My Cubist Summer

This month I’ve been happily immersed in two superb essays on Picasso’s Cubism – T. J. Clark’s “Cubism and Collectivity” (included in his 1999 collection Farewell to an Idea) and Leo Steinberg’s “The Intelligence of Picasso” (included in his posthumous 2022 collection Picasso). It’s fascinating to compare them. 

In “Cubism and Collectivity,” Clark considers some of Picasso’s most extreme works of Cubism, e.g., Man with a Pipe (1911), Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”) (1911-12), and The Architect’s Table (1912). To describe these strange, elusive paintings, Clark uses “grid”: “Look at the way the buttons in Man with a Pipe are rolled along various lines to apexes or points of intersection on the grid, like zeros in a three-dimensional sum....”; “The grid had been, and still was, essentially a compositional device....”; “The grid is never entirely part of the perceptions it totalizes....” “I should say that Picasso’s grids are very often, perhaps most often, stretched or filled to breaking point.” And this beautiful passage on the grid in “Ma Jolie”: 

It is filled with the luminous, the dappled and glistening, the chequered shade, the translucent and half-penetrable – indicators that geometry had somehow now been divulged by seeing. Lines are invaded by light. The grid shivers again with Cezanne’s perceptual uncertainties, not the Douanier’s confidence in the sign.

Clark changed my view of Picasso’s grids. He lit them up – “lines invaded by light.”

Steinberg wasn’t a fan of the grid. In his “The Philosophical Brothel” (also included in Picasso), he wrote,

New York painters and critics valued Cubism less as a body of work than as a modus operandi, a pictorial “strategy” that offered escape from the pitfalls and sinkholes of deep perspective. The so-called Cubist grid was an ideated flat-level armature that enabled a painter, any painter whatever, to traverse the expanse of a canvas without falling through. Rather than seeing Picasso’s Cubist creations as part of an artist’s personal inventory, continually feeding into the rest of the work, the supposed structure described by the term “Cubist grid” was depersonalized. [“The Philosophical Brothel”]

In “The Intelligence of Picasso,” Steinberg didn’t use “grid”; he used “facet,” “arris,” and “watershed.” For example:

From this moment forward, the arris or watershed in Picasso’s work gets off an amazing career: during the following year, 1908, he works every rounding surface to a sharp ridge. Every swell becomes discontinuous, breaking against an arris. Planes define themselves as prismatic facets. And not body planes only: in a back view, at bottom center, even the interval between the thighs joins in the faceting, as if solids and void deserved the same stepwise pacing from any one point to whatever lies next. Picasso here disavows all continuous surfacing – the kind you caress; he is plotting the incidence of watersheds in a faceted system. 

I confess that before I read Steinberg’s essay, I didn’t know what an arris is. The dictionary defines it as “a sharp edge formed by the meeting of two flat or curved surfaces.” Steinberg first used it in his description of the cheekline in Picasso’s Self-Portrait (1907):

In the 1907 Self-Portrait, the cheekline runs wild, lancing, impaling the ear. The line, black and rigid, flouts the ostensible anatomical program – cooperating neither with skin tone nor with the requisite continuities. It signifies a change of plane at the cheek from front to side on a receding slope – and that’s all it will do. With chin or eye socket it makes no connection; and that’s why it looks wrong. How shall we explain this wrongness? And explained it should be, if we believe in Picasso’s intelligence; because intelligence should be intelligible.

Steinberg explained it: 

So what about this cheekline that is clearly too long and too inorganic? Picasso has abstracted it from its bedding. In the given context, the line still tells as an arris, defining a change of planes – but without adhering to the planes it supposedly turns. Does this sound absurd? Can a ridge at the junction of planes, as in this early Picasso, exist apart from those planes? Think of the arris down the prow of a ship – can you imagine it without the planes it defines? Yet this is exactly what Picasso conceives. He wants the arris seen apart from its connection with body – as an idea: not a thing but a meaning. And by making it unanatomical, inorganic – black, rigid, and overlong – he dissociates that line from its physical cause, from the bulk it articulates, almost as an abstracted sign.

Steinberg called that cheekline “the most fertile single line drawn in the twentieth century.” He tracked Picasso’s subsequent use of it. He saw it as the source of Cubism:

From this moment forward, the arris or watershed in Picasso’s work gets off an amazing career: during the following year, 1908, he works every rounding surface to a sharp ridge. Every swell becomes discontinuous, breaking against an arris.

Clark doesn’t see it this way. He doesn’t see Cubism as a continuous line of development. He says, “I believe we can best understand the painting Picasso did in 1911 and 1912 if we see it as not issuing from the process of inquiry of the previous three years.” Where Steinberg saw a continuum, Clark sees a break. The break comes in 1911, in Céret: 

What the pictures from Céret posit is a hypothetically complete and alternative system of representation, which they have found and instantiate. Nothing could be more different from the manner and matter of the paintings done in the years before.

In Céret, Clark argues, Picasso “changed course. He made his way back to the world of phenomena.” He looks at the work Picasso did the previous summer, in Cadaqués; he sees a significant contrast. The Cadaqués paintings “speak a uniquely spare, impalpable, diagrammatic language: they are, and have always recognized to be, Cubism near freezing point.”

Interestingly, Steinberg, in his piece, looked closely at a Picasso painted in Cadaqués – Harbor at Cadaqués (1910) – and found it “lovely.” He wrote,

The boat, half reclaimed by its atmospheric surround, dissolves into quivering accents, tokens of planar change accentuated by light. The component parts of the boat are still recognizable: stem and stern; the hint of a mast; the ribbing of its concave; the phantom anchor at lower right; while the browns of the boat’s wooden fabric melt in blueing air.

So much for “Cubism near freezing point.” 

Clark’s governing aesthetic is strangeness. His taste is for “Cubism’s deep, wild, irredeemable obscurity.” The Cubism that appeals to him are the dense, complex grids of Man with a Pipe, Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”), The Architect’s Table. Clark revels in their strangeness. I do, too. But I have a question. Do they describe anything? Clark says yes:

The fragments of planes, lines, lighting, and spacing that make up the texture of “Ma Jolie” may or may not have forfeited “their former descriptive functions” ... but they clearly still carry their former descriptive appearance. They are full of the kinds of particularity, density, and repleteness that usually go with visual matching. They still look to be describing.

Steinberg said yes, too, but less emphatically: “Only minimally do the objects evoked serve as analogues to exclusively visual data.” But when he said this, he wasn’t looking at extreme Cubist paintings like Man with a Pipe, Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”), The Architect’s Table. He was looking at spare works of diagram and collage – Fruit Bowl, Bottle, and Bread Loaf on a Table (1912), Bottle, Wineglass, and Newspaper on a Table (1912), and Bottle, Glass, and Violin (1912) – that appear to be cousins of the 1910 Cadaqués paintings. Of Bottle, Wineglass, and Newspaper on a Table, he said, 

I love the airy brightness of it, every object conceived in thought, without clotting embodiment. If some find these products of Picasso’s nightlife unappealing, I hope, at least, they’ll respect the intelligence of their maker. My own pleasure in them derives partly from their elegant clarity, their cool; and in part from their wisdom.

That’s a perfect note to end on. These two great essays expanded my appreciation of Picasso’s Cubism immensely. Highly recommended.

Credit: The above illustration is Pablo Picasso's Woman with a Zither ("Ma Jolie") (1911-12). 

Pablo Picasso, Harbor at Cadaqués (1910)