A Shared Vision an Introduction to "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism" Author(s): Christopher Lyon Reviewed work(s): Source: MoMA,

Vol. 2, No. 2 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 7-13 Published by: The Museum of Modern Art Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4381090 . Accessed: 02/10/2012 10:56
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A Shared Vision
An Picasso and Bra

to Introduction
que: Pioneering Cubism

by ChristopherLyon

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 extraordinarysort 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, particularlyin 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: Braque 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 different. 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 inventiveand certainly different from-what either of them would have produced individually. 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, DanielHenry 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 germinal 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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underpinningfrom 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 intellectual Cezannism. So it was necessary for Picasso and Braqueto be engaged in this dialectic, in which all solutions were tested, brokenapart,and bouncedoff one another, for the thing to come together as Cubism. The difference in temperament between Picasso and Braque can be expressedin 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 detachmentof Braque.Braqueworked in a slower, more deliberate way, and, as a result, producedfar fewer pictures. Despite their differences,Picasso andBraquetried to achieve a kind of anonymity in formulatingthe Cubist language.For at least a few years, they liked to think that their work could not be distinguishedas being by one or the other, and they did not sign the front of their canvases duringthis 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 personalityof the artist, as it comes throughin his particularhand, 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 Impressionismwas a very detachedway 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 fundamentally schematic, simplified, and generallygeometrical. But insofar as the word "cube" actually suggests a freestanding, three-dimensional form, that is precisely what we do not find in these
pictures.

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.

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-dimensional form. The Cubist painterdoes not want you to feel deep space, but only the projectionof forms toward you, the spectator.One may describe this as a kind of "bas-relief" approachto structureand to space, and contrastit with the representationin Old Master painting of figures and buildings, which might be thought of as simulacra of sculptures 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 foreground of the picture. If you look at Braque's Houses at L'Estaque ([August]1908),which is the
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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 anotherand into the trees. This space is, finally, more shallow and more elliptical in character than the space of Old Masterpictures. When Braque presented this painting to the Autumn Salon of 1908, it was rejected.Matisse, who was on the jury,made an unflatteringremark 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 appearancein print. By the time "Cubist"came to be used as a name for the movement, the simple geometric schemas that we see in Braque'sHouses at L'Estaquehad ceased to be of interest to Braqueor Picasso, whose works had become much more complex. The paintings remained schematic and grew increasinglyabstractfrom 1908 to 1910. The artists were interested in reducingthe contours, the frameworkof the world of people and objects, to *9 more simplified schemas, but these schemas were never closed geometricalforms.They were always interlockingwith one another on the picture surface. This aspect of Cubist composition recalls Braque'sdeep affinity with the art of Cezanne. Cezanne's opening-up of the contours of represented objects so that they bleed into contiguous .1. areas-elision or passage-made possible the first art in which the integrity of the motif, of what is was sacrificedto the autonomyof the represented, composition as a whole. Elision is thus one of the crucial concepts behind Cubist painting. The absenceof color in Cubist work up to 1912 is a function of a reductionof the pictureto those aspects that are less immediately emotional and more intellectual. Picasso and in orderto concentrateon Braquehad to brushcolor aside, at least temporarily, certain aspects of space, light, and structure. Color would have hopelessly complicatedtheir task at a time when they were tryingto cut away to essential aspects of form. Only later, towardthe end of Cubism,when they had absorbed all of this into their vocabulary,do we begin to see color playingan increasing role-in a small way in the springof 1912, in Picasso'sSouvenirdu Havre,and even more over the summer in a picture such as his Landscapewith Posters
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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.

(July, 1912).

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

dimensionalillusion, it was possible to have simple, flat panelsof color.This is what is seen in the pictures of 1913 and 1914, and is usually referredto as Synthetic Cubism. This can be called a kind of decorativeCubism in comparison with the earlier,more stern and intellectual Cubism. It is made up not of but fragmentsof the visual world that have been brokendown and rearranged, of synthetic symbols or signs that the artist devises for the subjects in his
painting.

TheNatureof Looking
All Cubist art is inspired directly by things in the real world. Even when Picasso and Braquewere paintingin their most abstractmodes, 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 differedfrom those typical of Old Masterpaintings insofar as they had to do with objects from the immediate world of the artist. The subject matter environmentof Cubism, so to speak,is the artist'sown studio and its contents: the glass, the book, the pitcher, and other still-life objects, the people who came and went. They painted landscapesto some extent, but these played a lesser role than the still-lifes and renderingsof figures. Braquewas essentially a painterof still-lifes, and this expressedhis detachment, a kind of classical detachment in which the more intense human experiencesplayedonly a small part.Picassowas just the opposite.His fascination with the particularsof human experiencecomes throughin the fact that he was much more drawnto paintingfiguresthan was Braque.In fact, Picasso developed an area of Cubist painting, the portrait, that does not exist in Braque'swork. Cubists' subjects, compared to those of the old masters, are not only personaland intimate, but much less charged.A picture of a deity, a hero, the president of the republic, is one of an important and highly chargedsubject. The subject is much more importantthan the means by which it is rendered. But in the nineteenth century, beginning with EdouardManet, we find a transition. We move from a context of representing an important subject toward not simply representinga more intimate, less important subject, but towarda considerationof how we represent.That is what Cubismis ultimately about. It is less about the object than how we representit-which is another way of saying, how we understandthe 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. A
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SomeInventions
The differencein temperamentbetween Picasso and Braquecan also be seen in the ways they contributedto the artistic inventions that emergedfrom their collaboration.For example, Braquehad been trained as a house painter and in what we many of the contributionshe made derivedfrom his apprenticeship could term a "popular"or lower art form than easel painting. It was Braque who introducedstenciled 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 Braqueas 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.

young apprenticeleamed how to do with the special combs that Frenchhouse paintersused to create the illusion of wood on plasterwalls or on wallpaper. The popularcraftaspects of paintingthat Braquebroughtinto Cubismwere all picked up and used by Picasso, and this is true of Braque'sinventions as well. One example is the so-calledconstructionsculpture,which originatedin the work of Braquein 1911, when he began to make sculpturesout of paper, which he then painted and affixed to a backgroundso that they constituted three-dimensionalreliefs. Picasso was very amused by these sculptureswhen Braquefirst made them and, because the scaffoldingsof these papersculptures remindedhim of the biplanes of the Wrightbrothers,he began calling Braque his renderingof WilburWright'sfirst name. "Wilbourg," Braquethought of these papersculptureslargelyas 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 had been up to. His first what Braque sculptures,but in so doing,he radicalized construction sculpture, Guitar, which he made first in paper form and then recreatedin metal, has a kind of cutaway structurethat permitsyou to see the inside and the back of the form simultaneously. Picasso thus effectively introduced an entirely new conception of sculpture, neither modeled nor carved. The cutaway, see-throughmethod providedthe 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, demonstratehow the different personalitiesof Braqueand Picasso reflect fundamentalaltematives 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 anythingthat is put togetherwith glue and can referto three-dimensionalobjects. 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 characterizescollage. The collage
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Georges Braque. Fruit Dish and Glass. Sorgues, early September 1912. Charcoal and pasted paper. Private collection.

idea is very much the propertyof Picasso,who made the first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning, in the springof 1912, and this idea is basedupon a notion of contradiction, interruption,an anticlassical attempt to break through received ideas. In this picture,Picassobeginswith 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 printedwith the patternof chair caning. The mixture of materialsis itself an anticlassicalthing. We now have a picturethat is not made just of canvas,of paint, but has a piece of oilcloth in it. Even more radicalthan the mixing of materialsis the mixing of styles, insofaras the piece of oilcloth contains an image of chair caning that is almost photographically realistic image is juxtarealistic. The mechanicallyproduced,photographically posed to the loosely brushed,highly personal,and abstractimageryof the rest of the still life. This kind of contradictionis very characteristicof 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 throughoutthe image. As you look at Braque'sfirst papier colle, you can see that the lettering, the image of the glass, and the wallpaper-a form of the same level is appliedto the surface-are all on approximately woodgraining of abstraction,so that this picture has a kind of unity, which the Picasso Still Life with Chair Caning does not. The differencebetween pastedpapersas a classical invention of Braqueand collage as an anticlassical invention by Picasso reflects broaderinclinations of each artist. Braqueloves order, stability, constancy, the aspect of experience that is continuous. Picasso, on the other hand, hates stability. He is likely to put a jokerin the deck of his imagery,or into the structureof his painting.He doesn't want you to settle in and experience the picture comfortably.The cross-fertilizationof these two ideas is very importantin Cubism. The nickname Wilbourg,or Wilbur, that Picasso gave Braquereflected a friendshipbetween two artists who were workingvery closely together,sharing ideas in the mannerof the Wrightbrothers.The name also reflectsthe idea that these paintersare inventors,that they'rebreakinginto new areasof experience, new methods. After all, papersculptureand the metal sculpturethat developed from it was something unknown in the whole history of art, and as radicalin that history, you might say, as the first flight of the Wrightbrothersin the history of science. Among modern painters, Braqueholds a very prominent position; in the case of Picasso,comparisonsmust be sought in the most exceptionalmastersof the Renaissance. But though Picasso's contribution to Cubism-under the pressure of the dialogue with Braque-may be considered the greater,what Braquebrought to the interchangewas not less of the same. One purposeof Picasso and Braque:Pioneering Cubism is to make more clear the way in which the two artists' differences, in personalities,intellect, and pictorialgift, m contributedto a sharedvision of painting.

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.

16, 1990)is the first exhibition PicassoandBraque: PioneeringCubism(throughJanuary to trace the unfoldingof Cubism exclusively throughthe works of its inventors,Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Presentedare approximately390 paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings,and prints. The exhibition was organizedby WilliamRubin,Director Emeritus,Departmentof Painting and Sculpture.It is sponsoredby Philip Morris Companies,Inc. Additional supporthas been providedby the National Endowmentfor the Arts. An indemnity for the exhibitionhas been receivedfrom the National Council
for the Arts and the Humanities.
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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.