8. The Mutilated Body Was Thrown Back Into The Sea
Here is a cultural historian's view of Cubism:
For centuries painters had faced the task of providing an illusion of three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional medium … Now the first Cubists … Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, rejected these time-honoured solutions: they were intent on making works of art that would not let the viewer forget their distinct essence as human products. They shattered surfaces that in nature belong together and reassembled fragmented reality by transforming a curved object like a woman's breast or a man's cheek into some strange geometric contour that resembled virtually nothing, certainly not a breast or a cheek … After the austerity of the founding years, the time of analytic Cubism, its successor, Synthetic Cubism, worked with a brighter palette and its canvases intensified their alienation from nature with stencilled inscriptions and arbitrarily added pieces of paper.
What Barthes said about the classic novel and Merleau-Ponty about the classic landscape applies to this bit of prose. The story moves forward in its inevitable progression, imparting information evenly and calmly: ‘the first Cubists … They shattered surfaces … After the austerity …’ Nothing is at stake here, nothing signals to us that at every moment choices were being made, decisions taken, lives being ruined or saved. And I am not talking about a more biographical approach being needed, only an awareness that living and telling are not the same thing at all, and that though we, as readers and viewers looking back, inevitably lack the sense of what it was like to live certain moments, the historian can work to counter that, as indeed the best ones do, and, when dealing with works of art we can, if we are good enough critics, get close enough to them to convey something of what their making involved for their makers and first viewers.
Such a critic is Rosalind Krauss. Here is the start of her remarkable long essay on the series of little collages Picasso made between the autumn of 1912 and the spring of 1913, as he was gradually emerging from his passionate involvement with Cubism:
At first they seem to rotate through the crystalline atmosphere like so many weightless facets, the glittering light of an invisible gem. Now one of the fragments appears aqueous, like water beading the side of a bottle; now it dries to the shimmer of dust motes struck by a ray of sunlight…
But then there arises the sound of voices. They speak of a political meeting, of market shares. Someone tells of a woman who poisoned her lover, ‘A chauffeur kills his wife,’ says another. Who says? Whose voice?…
Though she does not say so in so many words, Krauss sees these collages as constituting as remarkable a series as any in the artist's oeuvre, and as marking a crucial moment in Modernist art. But she senses that, if she is to open our eyes so that we can see what she sees, she will have to work from the inside, not merely repeat the clichés of previous commentators.
The voices she is talking about are those that spring out of the fragments of newspaper the artist has cut up to use in these works. Scholars have recently begun to read these as well as seeing the shapes that have been made out of them, and have come up with fascinating facts. Picasso made great use of articles on the looming Balkan wars (‘Les Alliés signent l'Armistice. La Grèce s'abstient’), as well as of the kind of faits-divers Félix Fénéon used in his delightful Nouvelles en trois lignes (‘In Fontainebleau a tramp turns himself in for murder’), the financial news, and advertisements for everything from biscuits to massage parlours. He also, and more obviously, cut up headlines to provide witty allusions, ‘Un Coup de Théatre’, for example, becoming ‘Un Coup de Thé’, not only a (sort of) cup of tea but an allusion to Mallarmé's great poem, recently published in its correct format.
How are we to read these fragments? Who, as Krauss puts it, is talking? Some scholars have argued that they reflect Picasso's own anarchist, left-leaning views: ‘The news items accumulate’, Krauss quotes Patricia Leighton as saying, ‘to project an image of French politics as venal, power-mongering, and posing a crazy threat to all those values of humanity and civilisation that Picasso's work had always embraced.’ Others say that we are required simply to get the ‘feel’ of the different voices, not to decode them, that they represent Picasso and his friends sitting round a café table (the objects depicted in these collages are, apart from the musical instruments, the common furniture of the café tables of the time: glass and jug, bottle, newspaper, etc.) and talking endlessly about politics and life.
And what of the visual look of these little collages? Writing about Violin of autumn 1912 (figure 4), Krauss points out that ‘One of the fragments of newspaper is the other's twin — having originally been scissored from the same sheet, so that, as in a jigsaw puzzle, both match along their common edge — only now flipped relative to the other, back to front.’ She goes on to demonstrate how Picasso conjures the violin into life and how he forces us to work to keep up with him. One of the pair of cut-outs, she argues, the lower one, ‘exploits the scrollwork of its left-hand edge to assume the profile of a violin. Or rather half a violin, since it depends on Picasso's drawn addition of bridge and neck and right-hand side to elaborate the musical instrument.’ The other fragment of newsprint, ‘placed above the violin's shoulders, deploys its own notches and curves to cup the pegs and scroll of the instrument, becoming thus their “background”. In this position the lines of type now assume the look of stippled flecks of graphite.’ Thus, she goes on, where the first fragment produced the meaning: density and opacity of physical object, this one ‘summons forth a different sign. Light, it declares, or atmosphere’.
But Krauss has not finished. The magic of the whole collage, she suggests, rests on the fact that the two opposite meanings, light and opacity, are generated from the identical scrap of paper, the same physical shape. ‘Like Saussure's phonetic substance’, she says,
this support is seen to take on meaning only within the set of oppositions that pits one against another, the implosive p of up against the explosive p of put. Picasso's sheet, sliced in two, is thus a paradigm, a binary couple married in opposition, each taking on a meaning insofar as it is not the other. Figure and ground become this kind of contrary here, joined and redoubled by opaque and transparent or solid and luminous, so that just as one fragment is, literally speaking, the back side of the material from which the other was cut, the circulation of the sign produces this very same condition, but semiologically, at the level of the sign: front, solid, shape: behind, transparent, surround.