An Unpredictable Riot? 1913 and Stravinsky's Rites of Spring.

100 years ago, on a May evening, the audience were taking their seats at Paris’s Theatre Champs-Élysées. It had only been open a few weeks. A new ballet was being staged that night, composed by the young, relatively unknown Igor Stravinsky. It had been commissioned by the great choreographer Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes, although that night the sequences had been arranged by his colleague Nijinsky. The costumes were bright, colourful and reminiscent of Russian folk art. The whole work had a raw, primitive feel.

 

 Yet Stravinsky’s piece was fused in a modernist crucible. Its participants were at the vanguard of all that was modern in the pre-war world. The city’s art world had been swept by a wave of incredible innovation, with the experiments of post-Impressionism resolving into a number of significant movements, from the colourful Fauvism and Orphism, to Picasso’s synthetic and abstract Cubism. In England, their works had caused a sensation at two Bloomsbury-run exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries and in Italy, motion and machine were celebrated in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. That year had also seem Parisian poet Guillaume Apollinaire publish Alcools, his cubist musings on the city, past and present, often called the great Modernist poem.

                                                                 experiment from Alcools

 1913 was an exciting year, with the old mores and methods thrown out in favour of the complete destruction of the rules governing structure, colour, subject matter and style. Stravinsky was also an iconoclast. His work challenged existing tastes in rhythm, metre and tonality, achieving a captivating dissonance that was completely new.

                                                         Composition by Picasso, 1913

 

Coming amid these innovations, the Parisian audience should have been accustomed to the shock of the new. But the work of the artistic vanguard had permeated a relatively small geographical location, encompassing Montmartre and Montparnasse, outside the academic hegemony that favoured the traditional, classical and harmonic. The audience comprised many lead artists and thinkers of the day, spilt among the modernists and members of the wealthy middle classes. Some were receptive, most were not. The performance prompted hissing, jeers, boos and the auditorium almost erupted in a riot. It was too shocking for many of its critics in 1913 but hindsight has vindicated Stravinsky’s masterpiece. Critic have referred to it as the single most significant moment in music history in the twentieth century. It broke the rules of musical composition as significantly as Picasso’s Cubism did with the human form and still life.

It is impossible to consider 1913 now without the benefit of hindsight; the looming conflict in the Balkans would escalate into one of the worst examples of senseless loss and destruction of the century. The outbreak of the First World War, fifteen months after Stravinsky's premier, would permanently derail the hot house of European modernism. This ballet, along with the poems and art of the period are the relics of a revolutionary flower that was nipped in the bud too soon.

Here is a section of the ballet, reconstructed from Stravinsky’s notes, danced by the Joffrey Company of Chicago, see what you think:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH1t0pCchxM

 

The Birth of Impressionism: private visions and public ridicule

 Monet's "Impression, Sunrise," 1874, which inadvertently gave the group its name. 

  It began in Paris, in the 1860s. A group of young artists sat drinking late into the night at the Café Guerbois, voicing their discontent over the repeated rejection of their work. France’s national Salon was governed by a conservative jury who favoured traditional subject matter, large-scale allegorical works and formal, figurative style. But these new artists dared to be different. Their brush strokes were infused with energy and movement, freely daubing and juxtaposing unexpected colours. Collectively, their work had a quick, “sketchy” or “unfinished” feel, contrary to the highly polished and finished establishment masterpieces. Instead of holing up, inside studios, they took their canvases outside and faced the challenges posed by shifting light and the vagaries of the weather. The Salon’s hegemony had produced repetitive, realistic images of acceptable themes, now disregarded by a rising generation who dared to find beauty in domestic interiors, street scenes and everyday life; hardly what the establishment considered “high art.” Among their number were names that now evoke those heady, pre-Franco-Prussian War days; Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Occasionally Paul Cezanne would look in.

 Paradoxically, the roots of Impressionist novelty lay in the past, where these young artists drew inspiration from the works of Dutch and English landscapists; Ruysdael and Hobbema, Constable[1] and Turner, blending the vibrancy of colour and brushworks used by Delacroix and the landscape traditions built up by the more recent Barbizon school of artists working around the Fontainebleau forest and along the Normandy coast, capturing wide vistas and domestic settings in energetic, vibrant brushstrokes and colours. Closer to home, the brazen, challenging eye-contact of nude prostitutes in Edouard Manet’s “Le Dejeuner Sur l’Herbe” had disconcerted and outraged the public when hung in the first Salon de Refusés[2] of 1863, as had “Olympia” two years later, establishing an extremity of reaction central to and almost indispensable for, the birth of modern art.

                                   Manet's "Le Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe." 1863

 In April 1874, this embryonic group officially emerged at the month-long exhibition critic Jules Laforgue called “the shock of the new…the most advanced eye in human civilisation.”[3] Based in the Boulevard des Capucines, at an old studio owned by the photographer Félix Nadar,[4] Degas was the show’s main organiser, assisted by Monet and Pissarro, responsible for the hanging of 163 works, including the placing of an “exquisitely delicate” work by Berthe Morisot[5] that shocked her former tutor into commenting that the whole exhibition looked like the product of a “cross-eyed mind.”[6] It was to prove a prophetic response. Around 3,500 people visited but disappointingly few pictures sold;[7] more people came for the experience, after reading the sensationalist reactions of the press. From London, the “Times” claimed the work was “anarchic” and “Le Figaro” labelled the artists “intransigents:” the journal “Charivari” swiftly published Louis Leroy’s now infamous sketch, satirising Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise,” as the lynch pin of a laughable collection, under the heading “Exhibition of the Impressionists.” Until this point, the group had been referring to themselves as the “Société anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc” or the “Société anonyme” for short, but Leroy’s derisive term captured the public imagination, despite the group’s initial displeasure and the name “Impressionists” spread.

                               Pissarro "Entree du Village du Voisins," 1872

 Not all the responses were negative; the majority of reviews were fairly balanced and a good number favourable,[8] even praising the artists for breaking with the “shambles”[9] the Salon had become; Leroy’s article appeared on the same day as Philippe Burty’s identification and praise of the works’ key characteristics and the artists’ success in challenging conventional ideas, published in “La Républiqe Français.” Four days later, respected critic Jules Castagnary’s article in “Le Siècle” laid the blame for their stand at the doors of the too-exclusive, reactionary Paris Salon and recognised the “common fixing of impressions” which signified for these artists, that a work was complete, further enforcing the new name. Public response was often crude, even carnivalesque: common contemporary jokes likened Impressionist methods to the firing of paint randomly at a canvas, an image that was to recur at many significant later stages of  avant-garde art.

 One strength of the Impressionists, was that they did not simply replace one set of rules with another; their rejection of narrow tradition enabled a diverse range of styles to flourish, allowing for Morisot and Degas, Monet and Cezanne to co-exist. Celebrating these marked differences in style, the Impressionists established a new, subjective art which did not simply replicate what was becoming possible with the development of photography. Now the camera could capture an objective image, it allowed the artist greater scope in seeking out a more personal vision, achievable through revolutionary uses of the palette, the application of paint and importance of the individual artist’s vision. Suddenly, the artist, not the critic, had the final say; these loosely daubed canvases were finished “art” because the creators said so, regardless of any formal rules or traditions. Practitioners could begin to redefine taste, rather than display specific talents within limits, creating as many definitions as there were artists. In this, the Impressionists took an important step for subjectivity and autonomy in modern art.

                                      Berthe Morisot "In a Park" 1874

 Despite mixed responses, there were to be eight more Impressionist exhibitions. The last in 1886, marked the rise of a new generation of artists, who were to benefit from the freedom achieved by their early Impressionists forerunners. Manet had died in 1883; Monet, Cezanne and Renoir declined to participate, so alongside Degas and Pissarro in 1886, hung images by young artists Seurat[10] and Signac that were to influence Van Gogh and Gauguin, prompting symbolist critic Félix Fénéon to coin a Neo-Impressiontistic, or Divisionist movement, later incorporated under the Post-Impressionist[11] umbrella. The ageing Pissarro was even drawn to emulate Seurat’s Divisionist or Pointillist technique, which had won the younger artist much attention and acclaim with works such as “The Bathers” 1883-4, “Le Bec du Hoc” 1885, “Lighthouse at Honfleur” 1886 and his circus images of the 1890s which assimilated the Impressionist’s aims and techniques, while moving beyond them. The legacy of Impressionism was a freedom of expression but perhaps more importantly, a freedom of exhibition, that sparked the powerful dialogue between modern art and the general public.

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[1] Constable’s “Hay Wain” was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1824, where it was first seen by Delacroix. Critics Delecluze and Nodier and artist Theodore Gericault had seen similar works at the Royal Academy and recognised French landscape to be “heavy, insensitive and false” in comparison.

[2] “Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe” was shown at the 1863 Salon de Refuses; “Olympia” in 1865. The Salon de Refuses had been set up in 1863 to showcase rejected material of the main Salon.

[3] Quoted in “The Impressionists.” Katz and Dars. Abbeydale Press. 1991.

[4] Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, whose photographic work featured bright, radiant light and blurred, asymmetrical images.

[5] Protegee, model and possible lover of Manet, she later married his brother.

[6] Quoted in “Cezanne” Dorling Kindersley, 1999.

[7] Degas and Berthe Morisot sold nothing, while Renoir was successful only by slashing his prices.

[8] In “Impressionism: Origins, Practise, Reception” Thames and Hudson, 2000, Belinda Thomson provides a “rough tally” of 52 reviews; 9 neutral, 20 favourable, 18 mixed and 5 hostile.

[9] Ibid.

[10] It was Seurat’s huge “Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte” that stole the show in 1886.

[11] A term equally randomly generated by Roger Fry and Desmond McCarthy in 1910.

Victorian Girls on the Loose in Paris.

An Adventure in the art capital of Europe.

                                         A class at the Ecole des Beaux Arts

The significance of artistic Paris in the last decade of the nineteenth century is difficult to overestimate. Writers and painters flocked there from all over Europe in search of greater freedom and opportunity; the launch of the Salon de Refusés and proliferation of dealers and smaller galleries offered a tantalising glimpse of avant-garde success unthinkable at home.

The 1880s and 90s had seen the star of Impressionism eclipsed by the likes of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne; new techniques were being explored by Symbolists, Synthetists, Primitivists and Expressionists. Anything seemed possible in artistic terms. The exciting experiments of the Fauves and Cubists lay in the future. Others were drawn by depictions of Bohemian life by popular authors such as George Du Maurier, Eugene Sue and Emile Zola as well as the comparatively low prices of studios, alcohol and café meals. This was the absinthe era. A spell in one of the Parisian art schools was seen as the way to develop skills in paint and colour and learn from the masters long before Roger Fry’s 1910 “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” exhibition at the Grafton Galleries brought them to the attention of a broader section of English society.

 The lure of fin-de-siecle Paris for young English women, was that of employment, love and artistic experience in a city where they could escape the strictures of the parental home. Three such girls who went off in search of adventure were recent Slade school graduates, Ida Nettleship, Gwen John and Gwen Salmond. Yet in 1898, they were the lucky ones. While Ida’s parents were supportive of her artistic endeavours and Gwen Salmond’s financial support eased the passage for them all, Gwen John had to fight to join her friends, falling out with her father in the process. Many women with Parisian ambitions met with initial resistance as their Victorian parents saw the trip as little more than an opportunity to misbehave. Kathleen Bruce, a sculptor who visited the city in 1901, wrote “…to say that a lass perhaps not out of her teens had gone prancing off to Paris to study art was to say that she had gone irretrievably to hell” and the undeniable freedoms encouraged by the relaxed atmosphere of late café hours was equally as attractive as the opportunity to study at one of the academies. There were understandable fears that the great masters might corrupt their students, leading at best to heartbreak in the case of Gwen John and Auguste Rodin; and at the worst, ruin.

                      Female arts students drawing from life at the Slade, London

First, they took rooms in a cheap hotel while they searched for lodgings but quickly moved on to rooms on the outskirts of the Latin Quarter at 226 Boulevard Raspail, which Ida wrote to reassure her mother was “a very old lady style of pension…looking down on a boulevard with rather brown rustling plane trees and cafes” on the “delightful” side of the river. However, they then found what they were looking for on the fifth floor of 12 rue Froidvaux; a wide leafy avenue in the cheaper Montparnasse district, which they mis-spelt as Froidveau and mis-translated as “cold beef”. The ground floor was a café but a separate side door gave them a degree of privacy and quiet, the balcony with “good views” overlooked the cemetery and the toilet was of the old variety, which required water being thrown down it. The elderly female concierge was “very high in character” and strict about visitors; “les dames, oui, mais les monsieurs? Non ! Jamais,” information which Ida was keen to pass on again to her mother: “all this is rather amusing but it will show you it is a respectable place.” It cost 900 francs, but Ida worked out their combined finances, planned for basic living expenses and decided they could afford it for three months. What finally swung them in its favour was its proximity to the Louvre and Julian’s Academy.

Their studio was basic and had clearly seen better days but the girls had great plans; “half the wall is covered with brown paper, and when we have spare time and energy we are going to cover the other half,” Ida wrote, but spare time was lacking amid their busy schedule of gallery visits, sketches and exploring the narrow streets for shops selling art supplies. They ate at an anarchists’ restaurant, from which some of the waitresses became their models; at breakfast they read Shakespeare’s history plays and out in the street, kept an eye on Parisian fashions; evenings often became dressmaking sessions, based on what they had seen in the department stores. Gwen John produced an “Interior with Figures” which shows Ida in an historically-inspired creations, wrapped in a heavy pink shawl and full, ruffled skirt. When her father Edwin John visited, he took exception to a dress of Gwen’s, modelled on a picture by Manet, which he claimed made her look like a prostitute.

Gwen John's Interior with figures, showing Ida in the pink dress

Next, they had to enrol in an art school. The nearby Julian’s run by Benjamin Constant, was the girls’ first choice but it was very expensive and with thirty pounds remaining in her budget for fees, Ida considered the cheaper Académies Colarossi or Delécluse. However, she soon heard of the new Académie Carmen, which had opened up near the Luxembourg gardens at 6, passage Stanislas. It was run by Carmen Rossi, a model of Whistler, who would be undertaking some of the teaching: originally Rossi charged the female students twice the amount as the men, but Whistler soon discovered this and put a stop to it. At first, only Gwen Salmond with her sixty pounds for fees, could afford to enrol but she generously paid for Gwen John to attend as an afternoon student, while Ida enrolled under Laurent at Colarossi’s. Writing a pamphlet on the lure of the city in 1902, Clive Holland reflected the popularity of their choices; “a year or two at Julian’s, the Beaux-Arts or Colarossi’s is worth a cycle of South Kensington with its ‘correctness;’" by 1900, one in three students of the Beaux-Arts was a foreigner.

Perhaps the artistic highlight of the girls’ Paris sojourn was their contact with Whistler. He was coming to the end of a distinguished career (he died in 1903) and his reputation was sufficient to cause a stir among the students when the new Académie Carmen opened the autumn of 1898. The school rules were strict, even more than those of the Slade; the sexes were segregated into different studios, there was to be no drawing on the walls, no smoking, no singing, even no talking, which made it very unpopular with male students who soon rebelled against what they considered an unnecessarily draconian stance. A head student, the massier or massiere, was appointed to handle student matters and maintain the list of rules pinned to the wall: during part of 1899, this post was held by an English girl, Inez Bate who had achieved favour by painting exactly as Whistler taught. Taking orders from a young woman only irritated some of the male students further though and the class became predominantly female. Largely, the girls were happy to be presided over as part of a dedicated band; Gwen Salmond explained “Whistler is worth living for,” a “first rate master who knows how to teach,” “very beautiful and just right” and even Ida rushed to his defence, rebutting attacks on his teaching as “stupid and unkind.” In his later autobiography, her husband reminded Whistler of Ida when the two men met again in London; “I mentioned Ida Nettleship, who had been his pupil in Paris, had posed for him and was now my wife. Mr Whistler spoke of her with much sympathy, asking me to make her his compliments. Influenced by Whistler, Paris and a new found freedom, that autumn was a “most promising time,” full of inspiration and hope; in her letters home, Ida describes them as almost intoxicated with the possibilities of art; “we all go suddenly daft with lovely pictures we can see or imagine and want to do."

Whistler at work

Yet the fees were expensive and the girls were not making any money. All too soon, the dream had to come to an end. Reality beckoned. The Parisian interlude was never meant to be permanent, rather a glorious finishing process before the real business of life began. Returning to England, Ida was forced to confront the question of her future. Within the year, she would marry the flamboyant Augustus John, yet the marriage would be a troubled one. Paris would remain, for her, as an image of a better time, to which she longed to return. When she did go back and try to make a life for herself, a few years later, it was not with her husband, but with his other mistress and their combined brood of children.

Three extraordinary, dead women

Writer Sophie Brzeska, artist Ida Nettleship and model Fernande Olivier, who spent their lives with famous men. 

Taken from a multiple biography currently in progress

                                 Sophie, painted by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in 1913

When Sophie Brezska was born in 1873, Charles Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” was fourteen years old but by the time of Fernande Olivier’s death in 1966, mankind was only three years away from setting foot on the moon. The world changed beyond recognition during the lives of their generation. Their maturation was concurrent with the suffrage movement and whilst none engaged directly with the more political activities of their contemporaries, their lives reveal continual conflict between more conservative, traditional values and new codes of conduct and experimentation. Nor was their challenge to gender stereotypes constant. Each experienced specific moments when changing social and moral expectations informed their decision making and resulted in deliberate acts of defiance, which although frequently motivated by personal desire, expose a complex interrelation of individual and context. What seems most strikingly and inescapably time-specific, was the power of men to define and limit their artistic achievement: their success being as durable as contemporary masculine understanding and generosity. Sophie lived briefly with the tragic Vorticist sculptor Henri Gaudier, linking her name with his; Ida was married to the rakish and fecund Augustus John while Fernande was Picasso's first love. Each had ambitions of their own yet little of their work survives.

 Separated by the passage of a century and vocal women’s movements, it is easy now to talk about wasted opportunities and romanticise these women as heroines sacrificed to male success, but as artist Edna Clarke Hall put it in response to her critics, women’s responsibilities lie equally with their children and “…in the development of the powers in herself which are her true expression.” The early twentieth century does provide examples of women who became successful artists as well as raising children: Bloomsbury’s Vanessa Bell, poetess Frances Cornford, Ida’s friends Edna Clarke Hall and Gwen Smith all persisted despite complicated personal arrangements. Yet there were also a significant number of successful women who remained single, delayed marriage, or did not have children, featuring on the fringes of these three lives: artists Ursula Tyrwhitt, Dorothy Brett, Gwen John, Dora Carrington, Nina Hamnett and Marie Laurencin; writers Virginia Woolf, Julia Strachey, Gertrude Stein and Katherine Mansfield. Of course there are many others, but although equal success in the realms of domesticity and creativity was achievable, it was significantly more difficult for women of the early twentieth century. Sadly, the most consistent and significant factor was financial circumstance: they could not all afford rooms of their own.

                                A pregnant Ida in 1901, painted by Augustus John

 Possibly of the three, Ida came the closest to having what would now be considered the most successful if short lived “career”, studying at the Slade throughout her teenage years: a handful of Fernande’s pictures have been reproduced in biographies of Picasso and until recently, Sophie’s unpublished diaries and short stories languished in a Colchester library, where water damage made her French-Polish writing difficult to read: a 2008 translation and limited edition of her stories and autobiography went a long way to address this. Ironically, their posthumous existence has been allied to the fame of those who directly affected their output but it is significant that they have been remembered primarily as women and not artists or writers.

 The arena of relationships and gender expectations was difficult and complicated for Sophie, Ida and Fernande: all three rejected the marital ideals of their families in order to follow their hearts. Their quests for romance were not always successful though, as the men they encountered could be predatory and selfish, exploiting double standards of sexual behaviour even when professing themselves most in love. Nor did marriage guarantee security. Instead, these women sought to forge new family units and open relationships that allowed for greater sexual and personal freedom, although the idea often proved more fulfilling in theory than practice. The casual encounters and affairs of Sophie and Fernande were strikingly modern in comparison with the expectations of their upbringing and despite remaining faithful, Ida saw her marriage become a ménage. As such, the conditions and experiences of these three women’s lives identify them as representatives of a changing world.

                                    Fernande, painted by Kees Van Dongen

All three led tragic lives. Sophie's belief that Henri would be killed during the Great War, was proven in April 1915; after a peripatetic existence, teaching, writing and moving about to escape great poverty, she ended her days in a psychiatric hospital in 1925. After six years of marriage, Ida's youthful hopes were buried in drudgery and repeated childbearing; her final labour proved too much and she died in Paris in 1906, at the age of thirty. Fernande lived the longest, flitting between artists and lovers after she and Picasso split in 1912; again poverty oppressed her despite stints working for Paul Poiret and the writing of her memoirs in the 1930s; she died in 1966.

                                                            

No Cubes left in Cubism: Picasso and Braque 1910-1914

 Still life with chair caning, Picasso 1912

 Art is everything and everything is art.

                                                                                           

In the years leading up to the outbreak of the Great War, the relationship between art and artist underwent a fundamental change. The act of creation became increasingly self-conscious; initially playful, later cynical and ironic; as artists questioned their purpose and relation to the emerging modern world. Boundaries between life and art were repeatedly broached, as all objects and situations became potential artistic material, calling the very existence of the artist into question and leading some into an increasing mood of disorientation, disillusion and cynical manipulation. Others were buoyed by this iconoclastic frenzy, fired by the irreverently poetic and fantastic origins of Dada and Surrealism, Abstract, Constructivist and Installation art. Poet Guillaume Apollinaire said the spirit of these years forced artists to “learn to laugh,” but their works contained an increasingly uneasy sense of impending world events and the suspicion that they were  at best misunderstood, at worst, irrelevant.  

The men to watch were Pablo Picasso and George Braque, working so closely together in Montmartre's Bateau Lavoir studios that it was sometimes difficult to tell their creations apart. Since Picasso's 1906 "Demoiselles D'Avignon," they had rapidly been moving away from representational forms and experimenting with Cezanne's legacy of the cylinder, sphere and cone. Cubism’s innovations inevitably attracted followers among the young avant-garde artists of Paris. While Braque’s inclusion of new works in the 1909 Salon des Independants and Picasso’s retrospective late in 1910 confirmed them as the leaders in the field, a group of young “Salon” cubists were keen to appropriate and adapt the advancements they had made. As Cubism developed greater emphasis on the third dimension, artists found new ways of departing from the canvas and applied their cubist principles to the media of collage and sculpture, semiotics and machinistic expressions of modernism.
                                                               

Published in Paris in 1907, Henri Bergson’s “Creative Evolution” seemed to predict, or perhaps help inspire, the direction of Cubism. His theories of memory and the subjective construction of reality pervaded avant-garde circles, encouraging artists to “look on all matter as if it were carvable at will…regard matter as indifferent to form” and use the artist’s power of “decomposing and recomposing as (they) please….according to any law…into any system.” This implied more than just freedom from physical restraint, it encouraged an active, near god-like ability to manipulate all forms to individual, subjective purpose and encouraged the Cubists and later Futurists to view space as “the plan of our possible action on things.”

                                               Picasso's "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon" 1906

Early works.

In 1909 and 1910, Picasso and Braque’s experiments in Analytic Cubism produced monochromatic images apparently broken into fragments and reassembled to represent multiple viewpoints. They moved away from the Cezannian influences of twisting and contorting bodies that had marked their work from 1907-8 and began treating figures more like landscapes, dissecting the planes or cube forms they were reduced to. Important bridging works between these styles are Picasso’s “Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table,” a proto-Cubist still life of familiar domestic objects and “Bather” of 1909, which retains the clear influence of Cezanne’s series of the same name, whilst introducing the duller Cubist palette and opening up the body so as to be seen from a variety of angles. “Woman with Pears (Fernande)” also retains elements of the Demoiselles style, although other heads produced during a summer trip to Horta de Ebro show further fragmentation of features and planes, heading towards the complete abstraction of Picasso’s Cadaques trip of Summer 1910. This intense focus upon the merging of three dimensional objects, allowing them the freedom to pass through each other, developed Cezanne’s technique of passage in a way sometimes referred to as Facet Cubism.

Other works such as “Mademoiselle Leonie” and “Woman in an Armchair” still include recognisable human forms, however distorted or devoid of features but the body parts of “Nude Woman” are barely recognisable and the geometric lines have lost any three dimensional quality. Recent controversy over whether “Man with a Violin” might actually be “Woman with a Violin,” or even a still life arrangement, illustrates the extent of figurative rejection in these images. Although experiencing a greater degree of success in the market place with these new works, than ever before, Picasso returned to semi-recognisable human forms for the commissioned portraits of 1910. Images of dealers Vollard, Kahnweiler and Wilhelm Uhde are visibly varied in character, with subtle differences in palette and mood, suited to personality: the Kahnweiler work is most abstract, predominantly grey with lighter, more ochre focal points around the head and clasped hands: Vollard’s greys are greener, with strong emphasis on the yellow-pink face, which is full of character: Uhde is brown, almost dull purple, with pinched features and more visible clothing, especially the collar and neck tie.

Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910

Hidden codes in Cubism ?

 Through 1911 and 1912, fragmentation became so complete as to render original images almost illegible, infused with a new sense of space and openness; Picasso’s “Arlesienne” and “Dancers on July 14” have a lighter feel, although this many be in part due to the lack of heavy colour, as they are executed in ink on paper. Certainly the density of activity has lessened and the canvases of Braque’s “Woman Reading,” “Still Life with Violin” and “Pedestal Table” appear to be only loosely containing their subject matter, dispersed and diffuse as that was. By 1912, that there were no longer any cubes left in Cubism; the third dimension had been analysed, reconstructed and dissected beyond recognition. The paintings of this period, from Picasso’s dealers series, to 1912, are often referred to as Hermetic Cubism, when the shattering of solid forms was taken as far as is possible in oil on a two-dimensional canvas.

 Braque had introduced another innovation early in 1909, when he began to play with the idea of dimensions, signs and signifiers, acknowledging the artificiality of his work, a quality Matisse earlier admired in Cezanne. At the tops of “Violin and Palette,” 1909 and “Violin and Pitcher,” 1910, he painted a large nail, in trompe l’oeil style, pinning the canvas against a wall and undermining three dimensional interpretation. The irony of this was Cubism’s hitherto deliberate reluctance to yield meaning, breaking the usual planes and dimensions of objects and reconstituting them in short, often disconnected lines, broken circles and curves, with the use of shading or monochromatic tonality.

 A specific Cubist language and iconography developed, partly from the use of violins and musical scores; the instruments’ holes became an “f,” then an “s” and the inclusion of newspapers in compositions led Braque to include recognisable words, the first being a section “GIL B” of the “Gil Blas” paper, perhaps as an ironic nod to its critic Louis Vauxelles.  This points to a playful relationship between the real, or recognisable, aspects of a work and those which are almost impossible to decipher, indicative of a widening gap between the public and private aspects of Cubist work and the “truth” artists were prepared to yield. Letters and recognisable objects, such as faces, hands, violin strings or flutes, could be clues and concessions to the viewer or further exaggeration of the point that these canvases should not be interpreted in terms of representation but as comments upon the nature of art and depiction of reality. This meant artists could more overtly deny their role as conveyers of truths, using visual tricks to mislead rather than explain, true of other non-figurative art but interpreted by Picasso and Braque as a mark of exclusivity, perhaps even mockery.

                                                               Braque, Still Life 1913 

Much of the Cubists’ subject matter involved a return to the Impressionists’ personal and domestic realm; sheet music, fruit bowls, pipes, cards, papers, glasses and drinks were familiar depictions of the pleasures of café life. Braque later termed this phase “the triumph of painting as deception” and implied the symbols did indeed act as signifiers, visual signs for what was imagined, not seen, with the bunches of grapes appearing in several works representative of this theme of illusion. The letters and words featured did have contextual meaning across several canvases but the vocabulary of signs developed by Picasso and Braque were more playful and self-parodic, than a deliberate attempt to enter the realm of semiotics. Critic Jacques Rivière was taken in by this in 1912, writing that the inclusions of symbols had been taken to the “point of absurdity, (thus) depriving them of meaning,” hitting upon the very point that the symbols partly served the same purpose as the trompe l’oeil nails. However, the use of longer, recognisable words undeniably had significant inclusive and exclusive effects, exciting play between artist and viewer, who is fooled into seeing the canvas as a code to be cracked.

Picasso's guitar, 1913

Initially, this play of words was generated by subject matter but later began to provide clues in the deciphering of more abstract representation. Lettering, as used in “Lighter and Newspaper” highlighted the artificiality of canvas images that had no more connection with the real three dimensional object than its name did, reminiscent of Magritte’s “This is not a pipe” a decade later. Following the theme, Braque produced “Pedestal Table,” “Still Life with Banderillas” and “Le Portugais” in 1911, with words as fragments, as devoid of apparent relevance as the broken lines are to their subject matter. However, the sketched “Fox” and “Still Life with Bottle of Marc” still included words as clues to identity; in these cases, extensions of the titles. Braque’s “Homage to J S Bach” and Picasso’s “Scallop Shell” and “Souvenir du Havre” press the point further; Picasso included names and labels from posters and used words of personal significance in the 1911-12 “Ma Jolie,” as a reference to his new lover. The inclusion of symbols and words makes clear a key technique of Analytical Cubism: the artificiality of representation on canvas was explored to comment on the limitations of painting as an art form.

Rising off the canvas.

This sense of reconstructive adventure and the rejection of figurative limitations led inevitably into collage and the third dimension, enabling Picasso and Braque to liberate themselves from the flat planes of the canvas and blur the lines between hitherto separate media. Echoing Foucault’s concept of significant “texts”, and theories of semiotics, dealer Kahnweiler wrote of Cubism in the 1940s that the “true character of painting and sculpture is that of a script. The product of these arts are signs, emblems for the external world, not mirrors… once this was recognised, the plastic arts were freed from the slavery inherent in illusionistic styles.” For the Analytical Cubists, the qualities of objects existed independently of those objects; properties and ideas were more real in abstract form than they were when found in three dimensions, linking them with Platonic conceptions of the ideal.
Picasso's 1912 "Still Life with Chair Caning" was one of the most significant of the Cubist's experiments with dimension. Onto a half-completed painting of cafe-based objects: newspaper, clay pipe, glass, lemon slices and knife, is pasted a piece of oilcloth printed in imitation of a woven cane pattern, over which painted lines extend. Displaying little correlation between these two distinct areas, the image rejects classical unity and juxtaposes different planes which challenge the eye's attempts to decode perspective. The shape and framing of this work was also unusual; cut into an oval, encompassed by a single, thick piece of rope, it gives the effect of a cafe table top or the seat of a chair, an exciting move in the direction of sculpture. The "real" objects are allowed to possess their own dimensions, while the others are painted flat. Significantly visible, the "JOU" of the newspaper "Le Journal," puns on the visual game or joke of double dimensions and the further play on the concept of a "tableau," the French word for an easel picture, reminds us the picture is simultaneously a work of art and a useful table.

In further mimetic play, Picasso’s “Still Life” construction employed plaited fibres and scraps of wood, painted to look like a plate and wine glass, with sliced bread and sausage, creating a fictional space at the same time that the objects’ outward projection calls this into question. Differing conventions of reality are expressed; the sausage and bread are clearly not so, yet the plaited fibres are present as literally themselves; it also proves difficult to ascertain a single viewpoint, as the angles of table top and glass suggest the multi-faceted approach of Analytic Cubism. The line between reality and artifice is called into question; the work reassures on one hand, whilst disturbing our senses on the other.

From this, further contrasting dimensional techniques developed in Cubist works, marking the start of the Synthetic period from 1912-1914. Texture and pattern, along with chiaroscuro paint effects made the composed forms more like pictorial objects in themselves than recognisable figurations. Braque had already been using a faux-bois technique achieved by scraping a steel comb across wet paint to create a wood grain effect; now scraps of wall paper, adverts, cloth and sheets of music began to appear and instead of painting newspapers, the artists stuck real sheets of printed matter directly onto the canvases. This technique of using “found” objects as literal representations of themselves, later involved more complex, sculptural arrangement of pasted papers, interpreted by drawn or painted lines, known as papiers collés. Every plane in view, real or imagined, was parallel to the work’s surface. Braque’s “Still life with Guitar” shows the importation of paper for texture, colour and grain but Picasso’s “Guitar and Sheet Music” and “Guitar, Sheet Music and Wine Glass” use ochre patterned wall paper as a background for a more complicated collection of coloured, representative shapes. Initially, extra papers were being stuck onto the canvas but by late 1912, Picasso’s found objects were substituted for the canvas itself and drawn elements appeared on smaller pieces of paper, as if the relationship between the central “real” and representational objects had been reversed. The flat collages pushed further into the third dimension, as with Picasso’s “Guitar and Bottle of Bass” and “Violin” of 1913, which incorporates a box pasted into the design.

                                                          Picasso's absinthe glass 1913

 Braque’s use of faux-bois showed that almost any material could be used to represent another, as a sort of visual short-hand for the qualities of texture but the tactility of Picasso’s “Still Life with Chair Caning” went further in rejecting signifiers in favour of the real. Picasso had crossed over into sculpture before: a plaster version of a head of Fernande in 1909, later cast in bronze, has the Medusa-style hair and distorted figure which place it in the early cubist period, the Cezannian, or Facet era; other similar early works were also made of bronze, wood or plaster. What was different about the Synthetic sculptures was the new idea that the use of any material or object was acceptable; every day objects could potentially become works of art with little alteration. It was a matter of perception; they simply needed to be seen in that context; the ultimate stage to artistic autonomy. This was revolutionary, leading directly to Marcel Duchamp’s iconic ready-made porcelain urinal of 1917. After that, Art would never be the same again: Duchamp was to give up painting althogether a few years later, claiming there was nowhere left to go with it; yet sixty years of colourful canvases still lay ahead of Pablo Picasso.