Georges Braque's The Portuguese

Cubism is a terrible name. Except for a brief period, the style has nothing to do with cubes. It is instead an extension of the formal ideas developed by Cézanne. These were the ideas that inspired Matisse as early as 1904 and Picasso perhaps a year or two later. We certainly saw these ideas asserted in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. But Picasso’s great 1907 canvas is not yet really Cubism. It is more accurate to say that it is the foundation upon which Cubism is constructed. If we want to really see the origin of the style, we need to look beyond Picasso to his new friend Georges Braque.

A young French painter that had been a Fauvist until he was struck by both the posthumous Cézanne retrospective exhibition held in Paris in 1907 and his first sight of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles. Like so many people that saw Les Demoiselles, Braque hated Picasso’s outrageous canvas (Matisse predicted that eventually Picasso would be found hanged behind the work, so great was his mistake). Nevertheless, Braque stated that it haunted him through the winter. Like every good Parisian, Braque fled Paris in the summer. In this regard, Paris is rather like New York, which, every August, is emptied of all residents that can afford to leave. But in the summer of 1908 Braque decided to summer in the part of Provance in which Cézanne had lived and worked. Braque spent the summer shedding the colors of Fauvism and exploring the structural issues that consummed Cézanne. He wrote: “It [Cézanne's impact] was more than an influence, it was an invitation. Cézanne was the first to have broken away from erudite, mechanized perspective…” Quoted in William Rubin’s Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism: New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1989, p.353. Like Cézanne, Braque sought to undermine depth by forcing the viewer to recognize the canvas not as a window but as it truly is, a vertical curtain that hangs before us.

Georges Braque, Houses at l'Estaque, o/c, 1908 (Bern)
In Houses at L’Estaque Braque simplifies the form of the houses, here are the so called cubes, but he nullifies the obvious recessionary overlapping with the trees that force forward even the most distant building. When Braque returned to Paris in late August, he found Picasso an eager audience. Almost immediately, Picasso began to exploit Braque’s investigations. But far from being the end of their working relationship, this exchange becomes the first in a series of collaborations that lasts six years and creates an intimate creative bound between these two artists that is unique in the history of art. Between the years 1908 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Braque and Picasso work together so closely that experts can have difficulty telling the work of one artist from the other. For months on end they would visit each others studio on an almost daily basis sharing ideas and challenging each other as they went. Still, a pattern did emerge and it tended to be to Picasso’s benefit. When a radical new idea was introduced, more then likely, it was Braque that recognized its value. But it was inevitably Picasso who realized its potential and was able to fully exploit it. By 1910, Cubism had matured into a complex system that is seemingly so esoteric that it appears to have rejected all esthetic concerns. The average museum visitor, when confronted by a 1910 or 1911 canvas by Braque or Picasso, the period known as Analytic Cubism, often looks pained and leaves the gallery as quickly as possible even while acknowledging the importance of such work. In other words, for most people, Cubism is ugly and confusing. I suspect that the problem is not so much the art as that difficulty that is inevitable when such images are approached with little or no preparation. After all, we as a society seem to be under the delusion that art ought to be understandable to the layman.

Georges Braque, The Portuguese, o/c, 1911 (Basel)
In order to understand Cubism we need to go back to Cézanne’s still lifes or even further, to the Renaissance. Let me use an example that worked rather nicely in the classroom last semester. There I was lecturing away, have you noticed that I can go on? I was about to try to explain Cubism as I was drinking cold coffee from a paper cup. I set the cup on the desk in the front of the room and said, “If I were a Renaissance artist painting that cup on that table I would position myself at particular point and construct the objects and surrounding space frozen in that spot. On the other hand, if I were Cézanne, I might allow myself to see the changing shapes and lines that result when I shift my weight from one leg to the other. I might allow myself to see slightly around the paper cup since, as Cézanne, I am interested in vision and memory working together. Finally, if I were Braque or Picasso, I would want even more. I would not be satisfied with the narrow limiting conventions of the Renaissance nor even with the too timid explorations of the master Cézanne. As a Cubist I want to express my total visual understanding of the paper coffee cup. I want more than the Renaissance painter or even Cézanne, I want to express the entire cup simultaneously on the static surface of the canvas since I can hold all that visual information in my memory. I want to render the cup’s front, its sides, its back, and its inner walls, its bottom from both inside and out, and I want to do this on a flat canvas. How can this be done? The answer is provided by The Portuguese. In this canvas, everything was fractured. The guitar player and the dock was just so many pieces of broken glass. By breaking these objects in to smaller elements Braque and Picasso are able overcome the unified singularity of an object and instead transform it into an object of vision. At this point the class began to look quite confused, so I turned back to the paper cup and began to rip it into pieces (I had finished the coffee). If I want to be able to show you both the back and front and inside and outside simultaneously, I must fragment the object. Basically this is the strategy of the Cubists.