On Art

...Indeed, its popularity with Russians, Germans and anarchistic Italians had become a cause for suspicion among its enemies and critics...

...My own feeling is that Cubism, like every influential movement, has the strengths and weaknesses it deserves...

...Picasso and Gris continued working in isolation during the War...

...This is a mistake, I think, because it replaces relevant esthetic distinctions with less informative chronological ones...

...It also ranges over the works of Russian vanguardists like Kasimir Malevich and Michel Larionov, the Cubist-inspired pictures of the Italian Futurists Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra and Gino Severini, as well as contributions by the Americans Max Weber and Stanton MacDon-ald-Wright--all of whom were quickly drawn to the provocative new style that began in Paris in 1907-8 and reached its zenith in the years just preceding World War I. The surprise of the exhibition is the sizeable group of works by Czechoslovak artists, notably Emil Filla and Bohumil Kubista, who visited Paris during the early phase of Cubism and transmitted their discoveries to their radically inspired compatriots...

...That is a large claim and, to a degree, Cooper is justified...

...But whatever the familiarity of the subject, The Cubist Epoch is a stunning and, in some ways, surprising show...

...On the personal level, the phrase refers to his newly-beloved, Marcelle Humbert, the former mistress of a minor Cubist, with whom Picasso ran off in 1912...

...But it is here, I think, that the much-maligned critic, Guillaume Apollinaire, (discussed in my last column, "The Birth of Cubism," NL, April 5) was on the right track...

...The painting is part of the "Ma Jolie" series--pictures in which Picasso incorporated that phrase from a popular love song to commemorate a critical stage both in the development of Cubism and in his own life...

...In all, more than 300 paintings, drawings, prints, collages and pieces of sculpture have been drawn together for the show from public and private collections around the world...

...My feeling is that abstraction was one of the logical consequences of the style, and that at a crucial juncture in the development of Cubism its two greatest practitioners, Picasso and Braque, had a failure of nerve...

...the more they found that the clarity of their spatial structure became obscured by descriptive detail, formal complexities and an elaborate play of light and shade...

...Yet whenever they reacted against this complication and tried to make things clearer, they found themselves losing touch again with tangible reality...

...The defenders of Cubism rushed into print: the poet Andre Salmon, the painters Gleizes and Metzinger, and finally Apollinaire, whose Tire Cubist Painters, issued in the spring of 1913, attempted to reconcile the warring Cubist factions and explain the movement to the public...

...It is significant, too, I believe, that this important phase of Cubist development occurred when the movement was at the zenith of its success and notoriety...

...find a confirmation of Braque's and Picasso's failure of nerve in Cooper's analysis of their paintings during these years, though his interpretation differs somewhat from mine...

...One of the most unusual and unfamiliar of these is a beautiful oval still life with an intriguing Cubistic frame, "Violin, Glass and Pipe on Table," done by Picasso in 1912 and borrowed from the Narodni Galerie in Prague...

...It is possible that the Cubists themselves were a little bothered by these difficulties in reading...

...On Art A FAILURE OF NERVE BY JAMES R. MELLOW Douglas Cooper, the peppery British art historian, critic and friend of the Cubists who organized the expansive and impressive display, The Cubist Epoch, now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been quoted as saying: "Nobody has done a full-scale retrospective of this most important art movement yet, and few people realize how international it was...

...I am led to this belief by the fact that from about 1910 through 1912, when the imagery of Cubist painting--the figures, furniture, bottles, glasses, musical instruments--became progressively unreadable and the surfaces of the pictures began breaking down into an overall series of disjunctive planes, both Picasso and Braque pulled back and started employing fragments of typography in their pictorial constructions...

...This was, in my opinion, clearly a response to Delaunay's defection from the group in 1912...

...He tends to write off the remaining group--Henri Le Fauconnier, Albert Leon Gleizes, Jean Metzinger...

...The center did not hold...

...The next step, the use of actual pieces of wallpaper, newspaper, oil cloth, cigarette papers, allowed them to play an elaborate game of trompe I'oeil--and it produced one of their most audacious inventions, Cubist collage...

...Although the formal discoveries of Cubism were to go on leavening art for several generations, the loose confederation of artists that made up the Cubist movement was disbanded...

...Additional corroboration can be found in Kahnweiler's memoir, My Galleries and Painters, when the dealer observes of the paintings of that period: "There appeared some fantastic and admirable types of constructions, primarily in tones of gray and beige, but these became more and more difficult to read...

...I never saw them again...

...artists like Metzinger, with their lacy and chi-chi variations, ought to be considered full-fledged, practicing Cubists-- albeit poor or misguided ones...

...Braque and Andre Derain were mobilized...

...Moreover, Cooper's lucid exposition presents a strictly formalist case, contending that Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris are "the only three artists of whom it can be said that they used the idiom in a pure, unsystematic way" ("unsystematic" as opposed to those "who tried to make a scientific method out of Cubism...

...According to Cooper, the French Chamber of Deputies openly debated whether public buildings should be allowed to show works of "such an unmistakably antiartistic and antinational character...

...Bottle labels, book titles and newspaper headlines began to serve as the identifying brand names, so to speak, for objects that seemed on the verge of disappearing...

...Kahnweiler was stranded in Switzerland...

...As for the urge toward pure or total abstraction, Cooper appears to regard it as one more threat to the integrity of orthodox Cubism...

...In his informative illustrated catalogue, also titled The Cubist Epoch (Phaidon, 318 pp., $12.50), Cooper dismisses the formal terminology usually applied to Cubist development--analytical," "hermetic," "synthetic," etc.--in favor of the more traditional lexicon of art history: "early," "high" and "late" Cubism...

...In one or two of his paintings of the period, Picasso inscribed the words, J'aime Eva, like a schoolboy carving his commitment on a tree trunk...

...among them--as camp followers who wandered into the style without ever really understanding or furthering its principles...

...He argues convincingly that neither Picasso nor Braque welcomed this development...

...As Picasso put it: "On August 2, 1914, I took Braque and Derain to the Gare d'Avignon...

...It includes most of the historic landmarks in the Cubist canon: Picasso's crucial "Demoiselles d' Avignon" of 1907, plus the critically important early paintings of Georges Braque, Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Delaunay and others...

...Delaunay broke with the movement, taking several painters with him...

...Delaunay, who had never been happy with the Cubist palette ("those boys paint with spider-webs," he once remarked) was attempting to woo its adherents to his own highly colored version called "Orphism...

...The introduction of bright color into the previously somber Cubist palette around 1912, as in the Picasso "Ma Jolie" picture described above, is another indication of orthodox Cubism's threatened position at that moment...

...Writing in 1913, Apollinaire observed that the new art was "not yet as abstract as it would like to be...

...Typographical elements served to underscore the flatness of the picture plane, an effect they wanted to preserve...

...In the hands of masters like Picasso and Braque, however, the rejection of abstraction was to have its own benefits...

...The several beautiful examples of Mondrian's 1911-14 work that Cooper has selected for the show provide a step-by-step illustration of how Cubism was carried to a sustained geometric abstraction...

...A frail, delicate creature, she died in 1916...

...In other words, the style was leading them in directions they did not wish to follow...

...By 1912 it had achieved an international following...

...Other painters whom Cooper admires, e.g...

...Since Cubism was the essential style in what became the modern movement, it is odd that such a retrospective was not held before...

...This is the first exhibition to attempt to show Cubism as a historic style, defining its goals, its genesis, and development...

...other splinter groups formed...

...But it remained for someone like Mondrian to push the abstract tendencies of Cubism to their logical end...

...Picasso called her Eva: She was to be the primeval woman, playing opposite his Adam...

...Nonetheless, various phases in the development of Cubism and its principal masters have been explored in depth on innumerable occasions...

...This section has the effect of an archeological "find," for it uncovers a lost tribe of Cubists no one had ever heard of before...

...Leger, fare well enough, though he does not consider them "true" Cubists...

...He notes that both artists "recoiled" from nonfiguration, but goes on to explain: "The answer seems to be that the more elements of reality Braque and Picasso managed to incorporate into their pictures...

...Then World War I intervened...