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As with painting, so with sculpture. Picasso's Guitar of 1912, an array of cut and folded metal sheets that opened to let space in, was the first constructed sculpture in the history of art. It abolished the solidity, the continuous surface that had been, until then, the essential narrative of sculpture. From that unpromising-looking piece of rusty tin, a 60-year tradition of open-form sculpture was born that spread from Russian constructivism to the work of Anthony Caro in England and David Smith in the U.S.
Picasso never painted an abstract picture in his life. His instinct for the real world was so strong that he probably would have produced something woman-shaped every time he took brush in hand. Nevertheless, some of his cubist still lifes of 1911 run close to total abstraction, depending on such slender clues as a glass or a pipestem to pull them back to reality. As he moved forward, he found in collage a way of linking cubism back to the world. Collage, which simply means gluing, brought fragments of modern life—newspaper headlines, printed labels—directly into the painting. Cut them out, put them in. The tonal values of some of his finest collages have been ruined by age. The newsprint, once gray on white, is now cigar-brown. But in better preserved ones, like Violin and Sheet Music, 1912, the original effect remains: a magnificently Apollonian interplay of blue, gray, white and black on its ocher ground, stable and forceful at the same time.
The sense of the cubist moment can never come again. It is almost as distant, in its dulcet and inexhaustible optimism, as the faith that built Beauvais. Cubism was the climax of an urban culture that had been assembling itself in Paris since the mid-19th century, a culture renewed by rapid transitions and shifting modes. It was art's first response to the torrent of signs unleashed by a new technology. Not for nothing did Picasso inscribe "Our future is in the air" on several of his cubist still lifes; tellingly, Picasso's nickname for Braque was "Wilbur," after Wilbur Wright. "The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ," remarked the French writer Charles Péguy in 1913, "than it has in the last 30 years." Picasso and Braque took it for granted that reality had changed more than art, but their relation to the art of the past was not one of simple conflict. It was more tentative, precise and subtly felt. Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet of cubism, evoked the sentiment in his collection of Calligrammes:
You whose mouth is made in God's image
Whose speech is Order itself
Be easy with us, when you compare us
To those who were the perfection of order,
We who looked for adventure everywhere
We are not your enemies
We want to give ourselves vast, strange territories...
Pity us, skirmishing always at the frontiers
Of the limitless, and of the future,
Pity our errors, pity our sins.