Cubism’s legacy, in 81 paintings

The Lauder Collection at the Met

In
6 minute read
Picasso's 'The Oil Mill' (1909): Life defined as action.
Picasso's 'The Oil Mill' (1909): Life defined as action.

None of the movements that revolutionized modern art had quite the force of Cubism, and none was so directly traceable to two individual artists: Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who for two years virtually lived in each other’s studios and shared the progress of their work on a daily basis.

It was as close a collaboration as the history of art affords, and yet each man undertook his exploration separately. Both realized that they were creating a new visual language, even as they searched for its alphabet. And both men — still in their 20s, but supremely confident of their talents — realized that art would never be the same.

Nothing’s ever that simple, of course. What Braque and Picasso were doing reflected the wider breakup of the space-time grid of the Newtonian cosmos that was emblematized in Einstein’s theory of relativity, but which had already been anticipated, and in part realized, by late-19th-century movements in the arts.

In short, our two artists were bringing to term in the visual arts a process already in progress across the arts and sciences: a new way of seeing and depicting the world around and within us, and charting the relationships that emerged.

The end of landscape

In the largest sense, the ferment of Modernism was about erasing the conventional boundaries between inner and outer, and redefining our participation in a world we were challenged to create (or at least perceive) anew. Nothing of comparable significance had occurred since the development of Renaissance perspective, and one casualty of the new visualization would be the genre that had most comprehensively defined the art of the previous four centuries: landscape. Perspective — the simulation of depth — made the representation of landscape on a two-dimensional canvas possible, and with it a mode of seeing, of action and event at a distance, that would have the profoundest consequences not only for art but also for science, commerce, and, ultimately, empire.

Landscape is place that occurs in time and therefore implies the spatiotemporal grid that would be fixed by Newtonian physics. The supersession of that grid, and the matrix of seeing that went with it, meant the end of landscape as a genre in painting, at least as it was classically understood.

Cubism was the knife that performed this operation. Braque and Picasso set about to revoke perspective — flattening, foregrounding, and dissecting the objects they depicted. If the ultimate “goal” of perspectival art was trompe l’oeil — the representation of an object in two dimensions that could fool the spectator into believing that it was actually present in three — then that of Cubism was to reduce the object to a referent that was specifically not the thing itself; in short, to a sign. This innovation led Braque, Picasso, and their successors to experiment with collage — the incorporation of actual objects in fragmented form onto the canvas, including newsprint (an object that, while materially real, consisted of nothing but signs). Up to this time, the only alphabetic lettering in painting was typically the artist’s signature — the token of his or her unrepresented presence in the artwork. By using lettering — a pure sign — as part of the compositional motif, Braque and Picasso called attention to the artificiality (and therefore the creative openness) of representation as such.

Lauder’s big four

The next logical step was pure abstraction: the rejection of representation in favor of colors, planes, and shapes that betokened nothing at all beyond themselves. Neither Braque nor Picasso ever took that step, either in Cubism or in the styles they experimented with thereafter. Cubism was a critique of the perceptual world, not an abandonment of it. The sign still pointed to the thing; it was a nostalgia for the object.

Cubism fascinated the critic and art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who defined it around its first practitioners, adding to Braque and Picasso the Spanish painter Juan Gris and the Frenchman Fernand Léger as its canonical founding quartet. When the cosmetics executive Leonard A. Lauder began building his art collection in 1976, he restricted himself to these four men, with the goal of illustrating the origin and development of Cubism up to the point where it entered the mainstream of modern art. This collection has been deeded to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is now on public display for the first time.

In effect, Lauder’s collection makes the case for Kahnweiler. Gris and Léger were already practicing Cubists by 1912, and each extended the Cubist language. But so did others, notably the Italian Futurists, who had embraced Cubism even earlier and carried it in a direction of their own.

A mill springs to life

The Met show displays Braque and Picasso together and at times side-by-side, while giving separate rooms to Gris and Léger. This arrangement makes sense. Braque and Picasso came to Cubism by different routes, Braque through an initial brush with Fauvism and Picasso by way of Cézanne and African art. It’s fascinating to observe both men approaching a common point in the years between 1906 and 1909, and then all but merging stylistically in their period of daily association. They weren’t the same painter, of course, but even connoisseurs concede that without their separate signatures it would be difficult to assign some works definitively to one man or the other.

Lauder collected nothing trivial or insignificant, and some of the studies for large-scale compositions — such as Picasso’s Nude with Drapery and Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (both 1907) are extraordinary in their own right. The Oil Mill (1909) is historically important as the work that inspired the Futurists, and in it one reads the fate of landscape: the mill, deconstructed into planes, sprawls out like a thing suddenly alive, usurping space and reducing the inanimate fields and the distant hills to secondary interest. Life is here redefined as action, so that the machine that pulps the vintage (and, by extension, the building that houses it) can be seen as more alive than the immobile tree that is the natural source of its product.

Playfulness and wit

Most of the collection is relatively modest in scale; the great, heraldic works of Analytic Cubism had already been acquired by the time Lauder began to collect. Lauder did own one major Picasso masterpiece, however — the Woman in an Armchair (1909-10) — and a work comparably important for Léger — Composition (The Typographer) (1918-19). Because the collection is so focused, it’s relatively small — 81 works in all — but it will certainly be transformative for the Met as the museum moves ever more aggressively into the field of modern art.

As for the Kahnweiler thesis of a Big Four of Cubism, it is likely to remain controversial. Léger, perhaps more accurately described as a Cylindrist for his own favorite form, is a much more extroverted sensibility than Braque or Picasso, while Gris, the consummate draughtsman, is perhaps a little too elegant for the company: He impresses one less as a deconstructor of received conventions than as a synthesizer of new ones. Still, he is a relatively neglected figure, and a room of his own at the Met should make for a serious reevaluation.

Cubism itself, after a century, has suffered the fate of all great revolutions: It has become classical. We need to make an effort to recover the sense of how radical it once was, even as elements once obscured — its playfulness and wit, for example — stand out in bolder relief. The Lauder collection, while not a complete overview, provides a helpful primer on how art became modern, and vision changed with it.

What, When, Where

Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection. Through February 16, 2015 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. (at 82nd St.), New York. 212-535-7710 or www.metmuseum.org.

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