Because we all must make a living, art critics, curators, and scholars have spent much of the last fifty years reconsidering the role of Picasso in the Cubist movement. Through the 1960s or so, Cubism was popularly seen as a movement dominated by the great man, despite the contributions of other artists who, while prominent, were never blessed with Picasso’s level of global celebrity.
Today, professionals insist that Cubism be viewed as more of an ensemble production, and even mount exhibitions—such as the current display of Leonard A. Lauder’s impressive collection at the Met—in which a case is made that others like Georges Braque deserve at least equal billing. After all, it was Braque who had a series of paintings rejected at the dawn of the movement by a jury led by Henri Matisse, who complained that the works were unpleasantly full of "little cubes."
Shifts in scholarly opinion notwithstanding, those whose exposure to modernist art has been a bit more casual are still likely to hold the opinion that Picasso more or less is Cubism, and vice-versa. This may be both unfair and wildly incorrect. But Picasso’s fame remains the answer to the question, Why is "Cubism" a household word today, when other cults in the church of the avant-garde like Fauvism or Futurism or Divisionism are largely recalled only by more elite audiences?
The mass appeal of Cubism presents something of a paradox, inasmuch as its performances are, by definition, esoteric in their appeal.
As an essay in the exhibit’s catalogue puts it:
In Head of a Man with a Mustache, Picasso tests the limits of our ability to process visual ambiguity. We see only half of the face, whose curved shape is echoed by its one ear; the mustache lies below the chin rather than on the upper lip, or perhaps the little square beneath it can be seen as a mouth. Such visual contradictions violate our innate rules for facial perception. The drawing also contains several vaguely mechanical lines whose function is uncertain, further disorienting us. … Our bottom up processes fail us, and our top down processes face a challenge unprecedented in the history of Western art.
That is a great deal of testing, processing, contradicting, violating, disorienting, and challenging for one piece of art. The essayist goes on: "It is clear from the work of Picasso and Braque that Cubism demands a parallel development in the beholder’s response: that is, it demands changes in the beholder’s share that are suited to the modern era." To which the only fair response seems to be, Back off, Cubism!
And yet museumgoers flock to the challenges. (In a nod to the show’s ongoing popularity, a related article on the Met’s website has the delightful title, ‘Cube Your Enthusiasm.’) Among the more amusing and interesting themes of the show is the role played by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler—the principal dealer for Braque and Picasso during Cubism’s heyday—in popularizing and explaining (one might just as easily say ‘spinning’) what his avant-garde clients were producing to the art-buying public. It was Kahnweiler who proposed giving down-to-earth names some of the artists’ more abstract productions. One imagines how that conversation went—
Kahnweiler: Pablo, Henri, these are remarkable canvases of pasted newspaper bits and vaguely mechanical lines with uncertain functions that you are giving the world. But we must give them names, like ‘Head of a Man with a Mustache.’
Pablo, Henri: Impossible!
Kahnweiler: But if we do not, we will sell no paintings! There will be no money.
Pablo, Henri: Proceed.
This is easy humor, of course. It is a dodge to joke about modernist art rather than examine it on its own terms. But people have been laughing at Cubism even as they’ve been flocking to it all these years. Its combination of esotericism and continuing appeal seems to divide responses into two camps, especially in regards to the more abstract, colorless experiments of ‘Analytic Cubism’: Those who are persuaded that the modernist emperor is indeed without any clothes, and those who are in pious thrall to the paintings, who take a certain pride in working (or pretending) to understand things that the jokers gleefully claim are meaningless. The former think the latter are ridiculous, and the latter think the former are Neanderthals who probably voted for Romney.
Indeed, the very seriousness and piety of Cubism’s boosters can be off-putting, and one strongly suspects that Picasso and Braque (and Léger and Gris) had a much better sense of humor about their work than their latter-day acolytes. There is much to admire about what the Met has on display—and about its presentation, which is refreshingly free of cant, despite exceptions such as the passage from the catalogue above.
Like the rest of modernist art or literature, the context of all of these works is a disintegrating faith in the spiritual success of the Western project. Modernism is the child of Romanticism, and both trends presented themselves as enemies of tired, bourgeoisie complacency and its aesthetic concerns.
For painting and for Cubism in particular, there is a sense that the western visual language of illusionism and realism had run its course. The best response was playful rebellion: disassociating color from line, abandoning the foundational technique of using light and shadow to model three-dimensional objects on a flat canvas, and so forth.
But as the story of Kahnweiler’s insistence that the paintings have straightforward names shows, the buying public still required that the artists claim their paintings are of things. (Philistines!) Indeed, one suspects that Picasso’s mass appeal, which has been so essential to the continuing popularity of Cubism, has more to do with decidedly representational works like Les Demoiselles D’Avignon or Guernica, than with his more abstract cubist experiments.
The Cubists—like Eliot or Pound or Joyce in literature—deployed extraordinary talent in the pursuit of increasingly obscurantist experiments. Their defenders mount a strong defense of such excursions. Guy Davenport, as true a friend as modernism ever had, makes the following case for the esotericism of these paintings:
Cubism, a nonsense word for a style of painting invented by Picasso and Braque, was essentially the return to an archaic mode that understands painting to be the same thing as writing. Prehistoric painters abbreviated images. A tarpan, for instance, was drawn by beginning with the dorsal line of profile that flows from ears to scut. Then the head was aded, eyes, and ears. Then the tail. Next, front legs, belly line, and hind legs. The design could be abandoned at any point in the process; the graph would still mean tarpan. That dorsal line is still the Chinese for horse, with leg lines added.
The notion that Cubism is an attempted return to a fragmentary, archaic mode of communication is plausible in its way. But unlike the priests who worshipped before the prehistoric cave paintings at, say, Lascaux, consumers of Cubism do not necessarily speak the language of the painters. Indeed, the Cubists gleefully embraced subjectivity as a central theme. In other words: Their paintings just don't speak to everyone, and those to whom they do speak seem to hear different things.
In creating such a subjective and esoteric visual language, modernist painters all but ensured that subsequent movements would be chock-full of outright frauds and charlatans. The fact that many of their successors truly are emperors without clothes does not mean that the originals were hucksters. Still, those tired, bourgeois aesthetic concerns—beauty, realism, coherence—haven’t disappeared. The modernists have.