Cubism

Cubism and Wandering Rocks

Henri Matisse gave the name, in jest, to the new art movement of 1908. Its immediate precursors were Cezanne and African art, the former well known, the latter newly shown in Paris in 1907. While its parentage can be traced, a definition depends on what use you want to make of it. For instance, we look at a Cezanne painting where a slight exaggeration would make a hillside of houses become intersecting planes. Then we see Braque or Picasso paint the planes. By 1909, such transformations had changed the structure of modern art. Braque's Woman with Guitar is an example of what came to be called 'analytic cubism.' It's not a very good name; both Picasso and Braque denied that such paintings were intellectual constructions, as the word 'analytic' should imply. But analytic cubism does imply that something has intruded into the painting, some structural perception.

Analytic cubism grew into 'synthetic cubism' by 1912. Synthetic cubism often means adding things to the painting other than paint: collage. Less frequently it is used to apply to certain works of Juan Gris who would plan the structure of his painting first, then impose the subject on this framework. [1]. Specific cubists emphasized color or specific shapes. So Leger emphasized Cezanne's remark about interpreting nature through the cylinder, sphere and cone. [2]. In all cases it is a new, insightful realism the painters sought to create. Here is Leger:

To be free and yet not to lose touch with reality, that is the drama of that epic figure who is variously called inventor, artist or poet. Days and nights, dark or brightly lit, seated at some garish bar; renewed visions of forms and objects bathed in artificial light. Trees cease to be trees, a shadow cuts across the hand placed on the counter, an eye deformed by the light, the changing silhouettes of the passersby. The life of fragments: a red-fingernail, an eye, a mouth. The elastic effects produced by complementary colours which transform objects into some other reality. He fills himself with all this, drinks in the whole of this vital instantaneity which cuts through him in every direction. He is a sponge: sensation of being a sponge, transparency, acuteness, new realism. [3].

Delaunay called his cubist work "Simultanéisme." These paintings showed different aspects of figures or objects simultaneously--both sides of a face, for example; "...light deforms everything, breaks everything up," he wrote.

In poetry, Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy, about 1918, tried to imitate serious intent of the cubists to convey the inner sense of reality, rather than its outward appearance. Look at Picasso's portrait of Kahnweiler or his Guitar on a Table. In America, poets William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, Kenneth Rexroth, and Archibald MacLeish were among those influenced by the new movement.

Like the painters, the cubist poets took fragments of experience--Holman (in A Handbook to Literature) says Picasso called these "destructions"--and rearranged them into a new, meaningful synthesis. Picasso called this the "sum of destructions."

A modern example of a sum of destructions will be found in many poems by e.e. cummings, as this short poem shows:

yes but even
4 or(&h
ow)dinary
a

meri

can b
usiness soca
lled me
n dis...

cussing "parity" in l'hô

tel nor
man(rue d
e l'échelle)
die can't

quite poison God's sunlight

Here there are instants of change, where words blend into other words, one tone cuts across another, etc. It is a poem made of fractures.

If you look at the paintings (I think both Braque and Picasso each have one with this title, but I haven't looked them up) called "Le Jour," you will see a reassemblage of fragments of a day. It becomes a single perception, new and irrepressible, yet made of pieces: a glass and part of a table, a newspaper headline, part of a figure, music perhaps--a collage, a simultaneity.

Now look at the 19 fragments of "Wandering Rocks." Each one a fragment, and each fractured, and each part of a reassemblage that takes place not quite simultaneously, but partly. And, like the bicycle race and the viceregal cavalcade, it moves irrepressibly toward the city gate. It is kinetic cubism, and probably ought to be called synthetic cubism also, for what existed prior to the events, was clock-time. Joyce wrote the chapter with a stopwatch on his desk, superimposed the events of that day upon his minute chronology, broke them into fragments, intruded parts of one section into another, and separated each section, each "cube" of sense-data, from the next by the geometry of white space. Yet what emerges is not an abstract construction, but the events of an hour, happening with some simultaneity, minutely real.

-Ed Germain

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¹Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting, p. 86. From Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: "Gris organized Glass of Beer and Playing Cards according to a dominating pattern of vertical strips... A coherently silhouetted beer mug might be established by shifting the vertical band that constitutes the right side of the mug upward so that the white outline becomes contiguous with the outline of the fully modeled form of the mug to its left. But this realignment would in turn disalign the continuity between the blue curvature on the orange wallpaper and the edge of the sand to the right, both forms constituting a view from above of the beer's foam. Changes or transformations in the appearance of an object seem to occur in a number of directions: they follow the alternating rhythm of vertical bands but also the contrapuntal system of horizontal bands. Occasionally there is also a sense of transformations occurring in depth, as if Gris had peeled away the surface of certain vertical bands to reveal an alternate mode of representation or point of view beneath." [cited at http://artchive.com/ftp_site.htm] [back]

²In a letter, 15 April, 1904 to Émile Bernard, published in the catalogue of his 1907 exhibition. See Read, p. 170. [back]

³Quoted in Read, p. 88. [back]

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