What Has Happened to Cubism?

How the Cubists, Though Now in Eclipse, Have Influenced the Best Art of Our Time

JULIUS MEIER-GRAEFE

EDITOR'S NOTE: The author of this article is admittedly one of the ablest and most distinguished of living art critics. There is literally no field of art which he has not explored or on which he has not written illuminatingly. He is, furthermore, in Germany, a novelist, playwright and literary critic of renown. His fifteen books on art comprise an aesthetic library of prime importance. He recently spent six weeks in America in studying our private picture collections and public galleries. This article, though not written for the general reader, will certainly interest the constantly increasing group of Americans who are concerning themselves with the study, or purchase, of modern art. It is made timely because so many of the Cubist's formulas have lately been employed, the world over, by makers of textiles, designers of stage sets, silver, glass, and furniture, and, most recently, by the modernist architects of Europe and America.

I AM often asked whether Cubism is still living. Possibly, yes; why not? Perhaps it is living with some difficulty, but, in the last analysis, and by all means, still living.

Such questions can be answered equally well by "yes" or "no," for they usually come down to a definition of terms; and in order to define terms, one must usually begin with the creation of the world, and before one gets to Cubism one has either long since branched to another subject or died of old age.

Let us distinguish a little. The movement in modern art which became known under the name of Cubism arose from many legitimate and illegitimate motives, among others the urgent desire of the modern artist to establish control over the object in nature which was to be painted. It cannot be denied that earlier generations had the same purpose and accomplished it by one means or another. But, a little before the war, artists had grown tired of these early methods, or could not master them, or found the results inadequate. This was particularly the case with the surface painting of the Impressionists, whose renunciation of three-dimensional effects somehow seemed objectionable. The Cubists hoped to combat this deficiency by geometry. No objection could be raised against this. The cube was no less appropriate than the old Italian structure of verticals and horizontals; also, it had the invaluable charm of novelty in its favour, with the further advantages that it provided specific forms for certain expressions of contemporary attitudes. Nor was the method so new after all; it had merely been laid aside—as the Egyptians of the pyramids had successfully employed geometry to assure stability and beauty in their monuments, so that the first Cubist lived five thousand years before Picasso. Again, the geometrical formula had by no means been wholly shelved and forgotten in the progress of the ages. From Diirer to Seurat (to whom I shall return later), countless artists have occupied themselves with this problem; and to a greater or lesser extent all pictorial representation involves geometry. The difference lies in the use to which it is put. The same applies to the solar spectrum of modern colourists, to the serpentine line which Hogarth found so all-important, to the "glittering points" of Constable, and to all other pictorial aids.

All such aids, even the most peculiar, are serviceable so long as they remain means to an end and are able to eliminate other means which have fulfilled their purposes and become exhausted. And their fitness is in proportion to the amount of elimination which they make possible, and to the directness with which they assist a new generation to express itself. Of course, each artist imagines that his method is not only suited to himself but is the panacea for all times, the method, par excellence. Degrees of utility or accessibility can be established, and thus some will not hesitate to give geometry, or the spectral palette, a preference over the serpentine line. But this does not invalidate in the slightest the work of Hogarth, for whom the serpentine line was incomparably more useful than any other method in the world. We can think of the methods as mills or as sieves through which the artist must grind his emotion, or his statement, before arriving at a substantial form.

There may be a myriad different kinds of sieves. The main thing is that a man must come through and not remain behind in the filter. No filter, no matter how large, not even nature itself (for in the last analysis nature is but a filter) is a proper place to remain in.

MPRESSIONISM became absurd from the moment that Claude Monet no longer utilized light as a structural principal but imagined that he could represent sunshine objectively. Then the painter who endowed the world with the gayest landscapes, the singer of the Seine, the creator of a new Arcadia, was done for.

Renoir and Cezanne, who were both indebted to Monet for valuable suggestions, refrained from joining him in this vain excursion into solar optics. Whoever followed him was bound to be left in the filter.

And, similarly, Cubism became absurd when Picasso and his friends believed that it was possible not to dominate, but to replace, the natural object by geometric form. Thereby art, which is a language, was deprived of its most essential vowels, and ceased to be a means of communication. It went beyond geometry, and became hieroglyphics. Notwithstanding all the streams of ink which this experiment released, the hieroglyphics have not as yet been successfully interpreted. With equal justice Hogarth might have decided, instead of adding vitality to his satire by means of his beloved serpentine line, to create various more or less snakeline amphibians. His art would have been at best an aquarium.

Picasso's paradox did not drop from the sky. It was not only the reaction to the surface painting of the time, which had avoided depth like the plague; it was also a positive conclusion leading to what he purported to make a simplification. The premise to this conclusion was unwittingly supplied by Cezanne. Cezanne and Renoir had been the earliest to note these excesses of flat Impressionism and had been able to strengthen their resistance with the help of French traditional art. For, in the eighties, Renoir had come almost too near the school opposed to Monet—a strong, classical, statuesque draughtsmanship. Even Cezanne then preferred to model his drawing after the sculpture of Michael Angelo and Puget, in order to assure his figures the third dimension, while, in his landscapes he strove equally for spatial depth, purity of tone, and colour harmony. This programme led him to employ geometry discreetly as an instrument of perspective. This process, which Cezanne managed with the greatest caution (never contradicting nature but expanding it into the spherical), was isolated by the Cubists, coarsened and submitted to no restraint. Also, they subscribed to Cezanne's pronouncements, particularly his well-known dictum that everything in nature can be reduced to spheres, cylinders and cones, and that once an artist learns to draw according to this simple scheme he can draw anything. Picasso forgot that in all such statements we must take the speaker into consideration. What seems quite simple for an Einstein, may be a book with seven seals for other men.

The supposed simplicity of Cezanne's scheme did not prevent its inventor from painting over his pictures a hundred times; and even as an old man he complained of his inability to master reality.

It would be exaggerating to assert that the Cubists had omitted everything but the cube from art. They retained a particular taste in their choice of colours. This they did not derive from Cezanne. The Cubists with their taste were able to produce new patterns which were occasionally very charming, could be employed in textiles, and were remarkably useful in giving new life to various trades such as the designing of stage sets, furniture, etc. But this extra redeeming quality does not cancel the losses in Cubism—and their connection with Cezanne is confined, figuratively speaking, to the attempt to decorate the master's hat in an original manner.

THIS tendency has subsided, or has lost its old energy. The situation was much the same with the Neo-Impressionists who followed Signac and who, one after the other, gradually came to temper the excesses of their method, ceasing to break up their surfaces into points and returning to the traditional manner of painting. To be sure, Picasso at times still expresses himself Cubistically,— in the afternoons,—and, to that extent the movement cannot be called extinct. But since he works in quite different forms,—in the morning—in fact, in all styles of which the brush is capable, from Greek-Roman antiquity to the forms of Monet—his Cubism drops much of its official nimbus. Picasso is not left behind in his filter like the late Monet, to whom the intertwining of his aquatic flowers and the mother-of-pearl colour-fog of his moods still clung. As nimble as a squirrel, Picasso hops in and out of Cubism, playing hide and seek with the filter. To-day, perhaps, he is silently laughing at the over-serious theorists. Possibly, he even laughs aloud. There is nothing to prevent us from joining in the merriment.

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This humour contains the leading moral of the story. Picasso and his friends are not the only ones responsible for Cubism—there are also the others who accepted the new message too readily, in order not to come too late, as previously in the case of Monet. The world, glutted with dogmatizings and theorizings on art, deserves the three-ringed performances of a keen-witted fellow who wanted to see just how much one could impose upon the tolerance of an esteemed public. Finally, human hair and pieces of paper were stuck on the canvas, with the assertion that the emotional state could be expressed in no other way.

The world war and its consequences have helped to make both artist and layman again realize the significance of the object. And now that Cubism is past, nothing prevents us from examining its positive results.

The history of art since the French Revolution is a series of attempts at purification and simplification, and with each attempt there have been positive results—and broken windows. The energy of the movement mounts, with the approach of the twentieth century; likewise the damage—and in our days it is not always easy to discover the slimmer and slimmer advantages among the fragments.

The danger was increased through the modern trend toward the exotic. Exoticism and Cubism hang closely together. European painting becomes more and more like America at the time when America had no restrictions on immigration and no Ku Klux Klan; and this condition is the outgrowth of a long process. Delacroix went to the Orient and there acquired his palette. Manet worked under the suggestion of Spanish art and decoration. Heretofore foreign influences were introduced sportively, and in France they served purely to enrich the native art. The greatness of the French genius manifests itself particularly in a power of assimilation. With the adaptation of Japanese woodcarving by the Parisian painters of the seventies, the exotic element became active in Europe. Degas and his followers Europeanized it and gained real benefits for both draughtsmanship and modelling.

Meanwhile the debris of the last purification has been swept away. Once again the French tradition has digested the foreign element, and Braque, Derain, and other Frenchmen have produced work which is great and beautiful. Germany, where Cubism first celebrated provincial orgies, and where the absence of Parisian taste, with the Germanic predilection for abstraction, added more nonsense. In Germany again Cubism also helped to break the once all-powerful influence of the French and to crystallize a very modern and individual form. With its aid artists have been able to extract a certain flavour from the machine age. Gradually Cubism became a sieve. Since then the unfathomable dialectic of the theorists has abated, and we no longer speak of the sieve, which belongs in the kitchen, but of the one essential factor—the material sifted.