An Anecdotal History of Cubism At the time Picasso led a wonderful life.His uninhibited genius had never blossomed more radiantly. From El Greco to Toulouse-Lautrec, he had consulted masters worthy of reigning over disturbed souls, burning with passion.Now, truly himself and confident, he let himself be guided by a pulsating fantasy that was simultaneously Shakespearean and Neo-Platonic. During this period, spirit alone guided Picasso.An example will shed [some] light on his working methods. After a beautiful series of metaphysical acrobats, ballerinas serving Diana, enchanting clowns, and “Harlequin Trismegistus,”[1] Picasso painted, without a model, the very pure and very simple image of a young, beardless Parisian workman dressed in blue cloth, [who] closely resembled the artist himself when he was at work. One night, Picasso deserted the company of his friends who were wasting their time with intellectual palaver.He returned to his studio, and taking up the canvas that had been abandoned for months, crowned the effigy of the little artisan with roses.Through a sublime caprice, he transformed his work into a masterpiece.[2] Picasso could have continued to live and work in this manner, happy and rightfully self-satisfied.Nothing else allowed him to hope for more praise nor a faster increase in his fortune, because his canvases were beginning to be talked about. Nevertheless, Picasso was restless.He turned his canvases to the wall and threw down his brushes. During those long days, and many nights, he drew, concretizing the abstract and reducing the concrete to its essentials.[3]Never was labor compensated with so little joy.Devoid of his recent youthful enthusiasm, Picasso undertook a large canvas which was to become the first application of his research. Already the artist was passionately fond of the Negros which he placed well above the Egyptians, his enthusiasm was not based on a vain appetite for the picturesque.Polynesian or Dahomeyan images seemed “rational” to him.Renewing his work, Picasso inevitably gave us an appearance of the work that did not conform to the way we learned how to see it. The intimate visitors to the curious studio on the rue Ravignon, who had confidence in the young master, were generally disappointed when he permitted them to judge the first stage of his work.[4] This canvas has never been exhibited in public.[5]It has six large female nudes,[6] drawn with a marked crudeness.For the first time in Picasso’s work the expression of the faces is neither tragic nor passionate.They are masks that are almost devoid of humanity.However, these figures areneither gods, Titans nor heroes; they are not even allegorical nor symbolic.They are naked problems: white ciphers on a blackboard. The sober principle of the painting-equation was laid down. Picasso’s new canvas was spontaneously baptized “The Philosophical B[rothel]” by a friend of the artist.[7]That was, I believe, the last studio joke to cheer the work of[these] young innovative painters.Painting, henceforth, became a science and not one of the least austere.
[1]”Harlequin Trismegistus” is a synthesis of the two characters Harlequin, the artful ladies man of commedia dell’arte and Hermes Trismegistus, the “thrice great Hermes,” a Greek god associated with the Egyptian god Thoth, patron of wisdom and learning.Hermes Trismegistus invokes thoughts about mysticism and alchemy.Harlequin was Picasso’s alter-ego in his art since 1901.Here Salmon brings out the mystical feeling surrounding Picasso’ s Harlequins from the Rose Period, often seen with their families or fellow performers, sometimes at home, sometimes in a vacant, eerie landscape (e.g., Family of Saltimbanques, 1905, National Gallery, Washington. D.C.)
[2]The painting is Boy with a Pipe , autumn 1905, formerly in Collection of Mrs. John Hay Whitney, currently in a private collection..
[3]The best source on Picasso’s drawings from this period and their importance in the development of Cubism is Pepe Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).
[4]Salmon refers to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York), begun in the spring of 1907.It was completed by the end of the year.
[5]Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was not exhibited publicly until 1916, when Salmon gave the painting its present title andincluded it in the Salon d’Antin.
[6]Salmon is mistaken here.Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon has five figures.It may be that Salmon had not seen the painting for quite some time when he wrote this book in 1912, and therefore relied on his memory.In Picasso’s early sketches for the painting, he had included two addition figures--a medical student entering the room on the left side and a sailor seated among the posing prostitutes.
[7]in Propos d’Atelier (Paris: G. Crès, 1922), 16, Salmon wrote that the he, Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire called the painting, La B . . . philosophique.Thus, Salmon continued to obfuscate the true meaning of the work.William Rubin claims that Picasso called the painting his “bordel.”(William Rubin, “The Genesis of Les Demoiselle d’Avignon,” in, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon [New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994], 122.)See also the catalogue for the exhibition “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (Paris: Musée Picasso, 1988).
II The large canvas of severe, unlighted figures did not remain in its first state for a long time. Soon Picasso attacked the faces whose noses were, for the most part, situated frontally in the form of isosceles triangles.The sorcer’s apprentice continued to consult the Oceanian and African enchanters. Shortly afterwards, these noses appeared white and yellow.Some touches of blue and yellow created relief on some of the bodies.Picasso composed a limited palette of tones which corresponded exactly to schematic drawing. Finally, unhappy with his first research, he attacked other nudes--spared until then, having been set aside by this Neroian who was searching for a new statics and composing his palette with pinks, whites, and grays. For a short time Picasso appeared to be pleased with his development.The “philosophical b[rothel]” was turned to the wall.It was at this moment that those canvases with beautiful tonal harmony and supple drawing--most often nudes--were painted.They constituted Picasso’s last exhibition in 1910.[1] This painter, who had been the first toknow how to restore some nobility to a discredited subject, returned to the “study” and studies of his first style: Woman at HerToilette, and Woman Combing Her Hair--thus seeming to abandon, for an instant, any further gains from the research that made him sacrifice his original gift of immediate seduction.[2] We must follow step by step the man for whom tragic curiosity brought about Cubism.A vacation interrupted his painful experiments.[3] Upon his return, Picasso again picked up the large experimental canvas, which, as I have said, lived only through its figures. In it he created atmosphere through a dynamic decomposition of luminous power; an effort that left the endeavors of Neo-Impressionism and Divisionism far behind.Geometric signs--a geometry at once infinitesimal and cinematic--appeared as the principal element for a style of painting whose development nothing could stop from then on. As fate would have it, Picasso never would, nor ever could,become again a prolific, innocent, and learned creator ofhuman poetry. III Those inclined to consider the Cubists audacious jokers or cagey dealers might deign to take note of all the drama that truly presides over the birth of this art. Picasso himself had also “mediated on geometry,” and while he chose savage artists as leaders, he did not ignore their barbarity.Only he conceived logically that they had attempted the real figuration of existance and not the realization of the idea, most often sentimental, that we make of it. Those who see in the work of Picasso signs of the occult, the symbolic or the mystical, greatly risk never understanding it. In this manner, he wanted to give us a total representation of man and things.That is what the barbarian artists attempt to do.But [for Picasso] it is a question of painting, of art on a surface, and that is what he has to create--these balanced figures outside the laws of academicism and an anatomical system, while situating them in a space rigorously conforming to the unforeseen freedom of their movements. The fact that he wants to create in such a way is enough to make the one who instigates it the foremost artist of his age--even if he were to experience only the bitter joy of research without reaping its benefits. The results of the original research were disconcerting.There was no concern for grace; taste [was] repudiated as too narrow a measure! Nudes were born whose deformation was hardly surprising since we were prepared by Picasso himself, Matisse, Derain, Braque, Van Dongen, and, before that, Cézanne and Gauguin.It was the hideousness of the faces that froze with horror the half-converted. Deprived of the Smile, we could only recognize the Grimace. Perhaps, the smile of the Mona Lisa was the Sun of Art for too long. Her adoration corresponds to some particularly depressing, supremely demoralizing, decadent Christianity.One could say, paraphrasing Arthur Rimbaud, that the Mona Lisa, the eternal Mona Lisa, was a thief of energies.[4] It is difficult not to reflect in favor of the innovator, if we put face to face one of thenudes and one of the still lifes from this instant of Picassism (Cubism not having been invented yet). Although the human effigy appears to us so inhuman and inspires in us a kind of fear, we are more apt to subject our sensibility to the evident and quite new beauties of the representation of that bread [or] that violin or that cup, which were never painted before in such a way. It is because the accepted appearance of these objects is less dear to us than our own representation, our reflection distorted in the mirror of intelligence. Thus, with desperate confidence,we willingly allow ourselves to be dragged intothe search under [the guidance of] Picasso or some [other] painter in his family. Will much time be wasted? This is the problem! Who will demonstrate the necessity, the superior esthetic reason for painting beings and things such as they are and not as our eye recognizes them--that is to say, not since the beginning of time, but since men mediated on our image. Is that not art itself? Is not science the sole guide for these researchers, who anxiously subject us to all the angles of a prism at once, blending touch and sight, the two sources of much disparate joys? To that question, no one has been able to respond in a decisive way. On the other hand, the concern to make us feel an object’s total existance is not absurd in itself.The world changes its appearance. We no longer have the mask of our fathers, and our sons will not resemble us.Nietzsche wrote: “We have made the earth very small, say the last men, and they blink.”[5] Terrible prophecy!Is not the salvation of the soul on earth found in a completely new art? To that, I do not intend to respond today, as I am only aiming to prove that some artists, unjustly abused, obeyed ineluctable laws whose anonymous genius bears the responsibility. This chapter is nothing other than an anecdotal history of Cubism. Nothing that I advance here is imprudent.As far back as 1910, M. Jean Metzinger confided to a reporter: “We have never had the curiosity to touch the objects we were painting.”[6]
[1]Guilluame Apollinaire wrotein L’Intransigeanton December 21, 1910 that the Vollard Gallery exhibiiton consisted of paintings done “some time ago.” On December 23 Apollinaire noted that some “characteristic” works were added.In Les Marches de Provence, February 1911, Apollinaire described Picasso’s works in this show as “fathomless” blues and ”recent rose paintings.”(Leroy C. Breunig, ed., Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, translated by Susan Suleiman [New York: Da Capo, 1972], 122-123; 196).
[2]Woman at her Toilette/La Toilette, spring-summer 1906 (Albright -Knox Gallery, Buffalo) and Woman Combing herHair, summer-autumn 1906 (Private Collection).
[3]There is no known evidence that Picasso left Paris during the summer of 1907.We know from a letter dated August 8th from Fernande Olivier to Gertrude Stein (in Fiesole, Italy) that Picasso, Fernande and Salmon were at that time in Paris. (Hélène Seckel and Judith Cousins, “Chronology,” in Demoiselle d’Avignon[New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994], 152)Salmon seems to have confused Picasso’s 1906 vacation in Gosol with 1907.
[4]On Sunday,21 August 1911, the Mona Lisawas stolen from the Louvre.While Salmon wrote La jeune peinture française the painting had not been recovered.It was returned in November 1913, having spent the last two years a few blocks from the museum.Salmon’s close friend Guillaume Apollinaire had employed as a secretary a shady character named Géry Pieret, who boosted that he stole in 1907two Iberian heads that had belonged to the Louvre.Picasso bought those very heads.Fearing their discovery at the time of the Mona Lisa theft, Picasso arranged to return the sculptures anonymously through Salmon’s newspaper Paris-Journal.At the time of the Mona Lisa’s disappearance, Pieret disappeared too. Because of his connection to Pieret, Apollinaire was arrested on September 8th and released from jail on September 12th. At that time, Picasso denied knowing Apollinaire when questioned by the police.His name was not on Paris-Journal’s petition to exonerate Apollinaire.(Judith Cousins of the Museum of Modern Art, New York pointed this out to me for my previous study of Salmon.)Paris-Journal offered 50, 0000 francs as a reward and anonymity for the return of the Mona Lisa.(Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art, translated by Olivia Emmet [New York: Icon Editions/HarperCollins, 1993], 106.) Albert Gleizes played a part in securing Apollinaire’s release and exoneration through his connection with deputy district attorney Granié, who wrote art criticism under the pseudonym Aloysius Duravel.(John Richardson with Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso, volume II: 1907-1917 [New York: Random House, 1996], 207.) Here Salmon rephrases ArthurRimbaud’s “Les Premières Communions” (“First Communions”), part 9: “Christ! ô Christ, éternal voleur des énergies,. . .” (“Christ! oh, Christ, eternal thief of energies.”)
[5]From Thus Spake Zarathustra: “`The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man who makes everything small.His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest. “We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they blink’.” (Friedrich Neitzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufman [New York: Viking Press, 1954, repr. 1968], 129.)
[6]Jean Metzinger, “Note sur la peinture,” Pan! (October-November 1910), 649-51.