Cubism. Guillaume Apollinaire

separation between art, folk art and anti-art was lifted. Theodore Adorno specifically warned against comparing the insights of the modernist movement to similarities with older art. Only through the deliberate artistic use of techniques and material would the work become more than mere handicraft. He added that only when Braque and Picasso first pasted pieces of paper in the papiers collés did this have the intellectual spark that surpassed the effect and dexterity of previous expressions.

      Collage

      Through the technique of collage, two-dimensional paper transformed itself into three-dimensional expression. Depending on colour, pattern or material, the paper surface appeared in the foreground or in the background, and the painting was transformed into a bas-relief. Picasso had experimented with this technique when he had cut up scraps of paper and used them to construct his guitar box sculptures.

      Futurism in 1911 and 1912 incorporated the flat surface of the papiers collés with rhythmic repetitions and the associated dynamic structure in a state of simultaneity. Futurism created a dynamic relief of the world in a state of unrest. The processes did not develop sequentially, but rather in a concurrence of the past, present and future.

      Carlo Carrà created the prototype of a two-dimensional futurist paper collage using paper and newspaper cut-outs. The Manifestazione Interventista appeared on the 1st of August, in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, in the newspaper Lacerba in Paris. Evoking an explosion, printed strips of paper animated by an extraordinary dynamism rotate out from the central point in all directions. For the Futurists, the collage for the first time became a document of the period, using scraps of newspaper, advertising and musical scores. As if liberated, words and letters unfurled to symbolise sounds and noises, tumbling with an overflow of simultaneous information into the painting.

      A short time later, this Futurist combination of text and sound further developed in the Dada movement. Printed fragments of paper that had their own separate meanings were combined to reveal new interpretations and send new messages. In reciprocal interaction, even unrelated levels of reality obtained unexpected new meanings.

      Using already existing visual materials, collage created new possibilities in the total mutation of the original meaning of the material. Collage in the 20th century, as a way of thinking, opened unknown paths and unexpected possibilities.

      Simultaneity in Cubist Circles

      In 1913, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire dedicated his work The Cubist Painters to Cubism, thereby helping the movement attain broad renown. Painters like Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes made impressive contributions to the Cubist language of shapes. In 1912 one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century was created: the Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) by Marcel Duchamp. Aided by the Cubist vocabulary of shapes and his familiarity with Étienne-Jules Marey’s photos depicting movement, Duchamp painted a picture that moved the world. Five moments of the movement of one person, descending a spiral staircase, are captured in time-lapsed sequence, showing all the reciprocal movements triggered by her walking. In doing this, Duchamp introduced time as the fourth dimension in the painting. Though this nude triggered a scandal at the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York, some recognised the innovative character of this new work, calling it “the light at the end of the tunnel”. Duchamp, brother of the painter Jacques Villon, the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon and the painter Suzanne Duchamp, was anything but a consistent worker. His unruly soul quickly led him to experiment with different media and eclectic ideas that shocked the art world. In New York, he became friends with Francis Picabia, with whom he became responsible for Dada.

      Sonia Delaunay, Contrastes Simultanés (Simultaneous Contrasts), 1912.

      Oil on canvas, 46 × 35 cm.

      Simultaneity is the lyric expression of the modern view of life; it signifies the rapidity and the concurrence of all existence and action. Simultaneity for the Futurists was the “lyrical exultation [and] the artistic visualisation” of velocity. It is the result “of those great causes of universal dynamism.” Simultaneity was also the focus of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. However, they both interpreted the term in a completely different manner. When Guillaume Apollinaire credited both the Delaunays with the term, the Futurist Boccioni accused them of plagiarism, because he was not prepared to cede this key term to others, much less to two whose interpretation veered so greatly from his own.

      The Delaunays did not, like other artists, use this term to mean dynamism. They did not refer to the “élan vital” (“vital force”) as Bergson did, but rather to Chevreul’s theory of the law of simultaneous contrast. This theory, which dated from 1839 and had already played a role with the Impressionists, related colours and the relationship of objects to one another. Chevreul’s work was republished in 1890 and thus more present in the collective knowledge of artists. Sonia Delaunay, in her work Contrastes Simultanés (Simultaneous Contrasts) dared to jump directly into the abstract. Her painting was already a formal reference system of colour rhythms at a time when her husband Robert and artists Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Picasso were still slowly making their way towards detaching themselves from objects.

      Robert Delaunay founded Orphism, also known as Orphic Cubism. On account of the orchestration of colour, Guillaume Apollinaire named Delaunay’s painting style after Orpheus, the singer of Greek mythology. The origins of his painting style derived from Impressionism, Analytical Cubism and from Cézanne. The new landmark of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, built in 1898, fascinated him. Its elegant design became the subject of the Windows series. He painted it again and again, in new variations and refractions, using light and bright colour harmonies based on the colour values of light separated by a prism. Emphasising the delicate construction, he ceaselessly offered new perspectives of the monument, showing it in new lights and refractions, and always from a different viewpoint.

      Sonia Delaunay, Electric Prisms, 1914.

      Oil on canvas, 250 × 250 cm.

      Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.

      III. Picasso and Cubism

      Pablo Picasso, Three Women, 1908.

      Oil on canvas, 200 × 178 cm.

      The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

      Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Breaking with the Past

      The young artists of the early twentieth century undoubtedly demonstrated an avant-garde spirit of aesthetic radicalism. Yet even the leader of the Fauves, Matisse, was scandalised when he visited Picasso and saw his masterpiece; to him the painting was an abuse of modern art, as he could find no aesthetically justified explanation for it. Could the work indeed be classified (at least in those days) as modern art? Many of its first viewers, at any rate, saw it as “something Assyrian” (that is how Wilhelm Uhde presented it to Kahnweiler). Douanier Rousseau, we know, noted in 1908 that Picasso worked in the Egyptian genre. It has now been proven that during his work on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso had two Iberian stone sculptures with which he “took counsel” in his experiments. Of course, there was certainly Matisse’s Blue Nude and Derain’s Bathers, but essentially, Picasso was always a solitary artist: “He was always free, owing nothing to anyone but himself” (Kahnweiler). From the distance of over four decades, here is how the artist himself explained the reasons and essence of the creative breakthrough of 1907: “I saw that everything had been done. One had to break, to make one’s revolution and to start at zero.”[1]

      That break, however, that revolution, was neither instantaneously nor easily achieved. It was carried out amid the conditions of a new spiritual and creative crisis – one far more profound and all-embracing than ever before, because it touched on the technical, spiritual and pictorial possibilities open to the artist (“I saw that everything had been done”). It affected Picasso’s future as an artist and, therefore, his existence as an individual.

1

A. Liberman, The Artist in His Studio, London, 1969, p. 113.