….he did his best to liberate himself from the iron constraint of conventional perspective, not that he [Braque]or Picasso would ever entirely succeed in doing so.
You see, the whole Renaissance tradition is antipathetic to me. The hard-and-fast rules or perspective which it succeeds in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress: Cézanne and, after him, Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this. Scientific perspective is nothing but eye-fooling illusionism; it is simply a trick – a bad trick – which makes it impossible for an artist to convey a full experience of space, since it forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach, as a painting should.
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| Braque. Landscape at L'Estaque, 1908 Oil on Canvas, 81x65 cm. Kunstmuseum, Basel. |
In freeing himself from perspective, Braque reversed the old adage that distance lends enchantment to a view. His L’Estaque landscapes suggest that, on the contrary, proximity lends conviction to the view.
Cézanne was also the source of another painterly device to do with elision of planes, known as passage – a device which Braque used to evoke space without recourse to perspective. Braque took passage several stages further than Cézanne; within a year or two, Picasso would take it further still. Passage, which Alfred Barr defined as “the merging of planes with space by leaving one edge unpainted or light in tone,” would play a key role in the genesis of Cubism. It enabled Braque to generate what he called “une éspace nouvelle,” a new kind of pictorial space, by having open-sided, light refracting planes elide into one another as well as the surrounding space. This “research into space” is what cubism would be all about, he [Braque] said.
Page 97
Picasso and Braque had the deepest mistrust of theory: “Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music and whatnot,” Picasso said, “have been related to cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which has only succeeded in blinding people with theories.”
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| Braque, Still-Life with Violin and Pitcher (1910) |
As the critic Roger Allard saw, as early as 1912, cubism was a means of registering “mass, volume and weight.” Henceforth, everything had to be tactile and palpable, not least space. Palpability made for reality, and it was the real rather than the realistic that Picasso was out to capture. A cup or a jug or a pair of binoculars should not be a copy of the real thing, it need not even look like the real thing; it simply had to be as real as the real thing. And so there would be no more falsehoods; no more three-dimensional simulation, no more artful tromp l’oeil effects, except for the famous tromp l’oeil nail with a shadow that Braque added to more than one of his 1909 still lifes in order to contrast the eye-fooling mendacity of traditional notation with the cubists’ realistic treatment of forms in space.
Pages 104-105
This is how Braque explains his abandonment of perspective:
Traditional perspective gave me no satisfaction. It is too mechanical to allow one to take full possession of things. It has its origins in a single viewpoint and never gets away from it. But the viewpoint is of little importance. It is as if someone spent his life drawing profiles and believed that man was one-eyes. When we arrived at this conclusion, everything changed, you have no idea how much.
It followed that if the artist was ever “to take full possession of things”, he must be able to represent an object from any number of viewpoints at the same time. Multiple views in one form or another recur throughout cubism; however, they are only one of Braque and Picasso’s radical innovations. No less revolutionary was their reduction of the special element to an ever shallower recession; this enabled them to bring everything as near as possible to the surface of the canvas and as near as possible to the us. Braque described this manner of dealing with space as “tactile” or “manual”, because it enabled him “to make people want to touch what has been painted as well as look at it”. It is a complete reversal of the time-honoured system of establishing a distance and making objects recede from us. To bring things within our grasp, Braque (and Picasso) took to fragmenting and faceting forms, because “this was a means of getting as close to the objects as painting allowed. Fragmentation allowed me to establish a spatial element as well as a special movement and until this had been achieved I was not able to introduce objects into my pictures”. In the same way, faceting allowed the artist (much as it does a man who cuts gemstones) to use refracted light to give his surfaces a generalised sparkle. This was a tremendous advance on the traditional device of a single source of light.
Page 105
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| Female Nude, 1909, Oil on Canvas, 35 x 28 inches |
As the series of Santa Barbara – Fernande’s progresses, Picasso switches backwards and forwards between long shots and close ups. He bifurcates and crenellates Fernande’s forehead like the spurs of the peak. And just as he merges the faceted head with the faceted mountain, he merges the faceted mountain with the faceted sky. As a result, sky, mountain, drapery, woman, cohere into a single organism…
(May relate to things said by Hockney, Gayford, Weschler, Pepperell, Zen stuff, about everything in a way being interconnected -as one?).
He [Braque] was…fascinated by the tactile qualities of instruments that a player plucked or bowed. As he said many years later, “I was drawn to musical instruments because they have the advantage of being animated by touch”. For Braque a principal purpose of cubism – his cubism, that is – was to bring figures and objects within reach; to make us feel that it would be pleasurable to touch them. Braque’s musician paintings [of 1910] stimulate the viewer’s perceptions of touch and hearing. They may look like Picasso’s Musicians, but they are as different in their resonance as woodwind is from brass.
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| Braque, Fruit Dish and Glass, 1912, Charcoal and Woodgrain paper pasted on paper, 62x45cm. First papier colle. Private Collection. |
The Cadaqués paintings are indeed milestones, in that they constitute the crux of what would eventually become one of the most momentous issues of modernism: figurative versus non-figurative. In the end Picasso stopped short of abstraction, it was not failure of nerve but his conviction that art – his art – should be as real as the real thing. For Picasso, reality (as opposed to realism) is what painting would always be about. Cubism was a means of enhancing, not dissipating, that reality. He did not want a painting to be an abstraction any more than he wanted it to be a facsimile. He wanted it to constitute a fact, a very specific fact. People who urged Picasso to look more favourably on abstract art because it was the pictorial equivalent of music would be told, “That’s why I don’t like music.”
Page 165
“At that time [around 1909 to 1912] our work was a kind of laboratory research from which every pretension of individual vanity was excluded.”
Picasso on his and Braque’s early cubist working methods.
Page 245
Out of three strategically placed strips of …wallpaper Braque had contrived the first papier collé: a fruit dish containing a bunch of grapes beside a glass. True, the oilcloth collage had paved the way for this development, but Picasso had failed to see the full implications of his handiwork. Now Braque had done so. As he admitted, “After having made the [first] papier collé I felt a great shock, and it was an even greater shock for Picasso when I showed it to him.” Picasso immediately realised that papier collé opened up a vast new range of pictorial possibilities. An object could now be presented by some foreign element that was an equivalent, as opposed to an image, of itself. A piece of newspaper, for instance, could stand for a newspaper; it could also signify anything else the artist wanted it to signify. Drawing could then function simultaneously and independently to indicate volume and integrate the real element (the piece of newspaper or wallpaper) into the composition. Furthermore, by enabling colour to function independently of from, papier collé made it easier for Picasso and Braque to introduce positive colour into a cubist composition. And since scissors make for a sharper edge than a paintbrush, they could now achieve much shaper contrasts of colour, tone and texture.
Page 249
New mask idea - If I make it from wood, with the formal properties of vision as we experience it, as has been found so far, then it will be a thing in itself instead of a drawing / painting that attempts to record how we see the real thing to begin with.....this new mask can then be used to further recors the properties of vision doubled (none of this makes ANY sense at the moment, but hopefully will after a few experiments).
New mask idea - If I make it from wood, with the formal properties of vision as we experience it, as has been found so far, then it will be a thing in itself instead of a drawing / painting that attempts to record how we see the real thing to begin with.....this new mask can then be used to further recors the properties of vision doubled (none of this makes ANY sense at the moment, but hopefully will after a few experiments).
Vincenc Kramář – “I wanted to show that cubism is not just a studio game…[but] a serious attempt to discover a new plastic concept rooted in reality.”
Hoffmeister, 239 – 40
Page 308
Braque’s head wound [WWI] initiated a metaphysical process which would lead him to a state of néant (non-existence). “I have made a great discovery,” he said many years later. “I no longer believe in anything. Objects don’t exist for me except insofar as a rapport exists between them, and between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one sort of reaches an intellectual néant – what I can only describe as a state of peace – which makes everything possible and right”. Notions such as these would make Picasso extremely impatient.
Page 429
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