(7 of 10)
Unique Moment. For Picasso, Cubism was a turning point. Before, he had been the Prodigy. After, he would become the Maestro, imitated instead of imitating, a unique figure whose work gradually separated from the culture around him. But from 1911 to around 1917, for the first and only time in his life, his motto about finding, not seeking, was reversed: Cubism brought him into a field of mutual, symbiotic research and thus sublimated his virtuoso instincts. In the '20s and '30s, and rather less in the '40s, Picasso continued to pour forth major works of art, but their collective impact on the history of art, and on the whole sum of our culture, does not quite equal the modest-looking canvases, with their brown facets and yellowing patches of newsprint, that survive from his Cubist years.
For what Cubism attempted, and brought off, was a wholly new approach to visual language, to the methods of representation itself. It was not abstract art. It was not interested in mysticism or metaphysics. It tried, instead, to be as specific as possible about the location, shape and density of real objects in a real world.
Kahnweiler gave an elegant account of their basic aims: "The Impressionists would have painted a house in the distance with a blue roof that one would see simply as a blue blob. It was against this that the Cubists initially rebelled. They said to themselves: 'But this house is a cubic construction that is turned in a certain direction. All this must be communicated to the spectator.' So they immediately tried to give an image of objects that was more detailed, more precise, more true than can be seen in a single glance. They painted at least partially what we know of the object, and not only what we see of it."
Cubism was the first full demonstration in art that our sensations come from multiple viewpoints, that we inhabit a field of experience, not a fixed perspective. Picasso's achievement was to state, and then brilliantly develop, this vision. With his paintings and collages of 1910-14, he solved the problem of how to keep the painted surface as real as what it depicted (21-29). In short, he cut through the fiction of illusionism.
Sculpted Candor. His Cubist sculptures were equally prophetic: Guitar, 1911-12, with its flat tin planes and open spaces, proposed an alternative to nearly everything that, classically, sculpture was supposed to be. Guitar was not modeled, not a monolith, not of bronze or marble; it had neither armature nor skin; it declared its own crude structure with total candor. These are the characteristics of all the "constructed" sculptures that were to be made after Cubism—from Gonzales to David Smith and Anthony Caro. It was an extraordinary prediction, which stands to modern sculpture rather as Demoiselles does to easel painting.
In the same way, Picasso's wire constructions of the late '20s lead to Giacometti and many another later sculp tor; that darting, inventive energy was always at play. How many junk assemblers have taken their cue from the bike saddle and handlebars that Picasso combined into a bull's head in 1943, or the Baboon of 1951, with a toy car for face and a soccer ball for stomach? Picasso's sculpture, once considered a footnote to his painting, may turn out to possess a longer span of influence within its own medium.
Public