Crowther: Interpreting Cubist Space

This is Chapter Five 

of Paul Crowther’s 

‘The Phenomenology of Modern Art", 2012

The text has been quoted in this color

Note: Mr. Crowther writes philosophy- not art history or criticism.

He introduces specific works of art only as they relate to his ideas.

His discussion of those examples, however, is his only text that interests me.

So I jump from painting to painting

giving my own response to the piece before studying his.

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Of all twentieth-century art movements, cubism is perhaps the most fundamental, yet one of the most difficult to understand. Since its earliest phase, a critical tradition has arisen which holds cubism to be a tendency whose theoretical foundations and physical appearance can be explained best in terms of cognitive and metaphysical factors deriving from Kant's philosophy. This approach took on a new impetus with the publication of Edward Fry's compendium of early writings on cubism, and Lynn Gamwell's Cubist Criticism. Gamwell actually goes so far as to say (of two of cubism's most Kantian commentators) that, 'Raynal and Kahnweiler seem to have given the best overall view of Cubism, as far as understanding the historical roots and theoretical basis of the style." However, in this chapter I will argue that Kant's ideas are not compatible with how Braque and Picasso's cubist works appear. Indeed, we need a more phenomenological approach which emphasizes not just how we perceive cubist work's, but also how space is transformed, structurally, in terms of the stylistic criteria of modern art that I presented in the Introduction to this book. 

Here are the  "stylistic criteria of modern art"  from Crowther’s introduction:

(1) The overcoming or abandonment of traditional academic notions of ideal form, 'finish, and skill in terms of the application of paint, and compositional criteria. (2) An emphasis on subject matter that is not constrained by traditional criteria of artistic and moral propriety. (3) The embodiment of new pictorial codes that represent through partially, or entirely, adopting non-figurative means, and which extend, correspondingly, the kinds of perceptual relation that can be expressed directly through visual art. (4) An insistently planar emphasis (with a correlated diminution or elimination of perspectival accents).

If that is how Cubism is best understood, it’s hardly more fundamental than expressionism, spiritual abstraction, or any other kind of 20th C. art.

That has always seemed obvious to me, so I don’t need Crowther to prove it.

(and those who disagree might not want Kant’s jargon speaking for them)

 

But I am interested in how he writes about some early modernist paintings.

Picasso : Fruit and Bread Dish on a Table, 1909, 64 x 52"

 

Let’s start with the first painting that Crowther discusses.

Here’s my response to it:

Mystery and strangeness are being presented 

Possibly the objects for a ritual like the Eucharist.

The bread and fruit are not just here for eating.

The center , which is something like a big toothless grin,

is beginning to glow

Something unexpected is about to happen.

The artist is playing the role of magician or priest.

 

Cezanne distorted pictorial space to make  the kind of painting that pleased him.

 

Picasso did not have the luxury of an inherited income - he was not painting just to please himself. 

He had to sell stuff -   and provocative avant garde was a selling point - then, as now. 

And so we have my theory of Cubism:

It’s avant-garde garde entertainment.

Isn’t it fun to break rules,

and clever to celebrate that transgression.

Once the rules have been acknowledged as broken, however,

it does become pointless,

and so analytic Cubism had a brief shelf life.

The following piece seems related in several ways:

 

Cezanne: Still-life of Apples and Oranges, 1895

Fruit, tableware, drapery (plain and patterned) are presented on a small table - just as Picasso would  do fourteen years later.  No mystery here, however.  Open and cheerful - instead of closed and ominous.

Generous and prosperous.

We have way too much fruit - our table overfloweth.

Help yourself, my friend.

Crowther introduced the above Picasso  to accompany his discussion of "analytic" cubism.

He asserts that the term "analytic" is inappropriate:

To represent primary qualities commits us to an analysis of the subject matter, that seeks to disclose its most objective features. However, as I suggested earlier, it is fundamental to the artistic enterprise that not what is represented but how it is represented, is crucial. One might say that every distinctly artistic representation necessarilv carries an implicit proviso to the effect that 'This is how I. the individual artist, interpret this subject-matter' 

Now to link cubism to such a proviso (as indeed we must _ if cubism is to be an artistic style and not merely glorified orthographic projection) is to make nonsense of the claim to be representing the most essential or objective features of the subject matter. 

What the artist would in fact be doing, is not so much an 'analysis'  in terms of objective primary qualities (with the impersonal methodology that that implies) but rather a highly creative transformation of the subject matter into particular formal and volumetric features, that enables him or her to create a new entity whose structure is an equal function of both the particular subject matter, and the artist's individual handling of the medium. Of course, all representational painting does this to some degree, but cubism takes the process to such an extreme as to almost collapse the divisions between artist, medium, and subject matter (a point that I will elaborate fur-ther, as we proceed). 

This is why it is so misleading to use the term 'analytic at all in relation to cubism. It fosters the myth that the artist is engaged in impersonal quasi-philosophical investigation rather than a search for authentic artistic expression. Picasso made his opinion on this issue clear: 

The goal I proposed to myself in making Cubism? To paint and nothing more. And to plant seeking a new expression, divested of useless realism, with a method linked only to my thought - without enslaving myself or associating myself with objective reality. 

 To underline all this, it is worth looking at a cubist work of 1909 - Picasso's Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table ( Kunstmuseum Basel) where a decorative sense of colour still prevails, and where the subject matter is interpreted in terms of geometrical and volumetric properties suggested by its original structure. Here the various objects in the still life are tilted towards the viewer, and tonal values are simplified - especially in the folds of the curtains. However, it would be wholly misleading to describe these stylistic emphases as an 'analysis' of the object. In phenomenological terms, they are better described as visual transformations of it - a strategy that adapts the represented space and objects to the distinctive character of the two-dimensional picture plane.

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I am fascinated by Crowther’s  lengthy objection to using "analytic" to modify "cubism".

To begin with - I do happen to think of "analytic" Cubism as an "orthographic projection" that’s been "glorified" by using familiar artsy subject matter and presenting it as art.

Below is an example:

Picasso, Girl with Mandolin, 1910

A Bohemian subject matter presented with weak form, minimal color, and no narrative.

If I saw it in a dumpster, I would leave it.

It typifies "analytic cubism", but it does not typify Picasso.

The piece that Crowther selected, "Fruit and Bread Dish on a table",  has more of the mystery and power that he would create throughout his long career.

Here’s what the Tate Modern has to say:

 In an attempt to classify the revolutionary experiments made by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris when they were exponents of cubism, historians have tended to divide cubism into two stages. The early phase, generally considered to run from 1908–12 is called analytical cubism and the second is called synthetic cubism. It is termed analytical cubism because of its structured dissection of the subject, viewpoint-by-viewpoint, resulting in a fragmentary image of multiple viewpoints and overlapping planes. Other distinguishing features of analytical cubism were a simplified palette of colours, so the viewer was not distracted from the structure of the form, and the density of the image at the centre of the canvas.

Crowther wants Cubism, like all representational painting, to "interpret the subject matter" - not to analyze it.  But as his own quote from Picasso asserts, he was "seeking a new expression".  Interpretation was not really the point.

Coptic, 18th Century

I wouldn’t call "Fruit and Bread Dish on a Table" cubism - any more than the term should  be applied to Cezanne’s work or any other painting that ignores the picture box of natural perspective.

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Picasso, Seated Nude, 1909-10

 Even if we consider a work where the subject matter seems to have been broken up completely - such as Picasso's Sealed Nude of 1909-10 (Tate Modern, London) - the breaking-up has very much the character of a transformation, rather than a deformation. For example, the seated figured is translated into relatively well-defined, and variously sized facets that deline the form; but, on the other hand these facets are distributed in such a way as to merge the form with the background environ ment, and to even create areas of brighter faceting - where the upper torso of the figure, and several parts of the background

are pulled forward, as if drawn towards the frontal picture plane. True, the colour and tonal range in this work is extremely narrow, and has a certain visual austerity, but this does not, of itself, make the term 'analvsis' appropriate, and even less so when related to the features just described.

Ok, call it a transformation - but what does it express?  All its life - whether wonderful or horrible - has been sucked out.  Avant- garde transformation, ala Cezannne, is all it has.  AI could have made it.  Thank goodness Picasso moved on to more lively stuff.

Braque, Soda, 1912, 14" diameter

I suppose we have to call this Cubism,  but it’s not like an orthographic projection of anything. This is non-objective painting - with a bit of text thrown in.   It’s more like music - a jazz riff of urban energy.  Quite peppy and gritty. I like it!

Now, even when cubist space appears most broken-up, as in the 'hermetic' works of 1911, and early 1912, the notion of analysis does not even begin to get a purchase. Braque's Soda of spring 1912 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), for example, shows just how opposite of this, cubism's expressive dynamic actually is. The painting seems to focus on a set of rhapsodic visual variations on the theme of a bottle on a table - elicited by, and made harmonious in relation to, the two-dimensionality of the picture plane. The cheerful tondo format itself accentuates the sense of cubist space as a site of joyous reconfiguration. We are immersed in the broadly concentric visual rhythms, wherein the substance of the represented objects is transformed through its modes of distribution around the picture.

No one claims that Braque called this piece “cubist" in 1912 when he made it.

Let’s  give it a more generic term like "modernist" - and skip any talk of analytic.

I agree with Crowther - it’s quite  joyous —- whether it reconfigures anything is questionable.

Braque, Violin and Pitcher, 1909-10, 45 " x 28"

I’m not getting much more from this than I did from Picasso’s Mandolin Player to which it appears linked. 

Mantegna, Sybil and the Prophet, 1495

The shallow space, limited color, and dynamism of design of the above is similar to the  examples  shown of  analytic cubism.  The obvious difference is the narrative figuration.  Yet there is also a calm stateliness as well. The visual worlds created by Picasso and Braque are more tumultuous - unsettling.

Picasso, Portrait of Kahnweiler,   1910

Cezanne, Portrait of Vollard, 1899

By way of digression,

Picasso was 29 when he first painted his dealer,  Kahnweiler,

Cezanne was 60 when he first painted his, Vollard.

(2) 'Synthesis' and the Simultaneity Thesis. As we saw in Part One, Kant places great emphasis on the understanding's and the imagination's connective syntheses. He tells us that, 'By synthesis in its most general sense, I understand the act of putting different representation together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one act of knowledge. Taking this statement literally (as Kahnweiler does, for example) we would seem to have a succinct description of the 'simultaneous aspects of cubism from around mid-1910 onwards. The cubist work is to be taken as a synthesis of different views of an object, in a single image. It presents thereby, the object as given through time, rather than as perceived from a single viewpoint. This approach is possibly the most common interpretation of cubist space, of all. However, it faces a radical phenomenological difficulty. 

Consider such works as Braque's Violin and Pitcher of 1910, or Picasso's Portrait of Daniet Henry Kahnweiler also of 1910 Both these paintings involve subject matter which is transformed into substantial faceted forms that constellate around the basic shape of the dominant forms-searec figure, and the salient features of their respective visual appearance. The distribution of facets sits easily upon the two-dimensional picture plane, whereas normal forms of picturing would cut more deeply into it, in illusionistic terms.

 Now this faceting animates the picture plane with strong visual rhythms. And if there is rhythm, this entails some temporal nuance. But, if we want to describe these formal rhythms as the fusing of different appearances of the object into one simultaneous aspect, we need more than nuance, alone. What is required is a recognizable visual principle of temporal continuity  - one that allows the simultaneous image to be understood as a gathering up of the object viewed across different moments in time. 

In works such as Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase of 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), or some futurist paintings from 1909 onward, we find exactly such a principle. There is a visual linkage of forms such that we can recognize the picture as a simultaneous presentation of the object's appearances over different, successive moments in time. However, there is nothing that even remotely approximates this in the works by Braque and Picasso that I have just described, nor, indeed, can such a principle be recognized in any of their works. There are, however, some remaining ways in which Kant's notion of synthesis might appear to connect with cubist space. One could, for example, follow Raynal in construing the conventional representation as, in effect, a single appearance unstructured by concepts, and the cubist work in contrast as a complex and highly conceptualized synthesis of appearances. Unfortunately, Kant holds that any intelligible perception which is recognizably 'of' something - be it a bowl, or a picture of a bowl (or whatever) presupposes the application of a concept or concepts in a 'synthesis of representations' Hence, the conventional picture is also founded upon the unity of concepts, insofar as they provide 'rules' whereby appearances.

 

 

It's never been a good idea to take the names of art movements or periods all that seriously. Consider them historical accidents that ended up being widely used.  Many other words are that way - and meanings change over time.

 

Duchamp’s best known cubist painting is reasonably called both analytic and synthetic ( as well as aesthetically clinical as a cadaver illustration.)  It's  not surprising that he objected to the dominance of retinal art a hundred years ago.    He was, indeed, 50 years ahead of his time.

Cubism marks the beginning of art about art - coincident with writers who made literature about language.  Gombrich’s Art and Illusion validates this approach for art criticism.   It’s appropriate for universities - -which eventually became the major centers of art education.  It marginalized narrative painting until the rise of identity/social justice art.

Braque, Still Life with Harp And Violin, 1911, 46 x 32"

This seems more like chamber music than the actual stringed instruments that play it.

It’s light, lively, well ordered, precise. …. and expendable.

It has the compulsive energy of a doodle.

,It hums among like a busy urban street corner.

Crowther introduced it within his discussion of "synthetic" cubism.

Does it exemplify Kant’s notion of "synthesis" ?

Crowther argues that it does not. 

Instead he claims that pieces like this:

"Systematically reconstruct their subject matter by fusing it’s plastic mass with the surrounding space, and that of the other represented objects"

I would agree - but don’t really care about Kant, one way or the other.

Picasso, Bottle of Vieux Marc, glass, guitar, and Newspaper, 1913, 18 x 24"

A delightful play with shapes, tone, lines, and text.

Expansive and thrilling.

It’s surprising (and endearing) how the text here is so important in to the visual  design.

I’m guessing that the scraps of newspaper were laid down first,

while the lines came last.

Crowther includes it in his discussion of synthetic cubism - but why call it cubist?

Braque, The Portuguese, 1911

In the plethora of contemporary non-objective painting,

I can’t recall anything that resembles this. It has a grim seriousness - which a few painters share. But it also features something like a stately figure against a background. And that figure is having convulsions.

Here’s what Crowther wrote:

As Braque puts it, 'When the fragmentation of objects occurred in my painting around 1910, it was as a means for getting closer to the object, within the limits tolerated by the painting."

In relation to this, it is useful to consider Braques great work Le Portugais of 1911-12.  Here, the central human figure is presented allusively through overlapping vertical triangular structures, with facet like brush. strokes emphasizing the stuff and texture of material presence. The distinction between foreground and background, and the foreshortening of the central figure are expressed only ambiguously through small planes and facets. Likewise the individual character of the central figure, which is suggested through scattered details of human physiognomy and apparel. The most clearly recognizable features - namely the sounding box and strings of the guitar - are situated slightly below left-centre, and act as a visual point of gravity for the recognizable smaller details of the picture. Now in all this, there is not the slightest sense of isolating primary properties or of combining different views of the main figure simultaneously. Rather, three-dimensional reality is here reconstructed in virtual terms, so as to be visually harmonized with the two-dimensionality of the picture plane, and the materiality of painting as a medium. In Deleuzian terms, this is the Figure emerging from/returning to the material structure. To understand the significance of this one must note that, usually, in looking at a picture, its virtual three-dimensional and two-dimensional aspects are perceptually accessible only in exclusive terms. One cannot see the illusionistic content and the materiality and two-dimensionality of the picture, at the very same time. This 'twofoldness* (as the late Richard Wollheim used to call it) is fundamental to our perception of conventional pictorial structure. However, as we saw in Chapter Two, the emphasis on subjective conditions of perception and the mobility of the subject - from impressionism onwards - begins to subvert this perceptual dichotomy, as does the overcoming of finish and emphasis on manifest brushstrokes that I described in the Introduction to this book.

How might "twofoldness" (3d illusion versus 2d actual surface) be tested?  And if it’s not testable - how can we get serious about such an assertion ?  My own mind seems to toggle back and forth - sometimes quite rapidly - so one may bleed over to the other.

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For the rest of this chapter, Crowther discusses Kant in response to an art historian’s  (Mark Cheetham). dissent. It may be good reading for students of philosophy - but I’m taking a pass

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