisian artists...
...Done during the summer in L'Estaque, they are landscapes whose elements have been broken down into rigid planes and cube-like forms...
...What may have set the Cubist painters against Apollinaire was that he wrote about their art as an equal, and with an audacity that matched their own, not as a plumber called in to patch up leaks in their self-esteem...
...The Cubist movement is officially christened...
...Nonetheless, the fastidious young dealer is sufficiently impressed to begin acquiring some of Picasso's work...
...In the right-hand segment, the faces are squashed flat, the noses twisted out of joint...
...The secret aim of the young painters of the extremist schools is to produce pure painting," he wrote...
...Artists wanted to understand the true nature of each art...
...Within five years, through chance encounters, personal loyalties, and much public notoriety, Cubism extends its influence to Russia, Italy, Germany, and America...
...But a full defense of Apollinaire's art criticism should properly wait until later in the season when the Documents series, under the editorship of painter Robert Motherwell, issues Apollinaire on Art, a collection of the poet's salon reviews and art pieces...
...Striking as their portrayals of the life and hard times of the Cubists are, it is well to remember that these memoirs, recorded more than 50 years after the fact, are colored by hindsight, selective memory and amour propre...
...Although their lively reminiscences, like their careers, extend well beyond "the heroic age of Cubism," as the French poet Max Jacob called it, both men's accounts provide valuable documentation of the period...
...Duchamp gave up art altogether in the '20s and devoted himself to chess...
...I think both men are wrong in their estimates...
...One day a rival dealer, Vollard, accompanied by an intense young man, visits the gallery without introducing himself...
...Braque has been won over to the new style, and these pictures are described by the critic for Gil Bias, Louis Vauxcelles, as "Peruvian Cubism...
...Thus one has to take with a grain of salt his claim that "There are people who are born unlucky, and who simply never 'make it.' They're not talked about...
...They also offer an illuminating sidelight to the large and important exhibition, "The Cubist Epoch," opening April 7 and scheduled to run until June 7 at the Metropolitan Museum (which I will review in a later column...
...An especially vivid picture of those heady days in the Parisian art world emerges from two volumes Viking Press has just issued under the general title, "Documents of 20th-century Art...
...In his early years, Kahnweiler acknowledges, he made a political mistake--probably the most serious in his career--by not becoming a French citizen...
...Disappointingly, both men dismiss the criticism of Guillaume Apollinaire, who was the foremost poet of the Cubist group and, as a practicing journalist and art critic, its first important spokesman...
...The women, strutting and posturing, are all crude angles and ruddy flesh...
...Duchamp had one of the most widely discussed "unproductive" careers in the history of modern art...
...Braque proclaims that Picasso is "drinking gasoline and spitting fire...
...It was unspeakable...
...They meet when he visits Picasso's studio in the Bateau Lavoir to see the painting he has been hearing so much about...
...His business was a one-way street...
...He is surprised at the German's youth and maliciously spreads the story around Paris that Kahnweiler received his gallery as a First Communion present...
...There was dust on the drawings and rolled-up canvases on the caved-in couch...
...This depressed the cash value of Cubist pictures for almost a decade...
...I had eight years of swimming lessons...
...According to popular legend...
...Derain prophesies that the painter will soon be found hanging behind his big work...
...Picasso has completed his monstrous "Demoiselles d'Avignon," a bizarre painting of five nudes, supposedly the ladies of a "house" on Avignon Street in Barcelona...
...Vollard's companion, Kahnweiler later discovers, was Picasso...
...It was no doubt poetic, in his opinion, but neither truthful nor exactly analytical...
...It is a measure of the circumspection of both men, however, that they do not enter into a binding contract until 1912...
...Kahnweiler, who still regards Apollinaire as the great poet of the age, nevertheless concurs: "In the first place, he knew nothing about painting, and in the second place, he had a kind of compulsion to say things that were not so...
...In music, for example, they wanted to be aware of what was really fundamental and what was merely the habit of the age...
...I will say now, though, that Apollinaire's The Cubist Painters, first published in 1913 at the height of the Cubist revolution, is for me a landmark in art criticism: brilliant, extravagant--perhaps wayward--and full of prophetic glints...
...Kahnweiler has no contacts with painters and knows little about the art business...
...Duchamp is only one of several artists--many of them, like Braque and Derain, at first put off by the barbarism of Picasso's picture--to be drawn into the radical new movement...
...The illustrated books, My Galleries and Painters by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler with Francis Cremieux (160 pp., $8.50) and Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne (144 pp., $7.50), consist of lengthy interviews...
...The interview with Kahnweiler is particularly interesting for his no-nonsense approach to the formal issues posed by the Cubist movement...
...But he carried the techniques of Cubism, particularly Cubist collage, into his Dadaist phase with readymades like the famous urinal he submitted to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York...
...Kahnweiler's recollection of that visit is graphic: "No one can ever imagine the poverty, the deplorable misery of those studios in rue Ravignan...
...Beside the stove was a kind of mountain of piled-up lava, which was ashes...
...The reader senses a master of the direct sell, who sells himself with some justice as the principal entrepreneur of the Cubist movement...
...Duchamp's was given about two years before his death in 1968...
...He continued a career of sorts, however, by selling his early works to the Walter C. Arensbergs (who later placed them in the Philadelphia Museum), conducting an on-and-off romance with the Surrealists, producing copies of his famous boite-en-valise (a suitcase anthology of his oeuvre), and never straying too far from the limelight...
...Picasso's colleagues think the "Demoiselles" is a piece of madness...
...In 1908, Kahnweiler shows a series of Braque's paintings that have been rejected by the Autumn Salon...
...He wrote whatever came to him...
...Meanwhile a 23-year-old German, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, is opening a small gallery on the rue Vignon...
...When World War I broke out, his gallery was closed down and his paintings were seized as enemy property...
...Kahnweiler moves easily from difficult esthetic problems to questions of finance and world politics...
...Discussing the Cubists' need to overthrow existing pictorial practices, for instance, he notes: "I think that what happened at that time, not only in painting, but also in literature and music, reveals a very curious phenomenon...
...This was a little the case with me...
...After waiting out the war in neutral Switzerland, he was unable to prevent the sale of his collection, even with the help of friends like Braque, who had been decorated for heroism...
Vol. 54 • April 1971 • No. 7
