ART

Patrons and Roped Climbers

In retrospect, the sturdy figure of Ger-
trude Stein looms over the cultural land-
scape of pre-World War I Paris like an
old-fashioned radio—squat, massive,
dark and droning out an endless stream
of words. But if her words were some-
times tedious, her eye was seldom
wrong. In fact, no American expatriate
was a shrewder judge of Paris’ radical
new art. The Stein family, which came
to be known as les Americains, made a
powerful buying unit; it helped keep
some of the best young artists in Europe
alive. Gertrude’s brother Leo (an aes-
thete of some pretension, some under-
standing and much enthusiasm) gradu-
ated to modern art via Cézanne, whose
work he began to buy in 1904. Her
second brother Michael concentrated on
the paintings and bronzes of Henri Ma-
tisse. Gertrude herself liked Picasso and
Juan Gris. “Americans can understand THE LAST CLASSICISM
Spaniards,” she wrote. “Cubism is a Cubism was not abstraction but
purely Spanish conception, and only an attempt at depicting a
Spaniards can be Cubists” —thus cheer- tangible world on a flat surface
fully disregarding Braque. without means of one-point
However eccentric Gertrude Stein’s Renaissance perspective.
theories, the flat she shared with Leo at Clockwise from main picture:
27 Rue de Fleurus was a salon through Harbor in Normandy (1909);
which the best artists and writers in Markwippach (1917);
France passed each Saturday. Throughout Gertrude Stein and Cubist
their ten years together at Rue de paintings at home;
Fleurus, Leo and Gertrude kept buying. Portrait of Josette (1916);
One of their first major purchases was Seated Nude (1909-10);
Young Girl with Basket of Flowers, a big Portrait of Picasso (1912).
blue-period Picasso nude for which they
paid 150 francs ($29). Soon Gertrude
owned more early Picassos than anybody
else in France. Picasso dashed off a
small Homage to Gertrude, 1909, a parody
of Baroque ceiling painting, complete
with curtain, clouds and trumpeting
angels, which she tacked to the ceiling ing this week at the Los Angeles County cent shimmers of Impressionism. In Although Cubism had an immense method, to all visual experiences. Braque
above her bed. As time wore on, Ger- Museum. classical art the aim is to represent a real latter-day effect on abstract painting, it likened his relationship with Picasso to
trude came to think of Picasso as her If Picasso’s early pictures of harle- world: but in this trompe-l’oeil reality, the was not abstraction, nor did it want to mountaineers on a rope. But each man
spiritual brother. In 1913, Leo moved quins, whores and melancholy absinthe thing which is not real is the painting be. Even in Picasso’s Still Life, 1912, had his own style of climbing. Any
out, taking his favorite pictures with drinkers had never been painted, the itself. The canvas dissolves and contra- which must have struck its first viewers definition of Cubism has to include not
him. “Cézanne and Matisse,” he noted history of modern art would show a dicts its own nature as a two-dimen- as an incomprehensible assemblage of only the suave, melodious painterliness
sternly, “have permanently interesting slight gap—but its structure would be sional surface; it becomes a window planes and lines, the viewer’s eye is of Braque and Picasso’s thrusting ener-
qualities. Picasso might have had—if he the same. It was only with the invention opening on a view. The Cubists proposed drawn deep into reality—captured first gies, but also the cool, precise overlap-
had developed his gifts instead of ex- of Cubism that Picasso emerged as a to construct an undivided reality that by the fragments of newsprint, then ping of such works by Gris as Portrait of
ploiting those that he did not possess. daemon of history; in eight years, would involve no such fictions: to put a finding the stem and bowl of a glass, Josette, 1916, where spatial ambiguities
The general situation of painting here is between 1906 and 1914, Picasso and tangible world on a flat, tangible surface. the-edge of a table, the curve of a pipe. of positive and negative, the superimpos-
loathsome with its Cubico-futuristic Georges Braque changed the look and Thus, with incredible bravado, Picasso Thrusting energies. The Cubists’ ition of transparent and opaque shapes,
tommy rotting.” The Stein collection was function of painted surfaces radically and Braque (neither had yet turned 30) subject matter was drawn from the life are played off against expectations of
farther dispersed after the deaths of Leo and forever. Ever since, modern art has set out to displace a history of visual they lived as virtually penniless men—in what a figure really “looks like.” A
and Gertrude. As a tribute to a vanished tended to define itself in terms of Cu- representation that had lasted more than studios, on the street, or swigging a marc painting like Lyonel Feininger’s Markwip-
era, Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art bism, either by what later artists de- 500 years. Every element of art had to at some cafe. The packet of cigarette pach, 1917, shows how far a minor artist
has temporarily brought it together veloped out of the movement, or by their be rethought in terms of a new func- papers in a Braque, the jug in a Juan could transcend his limits when the
again: it includes seven Cézannes, ten struggle to find a way past it. tion—line, color, light, volume, space. Gris or the boxy village houses hemmed Cubist impetus played through them.
Gris, 75 Matisses and 110 Picassos. The show in Los Angeles was organ- Thus the solidity of the rocks, lighthouse by bulging trees that Léger painted in After 1920, neither Picasso nor
Daemon of histor y. Among the ized by Art Historian Douglas Cooper, a and boats in Braque’s Harbor in Nor- 1914 could be taken for granted as Braque worked roped to each other, or to
Picassos is the 1912 Still Life, a classic major collector and close friend of mandy, 1909, is not achieved through subjects; their anonymity not only con- anyone else, again. The vocabulary re-
example of Cubico-futuristic tommy Picasso, Braque and Léger. The move- light-and-shade modeling, still less by nected them to ordinary life but also mained rich and supple for them, more
rotting. Leo, the man of taste, hated it; ment, he argues, aimed to restore reality perspective; instead, each form begins to focused a viewer’s attention on what was and more academic in other men’s work.
Gertrude, the illogical intuitive, loved it. to art, to discover a way of representing buckle into planes and projections, and happening within a new language of And though Cubism has been officially
Perhaps neither recognized that it repres- “the solid tangible reality” of things. every shape is evenly compressed painting. dead for 50 years, the issues it raised
ented a major change in human visual This sense of reality and tangibility, says against the eye. Even space, which in Cubism was the last classicism, the remain central to the fate of easel paint-
experience. Just how emphatic that Cooper, had been lost to French painting Renaissance tradition was basically a last successful attempt by art to discover ing in our time. The best paintings it left
change was can be seen in a huge retro- in the late 19th century, amid the theor- void, becomes an object, blue and dense a mode of looking at the world that have not been surpassed.
spective of the history of Cubism open- izing of the Symbolists and the opales- and faceted. could be “scientifically” applied, as ■ Robert Hughes

76 TIME, DECEMBER 14, 1970 77