Preface: Form and Content in Cubism

Karmel, Pepe

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Preface: Form and Content in Cubism

Pepe Karmel

Picasso and the Invention of Cubism

In the last two decades...

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Pepe Karmel

PublisherYale University Press

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Preface: Form and Content in Cubism

In the last two decades there has been a virtual explosion in studies of Picasso and of Cubism. Social history has proven a particularly fruitful approach, yielding new insights into the links between Cubism and anarchism, the threat of war, the art market, entertainment, fashion, science, psychology, and philosophy.1This explosion seems to have been provoked by the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1980 retrospective, organized by William Rubin. Among the earliest and most important responses were Linda Nochlin, “Picasso’s Color: Schemes and Gambits,” Art in America, vol. 68, no. 10, December 1980, pp. 105–23 and 177–83, and Rosalind Krauss, “Re-Presenting Picasso,” in the same issue of Art in America, pp. 90–96. Patricia Leighten, Re-ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton University Press, 1989) addressed the political implications of Cubism; it has been supplemented, and contested, by David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). The effects of World War I have been explored by Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987) and Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton University Press, 1989). Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994) examines the links between high and low culture, while Elizabeth Cowling, “The Fine Art of Cutting: Picasso’s papiers collés and constructions in 1912–14,” Apollo, vol. 142, no. 405 (New Series), November 1995, pp. 10–18, reveals an unexpected link between Cubism and the practical aspects of fashion. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press, 1983) has now been complemented by Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton University Press, 1993). The links among Cubism, linguistic theory, psychology, and modern educational philosophies are explored in Natasha Staller, A Sum of Destructions: Picasso’s Cultures and the Creation of Cubism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001) and Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Abrams, 1997). The publication of the first two volumes of John Richardson and Marilyn McCully’s magisterial Life of Picasso has tremendously enriched our understanding of the circumstances in which Cubism emerged, and of the private concerns hidden behind its façade of impersonal form.2John Richardson, with Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso, Volume I: 1881–1906 (New York: Random House, 1991) and A Life of Picasso, Volume II: 1907–1917 (New York: Random House, 1996). Other scholars, drawing on the model of semiology, have argued that the key achievement of Cubism was Picasso’s reinvention of painting as a system of arbitrary signs comparable to a written or spoken language.3For the semiological interpretation of Cubism, see esp. Rosalind Krauss, “Re-Presenting Picasso,” and “The Motivation of the Sign,” in William Rubin et al, eds., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), pp. 261–86; Yve-Alain Bois, “The Semiology of Cubism,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, pp. 169–208; and Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). What all of these approaches have in common is their opposition — or at least indifference — to the formalism that had previously dominated Cubist criticism.

This shift in the character of Cubist criticism corresponds to changes in the larger art world. Through much of the twentieth century, it seemed as if the story of modern art could be summed up as an evolution from representation to abstraction. Cubism’s role in this story was to effect a formal revolution, replacing the natural shapes of figures and objects with a new language of abstract forms, and substituting a shallow space of overlapping planes for the deep space of Renaissance art. Picasso himself may have refused to abandon the goal of representation; later artists would be more radical, taking advantage of Cubism’s discoveries to create a thoroughly abstract art.4This interpretation of Cubism as a stage on the road to abstraction seems implicit in the writings of such “canonical” critics as Douglas Cooper, Edward Fry, John Golding, Robert Rosenblum, and William Rubin. See Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch (London: Phaidon, 1971); Edward Fry, Cubism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966); John Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907–1914 (1959, repr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth Century Art (New York: Abrams, 1959). As discussed in Chapter 4, Rosenblum’s writings also provided the starting point for the “semiological” analysis of Cubism. William Rubin’s influential analysis of Cubism was first proposed in “Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition,” published in several 1967 issues of Artforum and reprinted in Pepe Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), pp. 118–75; on Cubism, see pp. 150–59. This was followed by “Cézannism and the Beginnings of Cubism,” in William Rubin, ed., Cézanne: The Late Work, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), pp. 151–202; and by the “Introduction,” in William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), pp. 15–62.

By 1980 this story was no longer credible. The human figure and the natural world had returned as important elements within “advanced” art. Pure abstraction no longer seemed revolutionary; on the contrary, it was widely perceived as the preferred style of the political establishment. What now seemed subversive in Cubism was precisely its impure combination of abstraction and representation.

The partisans of semiology and of social history have often attacked each other.5See e.g. Patricia Leighten, “Cubist Anachronisms: Ahistoricity, Cryptoformalism, and Business-as-Usual in New York,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, 1994, pp. 91–102. Nonetheless, for the last twenty years, their differing approaches to Cubism have functioned in a complementary fashion. Semiologists have argued that Cubism functions like a language, evoking the real world without having to represent it illusionistically, while social historians have explored the messages conveyed by this language. Today, it is Cubism’s formal development that is unduly neglected. The social historians tend to regard this formal development as a “given” — something that needs to be interpreted but not to be explored in its own right. One might expect the semiologists to take a different view. However, their allegiance to the Saussurean doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign has tended to close off this avenue of investigation: there is no reason to investigate the character or development of something that is deemed, a priori, to be arbitrary.6On the notion of the arbitrariness of the sign, and its application to Cubism, see Chapter 4. In practice, both social historians and semiologists have tended to regard the formal development of Cubism as a matter adequately described in earlier accounts.

There are two problems with this assumption. One is that it ignores the new visual evidence that has become available since the formulation of the “canonical” accounts of Cubism. Numerous drawings, paintings, and sculptures critical to the understanding of Picasso’s development in the years 1906–13 were exhibited and published only after his death in 1973. Much of this material was simply unavailable to earlier authors, and requires significant revisions to their narratives. This process of revision was begun by Pierre Daix in his 1979 catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s Cubist work but is far from complete, even today.7See D. R., passim; and also the brilliant review by Edward Fry in Art Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, spring 1981, pp. 91–99.

The other problem is that the theoretical framework of the canonical accounts no longer seems adequate. Directly or indirectly, these accounts had been shaped by the writings of Clement Greenberg, which provided an almost inescapable point of reference for Anglo-American critics in the post-war era. As a practicing critic, discussing individual artists and movements, Greenberg was a subtle and varied writer. As a theoretician, however, he was highly reductive, defining modernism as an historically determined evolution toward a focus on the “medium” as the defining feature of art. In painting, this meant an insistence on the physical qualities of the medium, on the shape of the support, and — above all — on the flatness of the picture plane. Greenberg’s theory imbued the innovations of Cubism with an air of historical necessity. The novel materials of collage and papier collé, the new formal language of geometric squared-off forms, the increasing shallowness of pictorial space — all these could be explained as a quasi-inevitable response to the historical situation of painting around 1910.8See Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” originally published in Partisan Review in 1940 and repr. in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944 (University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 32–35; and “Modernist Painting,” a 1960 lecture, reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, 1993, pp. 86–87.

This analysis no longer seems tenable. If Greenberg could convince himself that the evolution of modern art was a one-way street — a triumphal progress toward the promised land of abstraction — the passage of another fifty years has demonstrated that modern art does not so much evolve as revolve, adopting and discarding styles only to revive them in new combinations.9See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” October 37, Summer 1986, pp. 41–52. This process of ringing changes on the basic elements of modernism has only confirmed the importance of Cubism, which continues to provide the pictorial syntax for most contemporary art. But it has demolished the sense of historical determinism that made Greenbergian formalism so compelling. Cubism can no longer be seen as a step along a predetermined path toward abstraction, or as a necessary result of historical forces.

It is difficult to let go of this belief in historical necessity. Although art historians have rejected Greenbergian formalism, they have tended to substitute new kinds of determinism. For some, the fact that Cubism emerged in the same years that Ferdinand de Saussure outlined his theory of language suggests that both were the product of a new, semiological Zeitgeist.10See Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” in Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 85–86. For others, the Cubist emphasis on formal elements at the expense of recognizable representation is a result of social and economic factors in French society.11In “What the Papers Say: Politics and Ideology in Picasso’s Collages of 1912,” Art Journal, vol. 47, no. 4, winter 1988, p. 354, David Cottington argues that Picasso, after 1909, began to make small pictures focused on “fundamentally conservative” formal concerns in order to please his collectors, who shared a “commitment to traditional aesthetic values.” The nature of his market thus “entailed” Picasso’s pursuit of “pictorial concerns of a technical and formal kind.” In the corresponding passage of Cottington’s more recent book, Cubism in the Shadow of War, p. 132, this extreme claim is toned down to the less deterministic statement that the “radical formal inventiveness and esoteric intertextuality” of Cubism were “anchored to traditional pictorial genres and aesthetic values.” But these determinist arguments are no more credible than Greenberg’s.

Picasso invented Cubism with the assistance of Georges Braque. The detailed record of their work reveals a series of brilliant extrapolations and naïve misreadings, wrong turns and lucky breaks. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the invention of Cubism was a happy accident. There was nothing inevitable about it. It might very well not have happened. Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that anyone else would have invented Cubism if Picasso had not. Braque, Léger, and Gris — the other “essential” Cubists, as Douglas Cooper dubbed them12Douglas Cooper and Gary Tinterow, The Essential Cubism: Braque, Picasso & their friends, 1907–1920, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1983, and New York: George Braziller, 1984). — all began their careers as Cubists by imitating Picasso. Without him, the course of modern art would have been completely different. The example of Cubism demonstrates the power of the human imagination to create something genuinely new.

This is not to say that Picasso invented Cubism out of whole cloth. He would never have been able to invent it if he had not had access to the rich formal and intellectual vocabulary of late nineteenth-century French art and culture. However, Cubism radically transformed its sources, to the extent that they are almost unrecognizable in Picasso’s work of 1910–13. What emerged from this transformation was a new formal language that could serve equally well as a vehicle for pure estheticism or as an expression of social experience. A great variety of meanings — philosophical, political, or biographical — can be discovered in Cubist paintings and sculptures. But, for the most part, these meanings might equally well have been communicated in some other, more conventional way. The truly new and distinctive feature of Cubism is its formal language. The goal of this book is to show how Picasso invented that language in the years 1906 through 1913.

These dates perhaps require some explanation. Although Picasso’s work of 1906 was in no sense Cubist, it was in the fall of this year that he began to explore the motifs that would lead to the development of Cubism. Conversely, all of the essential elements of Cubism had emerged by the end of 1913. Picasso continued to explore the potential of the Cubist style in the years that followed, but it might be argued that no fundamentally new element appeared in his Cubist work until the emergence of the curvilinear interlace in his work of 1923–26.

The first chapter of this book examines the ideas that seem actually to have played a role in the development of Cubism (as opposed to the ideas that became associated with it in later criticism). Three tendencies in nineteenth-century thought are important here. One is the “empiricist” theory of perception; the second is the idea of “decorative” design; the third, the Symbolist idea of the visual symbol as an “equivalent” for experience. These ideas were not taken over wholesale in Cubism, but were disassembled and recombined into a new synthesis; their influence remains visible in Picasso’s and Braque’s statements about Cubism, which are reviewed at the end of this chapter.

The second chapter traces the evolution of a distinctive Cubist space. This space is usually seen as a rejection of the perspectival space of the Renaissance tradition. In some ways, however, it is a return to the spatial organization typical of trecento and quattrocento painting. Cubist space thus seems at once revolutionary and archaic.

The third chapter follows Picasso’s path toward the break-up of solid form into a series of independent lines and planes arranged in space. Although unprecedented in Western art, this break-up was rooted in Picasso’s profound familiarity with academic representations of the human figure. It emerged, in a sense, from his investigation of different conventions for representing the body.

The final chapter attempts to clarify the “linguistic” character of the Cubist sign. Going back to the great philologists of the second half of the nineteenth century, it demonstrates how Saussure’s ideas represent merely a selection from a larger body of linguistic thought. It is these broader analyses of the formation and development of language that provide the most useful models for understanding the Cubist sign.

This book has been taking shape since 1986. Its roots go back even further, to the extraordinary Picasso retrospective of 1980, organized by William Rubin for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. A fledgling photography critic at the time, I would never have presumed to write about MoMA’s exhibition. However, I did write an article for Art in America on a concurrent exhibition, “Looking for Picasso,” at the International Center of Photography.13Pepe Karmel, “Portraits of the Artist as Picasso,” Art in America, vol. 68, no. 10, December 1980, pp. 26–29. I am grateful to Elizabeth C. Baker, the editor of Art in America, for allowing a young, ignorant critic to educate himself in public. I am also grateful to Leo Rubinfien — photographer, critic, and friend — for encouraging me to write about art and photography in the first place.

In 1986, when the Pace Gallery held its revelatory exhibition of Picasso’s sketchbooks, “Je Suis Le Cahier,” I screwed up my courage to confront the artist directly, publishing a piece on “Picasso in Process,” again in Art in America.14Pepe Karmel, “Picasso in Process,” Art in America, vol. 74, no. 9, September 1986, pp. 108–15. By this time I was in graduate school at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Several friends — Molly Nesbit, Kenneth E. Silver, and Gertje Utley — had convinced me that I would enjoy studying the history of art in a more organized, scholarly fashion. My understanding of Picasso, and of modern art in general, has benefited tremendously from discussions with them over the years.

That fall, I had the extraordinary good fortune to take a seminar on Cubism with William Rubin, a magisterial scholar and an inspiring teacher. Since I had so recently written on Picasso’s sketchbooks, Rubin insisted that I prepare a seminar report on Picasso’s Cubist drawings. I trudged off toward the library with a heavy heart. The literature on Picasso and Cubism was so voluminous, and it seemed highly unlikely that a mere graduate student could make anything resembling an original discovery about the topic. Once I began to burrow through the stacks, however, I found that there was virtually no literature on Picasso’s Cubist drawings, beyond a few entries in exhibition catalogues. Many (though far from all) of Picasso’s Cubist drawings had been published in Christian Zervos’s magnificent catalogue of Picasso’s oeuvre, but they were often out of order, so that related works appeared on different pages or even in different volumes. With Rubin’s encouragement, I quickly settled on Picasso’s Cubist drawings as a dissertation topic.

That winter, I made the first of many visits to the Musée Picasso, which houses Picasso’s archives as well as a unique collection of his work. Included in these archives is a complete photographic record of the drawings, paintings, and sculptures in Picasso’s estate. This made it possible for me to study numerous unpublished works, and to reconstruct, bit by bit, the sequence of Picasso’s drawings, and their relationship to works in other media. During this and many subsequent visits I received a warm greeting from the curators Michèle Richet, Brigitte Léal, Marie-Laure Bernadac, Hélène Klein, and Anne Baldassari. It is a tribute to Picasso’s greatness that these exceptional scholars have devoted their efforts to researching, exhibiting, and publishing his work. I also benefited from the generous assistance of the Musée Picasso’s librarians, especially Laurence Berthon, Jeanne-Yvette Sudour, Sylvie Fresuault, and Pierrot Eugène.

My initial research consisted largely of amassing and organizing reproductions of Picasso’s drawings — a process that consumed uncountable hours of photocopying, scissoring, pasting and sorting, with enormous piles of paper arranged around the kitchen table, threatening frequently to topple to the floor. While this process was still underway, I was honored by William Rubin’s request that I join the team working on the organization of MoMA’s 1989 exhibition “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism.” At the outset, I was principally responsible for suggesting the selection of Picasso’s drawings. A few of the visual comparisons that I proposed in the catalogue of the same title are repeated here; others are cited in the notes.

Over time, my involvement broadened to include other aspects of the exhibition. This made it possible for me to study much of Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist work at first hand, and not just from reproductions. I also benefited immeasurably from the opportunity to discuss this work with other scholars involved with the exhibition. Preeminent among these was of course William Rubin himself. It is one thing to read a book or a catalogue essay, another thing to hear a lecture, but there is nothing quite like working closely with a brilliant scholar on the subject closest to his heart. I also learned a tremendous amount from other members of the exhibition team, including the late Judith Cousins, curator of research; Lynn Zelevansky, curatorial assistant (now a distinguished curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art); and James Coddington, head of conservation. He and I made numerous after-hours visits to the exhibition in order to study at close hand the technique of Picasso’s and Braque’s paintings and papiers collés. Looking at pictures with a conservator teaches you things about art that you would never learn from books, and I have acquired from Jim a firm belief that you cannot really understand a work of art without understanding how it was made.

Two great scholars of Cubism — Pierre Daix and the late Edward Fry — served as advisors to the exhibition. Daix, needless to say, is the principal author of the catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s Cubist paintings and of a library’s worth of other books and essays about the artist.15See note 7 above. His catalogue of the paintings provided the indispensable foundation for my own study of the drawings, his critical writings offer countless insights into Picasso’s work, and I benefited greatly from our discussions. Edward Fry’s Cubism combined a brilliant précis of the movement’s evolution with a ground-breaking selection of contemporary criticism, while his later articles fundamentally transformed our understanding of Picasso’s achievement.16See notes 4 and 7 above. Fry’s good-humored and unconventional spirit made him a unique and delightful interlocutor.

As our work progressed, I acquired the additional responsibility of compiling information bearing on the dating of the works in the exhibition. This led me to the Galerie Louise Leiris, in Paris, the successor to the original Galerie Kahnweiler that represented Picasso and Braque during the Cubist years. Here I had the good fortune to meet Maurice Jardot and Quentin Laurens, past and present directors of the gallery, who permitted me to study Kahnweiler’s stockbook, the photographic records of the works that passed through his hands, and some of the correspondence preserved in the gallery’s archives.17A selection of this correspondence was originally published in Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler: marchand, éditeur, écrirain, the catalogue for the exhibition organized by Dominique Bozo and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine for the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, in 1984. Further correspondence was transcribed and published in Judith Cousins, with Pierre Daix, “Documentary Chronology,” in Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, pp. 355–445. My visits to the Galerie Leiris allowed me to clarify and add to the information available from these sources. Kahnweiler’s records provide the foundation for all subsequent attempts to date the work of these years, and they have on occasion led me to revise the datings found in published catalogues. I also benefited, in Paris, from the advice of Claude Picasso, Brigitte Baer, and Etienne-Alain Hubert, and from the profound resources of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet. Some of the information garnered during this time was included in an appendix to my dissertation; other elements of my research were summarized in the “Notes on the Dating of Works” that appeared as an appendix to the proceedings of a symposium organized by MoMA in conjunction with “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism.”18Pepe Karmel, “Notes on the Dating of Works,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, pp. 322–49.

The papers presented at this symposium, and the lively discussion that followed them, made it clear that the semiological interpretation had become the new orthodoxy in Cubist studies. My ongoing research into Picasso’s drawings and work in other media led me to feel that there were serious problems both with this interpretation and with the formalist interpretation it had supplanted.19This topic is explored in the discussion following Rosalind Krauss’s paper for the symposium, Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, pp. 300–304. These problems continued to preoccupy me as I worked on my dissertation, completed in 1993; this criticized the semiological approach to Cubism but did not propose an alternative. Benefiting from William Rubin’s forceful criticisms, the final draft of the dissertation offered a narrative of the evolution of Cubism, as followed in Picasso’s drawings.20Pepe Karmel (Joseph Low Karmel), “Picasso’s Laboratory: The Role of his Drawings in the Development of Cubism, 1910–1914,” Ph.D. thesis, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1993. Perhaps I should have published this text as it stood. However, I felt deeply dissatisfied with my own failure to forge a new positive reading of Cubism that would compensate for what I now saw as the serious flaws in existing interpretations.

As soon as I completed the dissertation, I therefore embarked upon a new phase of research, subsidized, in 1994–95, by a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Searching for an intellectual framework corresponding to the innovations of Cubism, I seized upon the Ariadne’s thread offered by Kahnweiler’s references, in The Rise of Cubism, to “tactile perceptions,” the “stimulus” of “memory images,” “associations,” and “preperception.”21Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism (1920, trans. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1949), pp. 10–13. These seemed to me to suggest a possible link between the ideas of the Cubists and nineteenth-century studies of perceptual psychology. Eventually, this investigation led me to explore nineteenth-century theories of language as well.

Pursuing these topics quickly took me beyond the borders of traditional Cubist scholarship. The writings of Richard Shiff and Jonathan Crary, tracing the links between perceptual psychology and nineteenth-century art, provided a valuable jumping-off point for this new research.22See Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (University of Chicago Press, 1984), and Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). Molly Nesbit and Natasha Staller generously discussed with me their own research on language and avant-garde art.23See Molly Nesbit, Their Common Sense (London: Black Dog, 2000); Natasha Staller, “Babel: Hermetic Languages, Universal Languages, and Anti-Languages in Fin de Siècle Parisian Culture,” Art Bulletin, vol. 76, no. 2, June 1994, pp. 331–54, and A Sum of Destructions. I am particularly grateful to Molly Nesbit for directing me to the writings of Hans Aarsleff, who confirmed my intuition of a significant link between Hippolyte Taine and Saussure.24See Chapter 4.

Struggling to reformulate my thinking about the development of Cubism in general, I have benefited from the advice, assistance, and encouragement of numerous other colleagues, including Emily Braun, Michael Fitzgerald, Milly Glimcher, Lewis Kachur, Robert S. Lubar, Marilyn McCully, Linda Nochlin, John Richardson, Bernice Rose, Robert Rosenblum, Gertje Utley, and Jeffrey Weiss. I was also encouraged to refine my ideas by invitations to contribute to various catalogues. An essay written for “Picasso: Sculptor/Painter,” the 1994 exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, organized by John Golding and Elizabeth Cowling, allowed me to collect my thoughts on Cubist sculpture.25Pepe Karmel, “Beyond the ‘Guitar’: Painting, Drawing and Construction, 1912–14,” in John Golding and Elizabeth Cowling, eds., Picasso: Sculptor/Painter, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1994), pp. 189–97. Cowling’s probing questions and incisive editing forced me to clarify my ideas, contributing directly to the discussion of this topic in Chapter 4 here. Joséphine Matamoros, Chief Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret (the village where Picasso spent many productive months in 1911, 1912, and 1913), invited me to contribute an essay to the catalogue of her 1997 exhibition, “Picasso: Dessins et papiers collés.”26Pepe Karmel, “Mémoire et désir: Picasso . . . Céret, 1911–1913,” in Joséphine Matamoros, ed., Picasso: Dessins et papiers collés — Céret 1911–1913, exh. cat. (Céret: Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret, 1997), pp. 10–21. I am also grateful for the warm hospitality extended by Matamoros and her staff during my visits to Céret in 1991 and 1997. More recently, I was given the opportunity to explore the American reception of Picasso’s and Braque’s 1912–13 work for the catalogue of Sarah Greenough’s exhibition, “Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries,” seen at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 2001.27Pepe Karmel, “Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, 1914–1915: Skeletons of Thought,” in Sarah Greenough, ed., Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2001), pp. 185–201.

I would also like to acknowledge the constant stimulus I have received from the writings of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Alfred Barr, John Golding, Robert Rosenblum, Leo Steinberg, William Rubin, Pierre Daix, Rosalind Krauss, and Yve-Alain Bois. At one point or another, in the pages that follow, I have argued — sometimes explicitly, sometimes tacitly — with all of these writers. It is a mark of their brilliance that it has seemed worth arguing with them for so many years.

During my numerous research trips to Paris, my father and step-mother, Alex and Marianne Karmel, let me stay countless times in their apartment. The heavy hours in Parisian libraries were frequently lightened by the prospect of meeting them for dinner. I cannot forbear mentioning my father’s delightful 1998 book, A Corner in the Marais, an historical memoir of their neighborhood, which he researched and wrote in considerably less time than it took me to complete this volume.28Alex Karmel, A Corner in the Marais: Memoir of a Paris Neighborhood (Boston: David R. Godine, 1998).

Gillian Malpass, in the London office of Yale University Press, has displayed extraordinary patience in awaiting the arrival of a manuscript that took the better part of the decade to complete, has gently but firmly prodded me toward numerous necessary revisions, and, as designer, has coped brilliantly with the demands of an unreasonable author. It is only the ceaseless labors of Sarah Ganz Blythe that made it possible to obtain the numerous photographs reproduced here; I am not sure this book would ever have come into existence without her help. Jasmine Moorhead took on the tedious but essential task of compiling the index. In Paris, Anne Baldassari took time from her curatorial duties to help me obtain permission to reproduce many essential pictures, and arranged for a superb photographer, Jean Ravailler, to make the necessary copy prints.

Claude Picasso, together with Theodore H. Feder of the Artists Rights Society, helped me resolve difficult issues of artistic copyright. I am deeply grateful to both of them, and to the hard-working staff of ARS and Art Resource, especially Katie Stieglitz, Janet Hicks, and Ryan Jensen.

My fellow scholars Martha Carroll and Joan Pachner have demonstrated their extraordinary friendship and commitment to this project by reading and discussing draft after draft, year after year. Only those who have themselves provided such “hands-on” advice can appreciate the enormous time and effort it requires.

I cannot begin to express my gratitude to Kirk Varnedoe, who has played a critical role at every stage of this book’s development. At the outset, when he first agreed to supervise my dissertation, he was still a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts. He continued to take an active interest in the project — criticizing each new draft of dissertation and book — even after assuming new and onerous responsibilities as Chief Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. His enthusiasm for the material has propelled me forward, while his probing skepticism has forced me constantly to refine my ideas and arguments. From 1996 through 1999, I enjoyed the privilege and pleasure of working with him on exhibitions of Picasso and of Jackson Pollock organized for MoMA.29See Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, Picasso: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997); this exhibition appeared in Atlanta, Ottawa, and Los Angeles, but was not seen in New York. See also Kirk Varnedoe, with Pepe Karmel, Jackson Pollock, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998). My essay, “A Sum of Destructions,” in Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, eds., Jackson Pollock: New Approaches (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), pp. 71–99, is devoted in part to Picasso’s “curvilinear Cubism” of the 1920s and its influence on Pollock. Even when our extended discussions did not touch directly on the material of this book, they helped shape my understanding of Cubism and of modern art in general. As teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend, he has been a constant source of inspiration.

Above all, I am grateful to my wife, Carey Adina Karmel, and to our children, Remy and Caleb, who have tolerated far too many weeks and weekends when I abandoned them for the library or the computer. Their love has sustained me through the seemingly endless process of writing and rewriting, and their impatience has propelled me to complete it. I dedicate it to them.

1 This explosion seems to have been provoked by the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1980 retrospective, organized by William Rubin. Among the earliest and most important responses were Linda Nochlin, “Picasso’s Color: Schemes and Gambits,” Art in America, vol. 68, no. 10, December 1980, pp. 105–23 and 177–83, and Rosalind Krauss, “Re-Presenting Picasso,” in the same issue of Art in America, pp. 90–96. Patricia Leighten, Re-ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton University Press, 1989) addressed the political implications of Cubism; it has been supplemented, and contested, by David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). The effects of World War I have been explored by Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987) and Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton University Press, 1989). Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994) examines the links between high and low culture, while Elizabeth Cowling, “The Fine Art of Cutting: Picasso’s papiers collés and constructions in 1912–14,” Apollo, vol. 142, no. 405 (New Series), November 1995, pp. 10–18, reveals an unexpected link between Cubism and the practical aspects of fashion. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press, 1983) has now been complemented by Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton University Press, 1993). The links among Cubism, linguistic theory, psychology, and modern educational philosophies are explored in Natasha Staller, A Sum of Destructions: Picasso’s Cultures and the Creation of Cubism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001) and Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Abrams, 1997). »

2 John Richardson, with Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso, Volume I: 1881–1906 (New York: Random House, 1991) and A Life of Picasso, Volume II: 1907–1917 (New York: Random House, 1996). »

3 For the semiological interpretation of Cubism, see esp. Rosalind Krauss, “Re-Presenting Picasso,” and “The Motivation of the Sign,” in William Rubin et al, eds., Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), pp. 261–86; Yve-Alain Bois, “The Semiology of Cubism,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, pp. 169–208; and Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). »

4 This interpretation of Cubism as a stage on the road to abstraction seems implicit in the writings of such “canonical” critics as Douglas Cooper, Edward Fry, John Golding, Robert Rosenblum, and William Rubin. See Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch (London: Phaidon, 1971); Edward Fry, Cubism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966); John Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907–1914 (1959, repr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth Century Art (New York: Abrams, 1959). As discussed in Chapter 4, Rosenblum’s writings also provided the starting point for the “semiological” analysis of Cubism. William Rubin’s influential analysis of Cubism was first proposed in “Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition,” published in several 1967 issues of Artforum and reprinted in Pepe Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), pp. 118–75; on Cubism, see pp. 150–59. This was followed by “Cézannism and the Beginnings of Cubism,” in William Rubin, ed., Cézanne: The Late Work, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), pp. 151–202; and by the “Introduction,” in William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), pp. 15–62. »

5 See e.g. Patricia Leighten, “Cubist Anachronisms: Ahistoricity, Cryptoformalism, and Business-as-Usual in New York,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, 1994, pp. 91–102. »

6 On the notion of the arbitrariness of the sign, and its application to Cubism, see Chapter 4. »

7 See D. R., passim; and also the brilliant review by Edward Fry in Art Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, spring 1981, pp. 91–99. »

8 See Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” originally published in Partisan Review in 1940 and repr. in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944 (University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 32–35; and “Modernist Painting,” a 1960 lecture, reprinted in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, 1993, pp. 86–87. »

9 See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” October 37, Summer 1986, pp. 41–52. »

10 See Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” in Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 85–86. »

11 In “What the Papers Say: Politics and Ideology in Picasso’s Collages of 1912,” Art Journal, vol. 47, no. 4, winter 1988, p. 354, David Cottington argues that Picasso, after 1909, began to make small pictures focused on “fundamentally conservative” formal concerns in order to please his collectors, who shared a “commitment to traditional aesthetic values.” The nature of his market thus “entailed” Picasso’s pursuit of “pictorial concerns of a technical and formal kind.” In the corresponding passage of Cottington’s more recent book, Cubism in the Shadow of War, p. 132, this extreme claim is toned down to the less deterministic statement that the “radical formal inventiveness and esoteric intertextuality” of Cubism were “anchored to traditional pictorial genres and aesthetic values.” »

12 Douglas Cooper and Gary Tinterow, The Essential Cubism: Braque, Picasso & their friends, 1907–1920, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1983, and New York: George Braziller, 1984). »

13 Pepe Karmel, “Portraits of the Artist as Picasso,” Art in America, vol. 68, no. 10, December 1980, pp. 26–29. »

14 Pepe Karmel, “Picasso in Process,” Art in America, vol. 74, no. 9, September 1986, pp. 108–15. »

15 See note 7 above. »

16 See notes 4 and 7 above. »

17 A selection of this correspondence was originally published in Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler: marchand, éditeur, écrirain, the catalogue for the exhibition organized by Dominique Bozo and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine for the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, in 1984. Further correspondence was transcribed and published in Judith Cousins, with Pierre Daix, “Documentary Chronology,” in Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, pp. 355–445. My visits to the Galerie Leiris allowed me to clarify and add to the information available from these sources. »

18 Pepe Karmel, “Notes on the Dating of Works,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, pp. 322–49. »

19 This topic is explored in the discussion following Rosalind Krauss’s paper for the symposium, Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, pp. 300–304. »

20 Pepe Karmel (Joseph Low Karmel), “Picasso’s Laboratory: The Role of his Drawings in the Development of Cubism, 1910–1914,” Ph.D. thesis, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1993. »

21 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism (1920, trans. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1949), pp. 10–13. »

22 See Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (University of Chicago Press, 1984), and Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). »

23 See Molly Nesbit, Their Common Sense (London: Black Dog, 2000); Natasha Staller, “Babel: Hermetic Languages, Universal Languages, and Anti-Languages in Fin de Siècle Parisian Culture,” Art Bulletin, vol. 76, no. 2, June 1994, pp. 331–54, and A Sum of Destructions. »

24 See Chapter 4. »

25 Pepe Karmel, “Beyond the ‘Guitar’: Painting, Drawing and Construction, 1912–14,” in John Golding and Elizabeth Cowling, eds., Picasso: Sculptor/Painter, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1994), pp. 189–97. »

26 Pepe Karmel, “Mémoire et désir: Picasso . . . Céret, 1911–1913,” in Joséphine Matamoros, ed., Picasso: Dessins et papiers collés — Céret 1911–1913, exh. cat. (Céret: Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret, 1997), pp. 10–21. »

27 Pepe Karmel, “Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, 1914–1915: Skeletons of Thought,” in Sarah Greenough, ed., Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2001), pp. 185–201. »

28 Alex Karmel, A Corner in the Marais: Memoir of a Paris Neighborhood (Boston: David R. Godine, 1998). »

29 See Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, Picasso: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997); this exhibition appeared in Atlanta, Ottawa, and Los Angeles, but was not seen in New York. See also Kirk Varnedoe, with Pepe Karmel, Jackson Pollock, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998). My essay, “A Sum of Destructions,” in Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, eds., Jackson Pollock: New Approaches (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), pp. 71–99, is devoted in part to Picasso’s “curvilinear Cubism” of the 1920s and its influence on Pollock. »

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