Cubism art movement Assignment | Custom Essay Services

I want you to write history of cubism art movement, how it begin, how it proceed and how it then came to an end. I will also attach one source that is a book you have to write history from there. I want you to write according to my suggestions. Footnotes with exact page number should be written.

A Rationale of Ugliness
Cubism and I t s C r i t i ca l Reception
I had studied the gargoyles of Oxford and Notre Dame, I had mused over the art of the Niger
and of Dahomey, I had gazed at Hindu monstrosities, Aztec mysteries and many other primitive
grotesques; and it had come over me that there was a rationale of ugliness as there was a
rationale of beauty, . . . which might have its own value and esoteric meaning. Men had painted
and carved grim and obscene things when the world was young. Was this revival a sign of some
second childhood of the race, or a true rebirth of art?
—Gelett Burgess, “The Wild Men of Paris”
This chapter aims to reconfigure our understanding of cubism by exploring the
wide range of critics and artists before 1914 who defined the movement within
politicized concepts of the “primitive.” Primitivist tropes extended from the
“directness” and grotesquerie of Africanism to the arrested elementary drawing
techniques in “finished” canvases, and from the concept of an essentialized
regional cubism directly tied to local soil (for example, the “Basque” cubism of
Félix Tobeen), to the supposedly “infantile” and “degenerate” qualities of the
art, such as that reproduced in Albert Gleizes’s and Jean Metzinger’s key text Du
“Cubisme” (On “cubism”; 1912).1
Primitivism as a central aspect of modern European art has been well studied
in the last two decades, engaging the field of art history with postcolonial
discourse in related fields of anthropology, cultural geography, history, and
literature.2 Within cubism studies, recognition of the importance of primitivism
for a historicized understanding of the movement has been hampered by a
long-standing ahistorical view of cubism as rejecting the irrational in favor of
a purely rational approach to art making. Such thinking has led historians to
utilize terms such as “beautiful,” “balanced,” “austere,” and “classical,” evoking—
intended or not—Cartesian concepts of art that the cubists pointedly struggled
to overthrow.3 Such concepts ignore the terms of cultural discourse with which
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cubism was actually received when it was new: “ugly,” “violent,” “childlike,”
“primitive,” and “insane.” The cubists and their apologists purposely sought to
realize a subjective and intuitive vision justified and intensified by the accommodation
of unconscious urges and primordial drives they believed gave birth
to cave art and other manifestations of the primitive. According to Apollinaire,
such sensitivity to the world around them would result in a new, vital, modern
instance of the classic.4 Such thinking resulted in seemingly oxymoronic terminology
that pervaded the early discourse on cubism, such as Gelett Burgess’s
reference to “a rationale of ugliness,” Gleizes’s and Metzinger’s tract conflating
Figure 42
Georges Braque in his
studio, 5, Impasse de
Guelma, c. 1911. Archives
Laurens.
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A r at iona l e o f u gl iness
classicism with the intuitive irrationalism of French philosopher Henri Bergson,
or André Salmon’s claim that Pablo Picasso had “logically grasped” the geometry
of cubism by “choosing the uncivilized artists as guides.”5
Conceptions of the primitive inform the reception of cubism across the
whole prewar period, not just Picasso’s, Braque’s, and Derain’s Africanist periods
of 1907–1908. Primitivist language is rife throughout the primary literature on
cubism writ large for many of the artists themselves, for those sympathetic to
them, and for those who opposed them. In the substantial body of statements
from both the artists and their critics pro and con, concepts of the primitive
identified with cultures indigenous to Europe were conflated with art that served
to define the non-European “other” in the Western imagination.
Visual documentation also reveals a significant relationship to ideas of the
primitive throughout the movement’s history, for example, a photograph of
Braque in his studio around 1911 with masks and musical instruments (figure
42) and the gallery view of the Picasso–Braque exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s
“291” in December 1914 (figure 43), revealing their recent works—such as
Picasso’s collage Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table (1912)—installed with a Kota
reliquary (Gabon) and (to settle whether Stieglitz viewed African art as a wonder
of nature) a large paper-wasp nest.6
Scholars have previously observed stylistic references to African sculpture
in Picasso’s later cubist works and interpreted the act in a variety of ways. For
Figure 43
Installation view
of Picasso–Braque
exhibition, Gallery ‘291,’
New York. From Camera
Work, January 1915,
showing Kota reliquary
(Gabon) and Picasso,
Bottle and Wine Glass on
a Table, 1912 (currently
Alfred Stieglitz Coll.,
Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York).
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example William Rubin discussed the subtle appearance of Picasso’s New Caledonian
finial figures—which hang on the wall in Gelett Burgess’s photograph of
1908 (figure 44)—in his Portrait of Kahnweiler (1910); indeed, Rubin notes that
Picasso himself pointed out the reference.7 Rubin and Yve-Alain Bois have each
discussed the relation between Picasso’s Grebo mask and his paper Guitar of
1912.8 These authors are interested in the style and language of Picasso’s art, and
they both assert—from different perspectives—the importance of neo-Kantian
theories of perception in the role played by African art in motivating cubists’
drive towards abstraction.9 This conclusion, however, from the vast evidence
of the primary sources, was roundly rejected by the artists themselves and all
but one of their contemporaneous supporters, Maurice Raynal.10 Despite this
attention to issues of style, scholars have not considered the rich complexity
of primitivism within broader cubist discourse, in terms either of the aesthetic
debates that animated contemporary artists—from the most traditional academicians
to avant-gardists—or of its political valences across a spectrum from Left
to Right in the avant-guerre.
This chapter deals with a number of key paradigms and tropes of the primitive
informed by French colonialism, including notions of the “savage” and the
grotesque; theories of the origin of creativity in both prehistoric and child art;
theories of racial essence, both within and outside the borders of Europe; and
the pathologizing of cubism as a sign of primitive regression and degeneration.
Figure 44
Gelett Burgess,
photograph of Picasso in
his studio, 1908. From
“The Wild Men of Paris,”
Architectural Record 27, no.
5, May 1910, 407.
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For French writers before 1914, concepts of the primitive apply to works as various
as the caves at Altamira (15,000–8000 bce, discovered in Spain in 1879 but
widely thought to be a hoax until proven genuine in 1902; figure 45), children’s
drawings owned by Picasso in 1901 (figure 46), African art (see figures 29, 30
and 51), and the art of numerous other cultures distant in time and/or space, including
ancient Egypt.11 For apologists of cubism, all such art represented bona
fide models of untrammeled creativity, while for adversaries of the movement
their influence on this anti-academic art evinced societal degeneration. Their
common presence and the attendant language used to describe them indicate
the malleability of their meanings for a range of audiences at the same time that
they reveal shared notions informing reactions to the movement. A historicized
understanding of the critical language of cubism—from its beginnings to World
War I—thus needs to integrate the role of primitivism into our understanding
of the movement and its reception. Concepts of primitivism encompassing the
exotic, the ancient, and the infantile—in the name of authenticity or of degeneracy—
shaped the understanding of cubism throughout the period brought to
a close by the First World War. Cubism, in short, triggered a critical discourse
revealing assumptions about the nature of art and the nature of experience that
helps map the stress fractures modernism engendered in the culture of pre–
World War I France.
Figure 45 (left)
Hall of the Bisons,
Paleolithic cave painting,
15,000–8000 bce.
Altamira Caves, Spain.
Figure 46 (right)
Child’s drawing
(anonymous), in Picasso
sketchbook Carnet deux,
1901. Charcoal on
paper, 13 x 21 cm. Musée
Picasso, Paris.
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The L angua ge o f the “ Primitive”
The American children’s writer Gelett Burgess, author of the poem “Purple
Cow,”12 visited Paris in the winter of 1908–1909. For an account to be published
in New York’s Architectural Record, he sought out the most “shocking” new developments
in the art world and in so doing interviewed a number of key modernists,
including Braque, Derain, Matisse, Metzinger, and Picasso.13 In his resulting
essay, “The Wild Men of Paris,” he reenacted Conrad’s journey to the “heart of
darkness”14 but found the primitive beating within the heart of Europe. In writing
his article, Burgess gave us one of the earliest documents of cubism, albeit
one that was ambivalently tongue-in-cheek. What struck him was not the mere
geometric character of the works he reproduced, such as Braque’s preliminary
drawing for his Grand Nu (1908; figure 47), Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907;
plate 9) or Three Women (1907–1908). What interested Burgess most was their
ugliness and primitivist character, though he did not like these developments
any more than did the laughing crowds he observed at the salon. But he saw
pretty clearly what was at stake:
It was an affording quest, analyzing such madness as this. I had studied the gargoyles of Oxford
and Notre Dame, I had mused over the art of the Niger and of Dahomey, I had gazed at Hindu
monstrosities, Aztec mysteries and many other primitive grotesques; and it had come over me that
Figure 47
Georges Braque, drawing
for Grand Nu (Large nude),
1907–1908. From Gellett
Burgess, “The Wild Men
of Paris,” Architectural
Record 27, no. 5, May 1910,
405. © 2011 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New
York / ADAGP, Paris.
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A r at iona l e o f u gl iness
there was a rationale of ugliness as there was a rationale of beauty; . . . perhaps, one was but the
negative of the other . . . which might have its own value and esoteric meaning. Men had painted
and carved grim and obscene things when the world was young. Was this revival a sign of some
second childhood of the race, or a true rebirth of art? 15
Burgess pointed out one of the keys to cubism in 1908: a purposeful simplification
and distortion of forms in the spirit of seeking a direct expressiveness
associated with what modernists took to be “primitive” art of both European
and non-European cultures. Evoking Gothic England and France, Hindu India,
sub-Saharan Africa, and the New World, he conjured both the present and the
past, the exotic and the grotesque,16 the Christian and the pagan. More than that,
he identified a “rationale of ugliness . . . which might have its own value and
esoteric meaning,” segueing directly to European Paleolithic art as its originary
moment.
Burgess is supported in this mix of ideas by Derain, who owned a Fang mask
from the French Congo that was influential on his Bathers (1907; figures 29
and 48) and other works. Derain equated his own embrace of African art with a
return to “nature”:
The Egyptian figures have simplicity, dignity, directness, unity; they express emotion almost as if
by a conventional formula, like writing itself, so direct it is. So I seek a logical method of render –
ing my idea. These Africans being primitive, uncomplex, uncultured, can express their thought by
a direct appeal to the instinct. Their carvings are informed with emotion. So Nature gives me the
material with which to construct a world of my own, governed . . . by instinct and sentiment. 17
Like Burgess, Derain projected his own motives and desires onto his interpreta-
Figure 48
André Derain, Bathers,
1907. Oil on canvas,
132.1 x 195 cm. Museum
of Modern Art, William S.
Paley and Abby Aldrich
Rockefeller Funds. © 2011
Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris.
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92
tion of Egyptian and African art and culture. Braque echoed Derain’s assumptions
in his own statement to Burgess when he said:
I must . . . create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume, of line,
of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is a mere
pretext for a decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that
emotion into art. 18
The terms these artists and writer employ—primitive, grotesque, instinct, emotion,
simplicity, directness, subjective, and nature—are used here to describe the
initial phase of cubism through the winter of 1908–1909. As the terms suggest,
for these modernists primitivism was not a style but an act of self-authentication—
whether modeled on the art of children, cavemen or Africans—locating
the source of creativity within the artist in a romantic merger with the elemental
that served the purpose of liberating the self. The rediscovery of an elemental
self stripped of societal accretions justifies the sorts of naive distortions and
extreme simplifications that emulate the art they deemed primitive and have
everything to do with what would become cubism throughout the movement’s
Figure 49
Paul Cézanne, Mont
Sainte-Victoire,
1902–1904. Oil on
canvas, 73 x 91.9 cm.
Philadelphia Museum of
Art, The George W. Elkins
Collection.
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93
prewar history. This goes a long way toward explaining how the entire cubist
movement could be viewed as primitivist, and not just by its detractors.
The appeal of the late work of Paul Cézanne and Henri Rousseau is continuous
with this discourse. Like the cubists, Cézanne’s departures from traditional
structures of space and form were made in the name of individual sensibility
and the perception of the artist. Rather than representing a break from the Africanized
primitivism of 1907–1908, the cubists’ continuing embrace of Cézanne
may represent their identification with a critical discourse that labeled Cézanne
a modernist primitive. Richard Shiff has examined the ways the concept of the
“primitive naïf”—the artist whose gaucherie guarantees his sincerity, spontaneity,
and originality—informs criticism of Cézanne by such contemporary writers
as Maurice Denis and Gustave Geffroy (figure 49).19 Cézanne himself embraced
this interpretation, as Paul Smith and Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer have
shown, identifying himself with the “folk” of his native Provence and signaling
his allegiance to his “race” rooted in a Latin “Golden Age.”20 Rousseau too
figured as a hero for the cubists for his untutored, childlike art, which conflated
a naive European folk style with imaginary exotic subjects, as in The Sleeping
Gypsy (1897; figure 50).21 The cubism supporter Roger Allard pointed to Rousseau’s
importance in an essay of 1911, retailing how Robert Delaunay, Gleizes,
Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, and Metzinger collaborated to present a
retrospective exhibition of forty-seven paintings by “Le Douanier” Rousseau at
the 1911 Salon des Indépendants as a true “primitive” and key precursor to cubism.
22 Apollinaire—the chief cubism supporter of the era—devoted a long article
Figure 50
Henri Rousseau, The
Sleeping Gypsy, 1897. Oil
on canvas, 129.5 x 200.7
cm. Museum of Modern
Art, New York, Gift of Mrs.
Simon Guggenheim.
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chap t er 3
to a memoir of Rousseau as late as 1914, paying homage to his achievements
and asserting that he “painted with the purity, the grace and the consciousness
of a primitive” and was among “the most daring and most significant
French artists of the last few generations.”23 Though some have dismissed
this homage as sentimentality, Apollinaire’s intellectual and emotional sincerity
is important to recognize.
Cubism and Primitivism
Tracing primitivist tropes through the primary literature reveals that they
are used both positively and negatively, and that they range—in significantly
imperfect counterpoint—from the political Right to the Left. Needless to say,
the writers pursue their own intellectual, and frequently political, projects
for which cubism was a vehicle. In fact, it is this very complication that
makes the primary literature of cubism such a fascinating expression of
French culture at this historical moment.
André Salmon, in his book La Jeune peinture française (Youthful French
painting, 1912), gives his well-known eyewitness account of Picasso’s development
of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and its dependence on “Oceanic
and African charmers.” He wrote:
The artist had already become excited about the black Africans, whom he placed well above
the Egyptians. His enthusiasm was not sustained by a vain appetite for the picturesque.
Polynesian or Dahomean images appeared “sensible” to him. Picasso, in completely chang –
ing his work, would inevitably offer us an aspect of the world not in keeping with what we
had learned to see. 24
For Salmon, this major painting led directly to Picasso’s later cubism, and
with that base he built his defense of the cubist movement. Discussing the
moment of early cubism in 1908, he wrote, “Picasso too had ‘meditated on
geometry,’ and, in choosing the uncivilized artists as guides, he was not
unaware of their barbarism. Quite simply, he logically grasped that they had
attempted the real figuration of being.” He concluded that Picasso “wants
to give us a total representation of man and things,” revealing how Salmon
viewed works like Picasso’s Nude (1910; plate 12) in relation to the Teke
figure acquired by the Musée d’Ethnographie in 1904 (figure 51). Salmon
invoked the sculptural “endeavor of the barbarian image makers,” asserting
that Picasso was aware of translating three dimensions into “painting, a
two-dimensional art, and that is why Picasso must also create by situating
these balanced human figures outside the laws of academicism and the
anatomical system, in a space rigorously consistent with the unexpected
freedom of motion.”25 Salmon’s reference to “the unexpected freedom of
Figure 51
Teke figure, Republic of the Congo
(formerly French Congo). Wood, h. 29.9
cm. Musée de l’Homme, Paris.
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A r at iona l e o f u gl iness
motion” points to the influence of the mathematician Henri Poincaré’s “tactile
and motor sensations” and its echo in Gleizes’s and Metzinger’s theoretical
text Du “Cubisme”;26 this allusion dates his observation to Picasso’s cubism of
1910–1912, the period when both books were being written, rather than to his
earlier Africanist period. Salmon was clearly discussing the importance of African
sculpture for an antiacademic art consonant with Poincaré’s concept of the
experience of space.
Critics hostile to cubism attacked the movement in similar terms to those
in which its supporters praised it. Louis Vauxcelles, art critic for Gil Blas, was a
major defender of modernism but hated the geometrizing of early cubism. In his
review of Braque’s exhibition at Kahnweiler’s in 1908, referring to such works
as Houses at L’Estaque (plate 13), he wrote:
Mr. Braque is a very audacious young man. The disconcerting example of Picasso and Derain has
emboldened him. Then too, perhaps the style of Cézanne and the reminiscences of the static art
of the Egyptians obsess him unduly. He constructs deformed men of metal, terribly simplified.
He has contempt for form, reduces everything—places and figures and houses—to geometrical
patterns, to cubes. Let us not make fun of him, since he is sincere. 27
Vauxcelles clearly described Braque as a primitivist whose “deformed” and “simplified”
art recalls “the style of Cézanne” and “the static art of the Egyptians”;
this hybrid aesthetic led Braque to reduce nature “to geometrical patterns, to
cubes,” a conclusion that gave birth to the movement’s absurd name. Rather
than identifying Cézanne’s art with Western rationality and that of ancient Egypt
with the irrational, Vauxcelles treated both as value-neutral signifiers whose unnatural
coupling is the result of Braque’s pathological “obsession,” which in turn
gave birth to the monstrosity that is cubism. In a last-minute concession, Vauxcelles
forgave Braque for being “sincere,” suggesting that he may yet step back
from the brink and produce a more formally understandable art. Such ambiguity
speaks to the anxiety experienced by critics like Vauxcelles, who sought to
reconcile conflicting notions of the primitive in reference to artists who openly
proclaimed the hybridity of their primitivizing maneuvers. In an interview published
in Les Nouvelles in 1909, Vauxcelles compared the primitivism of Braque
to that of Matisse, referring to such works as The Dance (I) (early 1909; plate 14)
in the clearest statement linking child art and cave art to the development of
modernism (figure 52): “From regression to regression, Matisse goes back to the
art of the caverns, to the babble of the infant who with a pointed flint traces the
silhouette of a reindeer’s head onto the wall. . . . He schematizes, he synthesizes.”
He then declared, “And the Kanaka cubes of M. Braque are the direct result.”28
Thus, though Vauxcelles defended the fauves,29 he rejected Braque’s geometrized
images—as in his infamous Houses at L’Estaque, which inspired the contemptuous
term “cubism”—as an unfortunate outcome of Matisse’s legitimate quest for the
primitive. Unlike Matisse, whose primitivizing references were cast by Vaux-
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celles as safely confined within the geopolitical borders of Europe, Braque went
a step too far by modeling his art on Melanesian (Kanaka) sculptures from the
French colony of New Caledonia.30 Braque’s painting, therefore, was the product
of an unhealthy, obsessive personality, whereas Matisse—despite his impulse to
regress—maintained a more balanced sanity.
Like Vauxcelles, but with considerably more sympathy, Léon Werth identified
the cubism of 1909 with primitivism. Werth was a novelist and anarchist
who combined an interest in avant-garde art with political activism, revealed
by his accompanying Salmon to a May 1910 demonstration organized by socialists
and anarchists to protest the execution of the French cobbler Jean-Jacques
Liabeuf as well as by his polemical contributions to the leftist journal Cahiers
d’aujourd’hui from 1912 to 1914.31 Werth was subject to police surveillance at
the time he wrote his article on Picasso’s exhibition at Wilhelm Udhe’s gallery
in May 1910.32 Given Salmon’s close links with both figures, it is very likely
that Werth was aware of Picasso’s own anarchist genealogy33; the article itself
is testament to Werth’s forthright honesty in admiring Picasso’s ambitions and
criticizing his pictorial results. He described “a landscape of cubic roofs, cubic
chimneys, and trees,” likely referring to Picasso’s Factory at Horta de Ebro (1909;
figure 53):
I could say that Mr. Picasso’s innovative painting is essentially traditional, that it is linked to
the great traditions of instinct and to the great traditions of mind. I might invoke the savages of
Oceania—no more than necessary—and I might invoke Cézanne, for whom nature was a sphere, a
cone, and a cylinder, and who said so. 34
Figure 52
Reindeer, Paleolithic cave
painting, 15,000–8000 bce.
Altamira Caves, Spain.
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As discussed above, Werth’s claim that such works invoked both Cézanne and
“the savages of Oceania” echoes the widespread identification of Cézanne as a
“modern primitive,” analogous to a non-European counterpart like the roof finials
from New Caledonia hanging behind Picasso in Burgess’s 1908 photograph
(figure 44). But unlike Vauxcelles, Werth did not attribute the cubists’ conflation
of geometrizing techniques derived from Cézanne and Oceanic art to “obsession,”
suggesting, rather, that the youthful Picasso was groping toward aesthetic
resolution in what is still an experimental art form. As Werth put it, “Mr. Picasso,
who fancies himself a geometer, will one day, without knowing it, speak a
painter’s language.” Werth’s conclusions are startling inasmuch as geometry—a
term rooted in European rationality—is here associated with a drive to primitivize
and with artistic models outside the Western tradition. He then speculated:
Figure 53
Pablo Picasso, Factory at Horta
de Ebro, summer 1909. Oil on
canvas, 50.7 x 60.2 cm. The
Hermitage, St. Petersburg. © 2011
Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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The relationship between the geometrical figures created by the mind and the forms of nature has
preoccupied philosophers. And if geometry owes its certainties to the suggestions of our senses,
why not—reversing directions—go from geometry to nature or else, why not, starting from nature,
proceed to a mathematics of the senses, a mathematics that would be art? 35
Werth here alluded to the cubists’ debt to the theory of conventionalism developed
by Poincaré, who, in tracing the origins of geometry back to its perceptual
roots inadvertently enabled the cubists to create “a mathematics of the senses,
a mathematics that would be art.”36 Once again a term traditionally associated
with rationality was separated from its Cartesian moorings and cast adrift in the
realm of the primitive.
Apart from Werth’s mild criticism of Picasso, cubism met with serious opposition
among cultural arbiters on the left as well as the right. Henri Guilbeaux—a
champion of neoimpressionism and a self-declared leftist with ties to anarchosyndicalism—
reviewed Picasso’s exhibition at Galerie Vollard in Les Hommes du
Jour in January 1911.37 He was exemplary of leftists skeptical of the movement,
judging it more of a publicity stunt than a true artistic endeavor.38 He passionately
defended neoimpressionism, but poked fun at Picasso, who “fancied
himself the humble successor to the primitives.” He concluded, “What he offers
us today”—which would include works like Nude (1910; plate 12)—“accentuates
the intentional distortions, which sometimes reach the level of the grotesque,
the ugly.” What particularly disturbed him was “women with unappetizing flesh,
who, thanks to the painter’s whim, are monstrous or grotesque.” For Guilbeaux,
such primitivist distortions culminated in cubism, a position he shared with
critics and supporters across the board, including Vauxcelles, Salmon, and Apollinaire.
In an article reviewing the Salon des Indépendants in Les Hommes du
Jour in April 1911 and citing the work of Léger, Francis Picabia, and Metzinger
(whose Nude [1910; figure 54] he would have viewed there), Guilbeaux perceptively
noted the influence of “Le Douanier” Rousseau; but this influence, he says,
“added to that of Gauguin and more recently to that of Picasso, has produced
grotesque results, ridiculous, made it seems in order to shock the middle class
(épater les bourgeois).”39
These writers revealed the association of cubism with primitivism into 1911.
The key terms defining that relationship were the “ugly” and the “grotesque,”
both Bakhtinian counterparts to the “beautiful” and symbolic tropes for cubist
opposition to the aesthetic norms of Western painting, which often focused
on the female nude as the crucial signifier of transgression (Guilbeaux thought
nudes should be “appetizing”). Guilbeaux’s use of the term “grotesque” to
describe cubism clearly evinced his association of the movement with threedimensional
African sculpture,40 while his preoccupation with Picasso’s uglification
(laidification) of the female nude was meant to signify the audacity of
the cubist project, which overturned all the aesthetic codes used to portray the
female nude as a Western ideal. His criticism thus resembles that of Burgess, but
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A r at iona l e o f u gl iness
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