The Flattening of “Collage”*

LISA FLORMAN

In his influential article “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” Tom Crow took the courageous step of citing—favorably—several critical essays written by Clement Greenberg. Crow wanted to remind us that, in its earliest theoretical formulations, including those advanced by Greenberg himself, modernist art was seen as thoroughly bound up with the rise of capitalism and the culture industry that attended it.1 It was, of course, to the early, overtly Marxist Greenberg (the author of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and “Towards a Newer Laocoon”) that Crow directed our attention; he had substantially less enthusiasm for the arguably more dogmatic, formalist critic who, two decades later, wrote “Collage.”2 That Greenberg, Crow rightly pointed out, had become so intent on denying any overlap between the products of mass culture and modernist art that he refused to acknowledge the obviously commercial nature of the collage elements—the labels, the scraps of newspaper, and wallpaper—that Picasso and Braque had actually pasted into their papiers collés. Crow seemed to feel that, whatever the insights of “Collage,” they were outweighed by such oversights, and within the course of a few paragraphs he had effectively written the essay off as irredeemably flawed. If I find myself less willing or able to dismiss “Collage,” it is not because I think the formalist, Kantian Greenberg is more compelling than his Marxist predecessor. In truth, I am far less interested in either the formalist or the Marxist alone than I am in (to borrow Stephen Melville’s phrasing) the Hegelian who

* This essay benefited from its presentation to the seminar in modern art jointly sponsored by the History of Art Department and the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. I would like to thank Brigid Doherty for extending the invitation to deliver the paper there. I would also like to thank Harry Cooper for his generous and careful reading of the text; even those few suggestions that I did not ultimately take helped me to clarify the finer points of the argument that I was trying to make. A more general debt of gratitude is owed to Stephen Melville, who, early on, showed me what it might mean to actually read Greenberg thoughtfully and with care. 1. Tom Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 3–37. 2. Greenberg, “Collage” (1959), in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 70–83.

OCTOBER 102, Fall 2002, pp. 59–86. © 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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emerges out of the rubbing of Kant against Marx in Greenberg’s writings.3 I would even go so far as to suggest that Greenberg has been a powerful presence within art history precisely because, like Hegel, he offers us a model, albeit imperfect, of how “art” and “history” might be thought together, and of how their conjunction can be seen to articulate a single field: art history as distinct from history tout court or, perhaps more urgently at present, from either visual or cultural studies.4 All of this is by way of saying that if in what follows I engage in a close reading of “Collage” (a text that Crow describes as one of Greenberg’s “most complete statements of formal method”5), it is not so much to explicate the essay’s formalism as to draw from it an understanding of the grounds on which art might properly be said to have a history—its history, if not fully separate from, neither fully subsumable into, a history of culture more broadly or generally conceived. I also hope to show that that understanding can be turned back upon the text itself, and used to rectify some of its more evident shortcomings. Even the omissions pointed out by Crow can be addressed, I believe, by rigorously applying the logic that Greenberg developed in the first half of the essay but failed to carry through.6 I am getting ahead of myself, however. Before we can even begin our close reading, we need to clarify precisely which text it is that we intend to read. “Collage” has all too often been taken as a straightforward revision of “The Pasted- Paper Revolution,” an essay that Greenberg wrote a year earlier, and that appeared in the September 1958 issue of ARTNews.7 The differences between the two texts

3. Melville, “Positionality, Objectivity, Judgment,” in Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1996), p. 78. Of course, it remains to be seen what kind of a Hegelian Greenberg actually is. 4. Crow’s essay, it seems to me, largely blurs these distinctions—not only through its explicit appeal to cultural studies (primarily the work of Phil Cohen, Stuart Hall, and Tony Jefferson), but also through its implication that the autonomy of art, on which rests whatever claim art history may have to occupying a distinct field, actually originates elsewhere. Crow writes, for example, that “the formal autonomy achieved in early modernist painting should be understood as a mediated synthesis of possibilities derived from both the failures of existing artistic technique and a repertoire of potentially oppositional practices discovered in the world outside” (p. 29). Similarly, although Crow begins by regarding the avant-garde as a resistant subculture like those studied by Hall and Jefferson, he closes his argument with the suggestion that it in practice only borrows from such groups. Thus: “In their selective appropriation from fringe mass culture, advanced artists search out areas of social practice that retain some vivid life in an increasingly administered and rationalized society” (p. 35). 5. Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture,” p. 8. 6. In this ambition to turn what I take to be the strongest arguments within “Collage” back upon that text itself, I feel a bit of the same hesitation expressed by T. J. Clark when he admitted that he was “genuinely uncertain as to whether [he was] diverging from Greenberg’s argument or explaining it more fully.” In my case, there is undoubtedly some truth to both claims—though I trace my ambivalence to “Collage” itself, which seems to lay out two distinct and even contradictory models of how modernism works. For Clark’s analysis, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” see Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 47–63. 7. Reprinted in Clement Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: 1993), vol. 4, pp. 61–66. “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” is in turn something of a reworking of a review of The Museum of Modern Art’s Collage exhibition that Greenberg wrote a decade earlier and published in The Nation 27 (November 1948).

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have, as a result, been frequently elided.8 But “Collage” is more than twice as long as its predecessor, and, although much of the additional material can be passed off as simply providing greater detail to the existing argument, the essay also includes two subjects nowhere raised in “The Pasted-Paper Revolution”—Picasso’s and Braque’s cultivation of the sculptural aspects of Cubism, and the later (that is, post–1915) paintings of Juan Gris—that significantly alter the argument’s overall shape. To the extent that Greenberg’s desire to incorporate these subjects into his narrative seems likely to have been what occasioned the rewriting, it might be worth our while to examine them briefly before taking up a properly sequential reading of the text. We will see as we proceed that the two subjects are closely, if negatively, related in the unfolding narrative of “Collage.” For our purposes, though, it probably makes sense to disentangle them momentarily and attend first to Greenberg’s discussion of the paintings by Gris, which serves as a sort of coda to the essay as a whole.9 While Gris’s work had been mentioned in “The Pasted-Paper Revolution,” the emphasis there was, understandably, on his papiers collés, and Greenberg’s judgment was largely negative; Gris’s collages were held to “lack the immediacy of presence of Picasso’s and Braque’s.”10 In “Collage,” although essentially the same charge is repeated, Greenberg follows it with praise for Gris’s later paintings, again, specifically those done in 1915 and the several years following. Greenberg claims that the paint- ings effectively recapitulate and clarify the most important achievements of Picasso’s

8. The situation is not helped by the fact that “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” was included in Greenberg’s Collected Essays and Criticism, while “Collage” was not. Even if that editorial decision was taken in view of the still ready availability of Art and Culture, it is likely to discourage any direct comparison of the two texts, and so to reinforce the impression that the differences between them are relatively minor. 9. It might seem that by beginning, as I do, at the end of “Collage,” I am willfully flouting the order of the argument as it is actually presented, and thereby altering it in some fundamental way. I would counter, however, that one of the things that characterizes “Collage” (and makes it more than a little Hegelian) is that no part of it is fully explicable in isolation. Everything is to be understood in the context of the whole, with the rather awkward qualification that that whole in turn depends entirely on the individual moments comprising it. The strategy that I have adopted here—to start at the conclusion, leap to the beginning, and then work my way forward to the end—is designed to simulate, as efficiently as possible, the multiple readings that in fact led up to the interpretation I will offer. 10. “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” (as in note 1), p. 65. It has become customary among art histori- ans, especially those concerned with Cubism, to distinguish between the more general category of “collage” and the subset “papier collé.” The latter term is usually reserved for works whose elements are limited, as the name implies, to pieces of pasted paper (often with pencil or charcoal drawing overtop), whereas collages may include a wider array of materials—everything from rope and fabric to pieces of metal or wood. (As a result, collage appears to open out more readily onto practices perhaps best described as sculptural, whereas papier collé seems to maintain a much closer attachment to the field of painting.) Because Greenberg does not distinguish between the two terms, and in fact never employs the phrase “papier collé,” I have used them more or less interchangeably here. Nevertheless, as Harry Cooper pointed out to me, the change of title—from “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” to “Collage”— suggests that Greenberg did in fact recognize a distinction between the two practices. It may even be that we should read the switch to “Collage” as an indication of Greenberg’s growing sense that, in the end, collage would prove the more “revolutionary” of the two, or at least the more pervasive and so the more historically consequential.

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and Braque’s earlier papiers collés. He points in particular to Gris’s “sonorous” blacks—to the way that they initially constitute themselves as shapes (rather than shad- ows) and so establish an ambiguous relation to both adjacent shapes and the plane of the picture as a whole. In Greenberg’s eyes, the brilliance of a work like Gris’s 1916 Still Life lies in the fact that it demonstrates, “perhaps more clearly than anything by Picasso or Braque, something which is of the highest importance to Cubism and to the collage’s effect upon it: namely, the liquidation of sculptural shading.” In such works, Greenberg adds, “the decorative is transcended and transfigured.”11 The essay leaves little doubt that these twinned accomplishments—the liquidation of sculptural shading and the transcending of the decorative—are central to Greenberg’s assessment of Gris’s paintings, just as they are to his estimation of Cubist collage. From the essay’s opening sentence, it is also made clear that that estimation is considerable: “Collage was a major turning point in the evolution of Cubism,” we are told, “and therefore a major turning point in the whole evolution of

11. “Collage,” pp. 81–82.

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modernist art.”12 What remains unexplained in “Collage” itself is why the history of modernist art should have pivoted upon a dual rejection of sculptural shading and the sort of decorativeness that Gris’s paintings are likewise seen to have overcome. In order to flesh out the logic underlying this particular view of modernism, we will need to take a brief detour through a couple of other essays by Greenberg, including what is surely his most programmatic (and controversial) statement on the subject, “Modernist Painting.” As Crow and others have accurately pointed out, Greenberg’s interest in modernism was fueled from the start by a deep anxiety over the fate and identity of art. In his earliest essays, he cast the argument in explicitly Marxist terms: capitalism’s inexorable commodification posed a serious threat to cultural standards and values, and only the radical experiences afforded by avant-garde art offered any real hope of saving painting, for example, from being turned into a form of “relatively trivial interior decoration.”13 In his later writings Greenberg’s terms are rather less political, but he continues to hold modernism responsible for “the whole of what is truly alive in our culture.”14 Its resistance to the deadening effects of contemporary society is staged, he argues, not through any direct critique of either those effects or their cause, but rather through the processes of “self- criticism”: “I identify modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of the self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant.” In “Modernist Painting,” Greenberg argues that such self-criticism is used not to subvert the “self” in question, but to entrench it more firmly; and he warns that activities unable to avail themselves of this sort of self-critique are those most likely to disappear, “to be assimilated to entertainment pure and simple.”15 The arts, he explained, having recognized their vulnerability, discovered that they “could save themselves from this leveling down only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.” Each art, however, had to perform this demonstration on its own behalf: The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed

12. Ibid., p. 70. 13. “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Partisan Review (July–August 1940); reprinted in Greenberg’s Collected Essays, vol. 1, p. 24. It is, I think, a bit difficult to know how serious a threat to art capitalism actually poses. No doubt there are many who feel that Greenberg’s anxiety in this regard is misplaced— either because they hold art to be inviolable or because, on the contrary, they celebrate its involvement with commodity culture. I myself, however, am inclined to agree with Stephen Melville when he writes, in a discussion of Greenberg’s modernism, that the “fear we attribute to the world of art is not bizarre; it is based on the way things of culture increasingly do appear to die, to cease to count, in our world: not with a bang, but a whimper. It is, among other things, fear of Muzak” (Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983], p. 8). Also see Melville’s entry on Greenberg in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) vol. 2, pp. 335–38. 14. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Collected Essays, vol. 4, p. 85. 15. Ibid., p. 86.

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from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered “pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence.16 We would perhaps do well to take note of the quotation marks that appear in this passage around the words “pure” and “purity.” They seem to indicate a certain ambivalence on Greenberg’s part, a dissatisfaction, even, at having had to resort to these terms.17 If we disregard the scare quotes, and so assume that the language of purity precisely captures what Greenberg had in mind, we will feel ourselves invited to imagine the history of modernist art as a progressive paring away of the inessential, so as to reveal in the end the final truth or essence of each art. Greenberg himself unfortunately appears to have accepted this invitation at a number of places within “Modernist Painting,” perhaps most infamously in his discussion of the “ineluctable flatness” of painting’s material support. “Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art,” Greenberg concluded, “Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.”18 It is an unhappy fact of the reception of Greenberg’s criticism that this reductive account of modern art’s relation to medium has become the accepted reading of “Modernist Painting,” and is held, moreover, to be exemplary of Greenberg’s writings on these matters as a whole. Such a reading has nourished the belief that Greenberg was committed to little more than painting’s assertion of its literal surface, a commitment that is easily and rightly written off as superficial.19 Whether or not “Modernist Painting” can actually sustain such an interpretation, “Collage” clearly cannot. In fact, one of my hopes for the present

16. Ibid. 17. For a reading of “Modernist Painting” that does take those quotation marks fully into account, see Stephen Melville’s Philosophy Beside Itself, p. 4ff. Of particular relevance to the argument I hope to make here is the following passage, from page 7, in which Melville draws out the implications of accepting the idea that art might, in fact, be something capable of “assimilation to entertainment pure and simple”: We want, then, to say that it is an essential possibility of art that it can mistake itself in a certain way. In so doing, we rule out any radically aestheticist position from the beginning, and this means that we are going to be able to use notions like purity only if they are somehow bracketed; we have in effect already built an impurity into our notion of art in a way that cannot be overcome. At the same time, because we have begun from an effort to take a certain kind of threat seriously, we are forced to speak of something like “purity” as a central project for or aspiration of art. And with this double handling of “purity,” we have installed a dialectical motor capable of generating a real history operating in something other than logico-aesthetic space—a space organized by a desire to continue the enterprise of art and not a desire to offer “theoretical demonstrations.”

18. “Modernist Painting,” p. 87. 19. See, for example, Christine Poggi, “‘The Pasted-Paper Revolution’ Revisited,” in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 1, p. 392. Although Poggi concedes that Greenberg was “an astute observer of the relational, ever-shifting value of surface and volume in Cubist works,” she finds both “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” and “Collage” to be marred by Greenberg’s “continued [assumption] that the pictorial ground was an a priori fact whose integrity must be affirmed.”

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essay is that it will encourage a reversal of the usual priority of things, so that “Modernist Painting” will begin to be read through the corrective lens of “Collage.” The reversal would allow us to see the appeals to medium-specificity in “Modernist Painting” as something other than a narrow essentialism, and the self- criticism that the essay claims to be definitive of modernist art as quite distinct from the self-reference for which it is generally mistaken. Indeed, the idea that Greenberg holds to an exclusively purist conception of the arts is readily given the lie by his insistence in “Collage” on the sculptural dimensions of Cubism. Picasso and Braque are credited there with having produced in their early pasted-paper works “the illusion of forms in bas-relief,” and, before that, of having been “crucially concerned, in and through their [paintings], with obtaining sculptural results by strictly nonsculptural means.”20 These observations play an important role in what, I will argue, is the essay’s clear demonstration that Greenberg’s history of modernist art is, far from being a simple linear progression to an essence, in fact fully dialectical. We will want to look carefully over the course of the remainder of this essay at the exact nature of that dialectic. For the time being, though, it may be enough to remark how, in the history of modernist (which is to say, medium-specific) art recounted in “Collage,” the medium of painting draws at certain (self-)critical moments on the resources of sculpture— as it does no less on those of papier collé. “Collage” also makes plain the absurdity of the notion that modernist painting was oriented solely toward the revelation of the “ineluctable flatness” of its material support. We can see easily enough for ourselves that, had it only been a matter of that, there would have been little to distinguish a modernist painting from, say, the wallpaper against which it hung, and so little guarding against the medium’s degeneration into “relatively trivial interior decoration.” “Collage” is very clear on this point. Literal flatness is a condition that modernist painting had to acknowledge, but to which it refused to be fully reconciled: “Painting had to spell out, rather than pretend to deny, the physical fact that it was flat, even though at the same time, it had to overcome this proclaimed flatness as an aesthetic fact” were it to become a successful painting.21 The “sculptural” and the “decorative” that Greenberg takes up later in his discussion of Gris can thus be seen as names for

20. “Collage,” pp. 75 and 71. In fact a similar point is made in “Modernist Painting,” though it has been almost entirely overshadowed by those passages that seem to contradict it. The relevant sentences are these, from page 89: It was, once again, in the name of the sculptural, with its shading and modeling, that Cézanne, and the Cubists after him, reacted against Impressionism, as David had reacted against Fragonard. But once more, just as David’s and Ingres’s reaction had culminated, paradoxically, in a kind of painting even less sculptural than before, so the Cubist counter-revolution eventuated in a kind of painting flatter than anything in Western art since before Giotto and Cimabue—so flat indeed that it could hardly contain recogniz- able images.

21. “Collage,” p. 71; italics added.

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painting’s tendency to forget one or another of these “facts” about its own field.22 (In this light, the “decorative” connotes both the ineluctable physical flatness of the canvas, and the limit point at which painting passes over into the extra-aesthetic or merely decorative, the category, that is, of non-art.) Having arrived at this understanding of its terms, we are perhaps finally ready to begin working our way sequentially through “Collage.” Greenberg’s exclusive concern at the beginning of the text is with the early Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque. He suggests that those works took the particular forms they did as a result of the effort to find a balance between flattened facet-planes that would emphasize the surface and a modeling that would disrupt it, without, however, producing anything that could quite be mistaken for sculptural form. “The main problem at this juncture,” Greenberg wrote, in reference to the paintings of 1910 and 1911, “became to keep the ‘inside’ of the picture—its content—from fusing with the ‘outside’—its literal surface. Depicted flatness—that is, the facet-planes—had to be kept separate enough from literal flatness to permit a minimal illusion of three- dimensional space to survive between the two.”23 Braque had already tried to address this problem with what Greenberg described as “expedients,” the “token” means of the tack-with-a-cast-shadow used in the 1910 Still Life with Violin and Pitcher, or the tassels-and-studs that appeared in several other works. By producing a momentary conflation of the rearmost of the painting’s depicted planes and the physical plane of the picture itself, these tacks and studs created a “trompe-l’oeil suggestion of deep space on top of Cubist flatness, between the depicted planes and the spectator’s eye.”24 Unfortunately, the effect was never more than local: “Plastically, spatially, neither the tack nor the tassel-and-stud acts upon the picture; each suggests illusion without making it really present.”25 If ultimately somewhat less than adequate, the token hardware of these early paintings nonetheless seems to have brought Picasso and Braque to a crucial realization: namely, that there might be a way to overcome literal or physical flatness by, paradoxically, bringing it to the fore. “Collage” lays out the complexity of the gambit in some detail: If the actuality of the surface—its real, physical flatness—could be indicated explicitly enough in certain places, it would be distinguished and separated from everything else the surface contained. Once the literal nature of the support was advertised, whatever upon it was not intended literally would be set off and enhanced in its non-literalness. Or to put it still another way: depicted flatness would inhabit at least the

22. The “sculptural,” that is, amounts to a forgetting or a denial of the physical fact that a painting is flat, whereas the “decorative” would denote the opposite tendency—a disregard for what Greenberg calls the “aesthetic fact” that that flatness (the canvas’s mere or mundane physicality) must somehow be overcome in order for the painting actually to be judged a painting. 23. Ibid., pp. 71–72. 24. Ibid., p. 72. 25. Ibid.

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semblance of a three-dimensional space as long as the brute, undepicted flatness of the literal surface was pointed to as being still flatter.26 Thus, for example, the printed or stenciled letters and numbers that, in 1911, Picasso and Braque began introducing into their compositions; the point was to draw attention through these inscriptions to the literal surface of the painting, so that everything less obviously adhering to that surface would appear to recede in depth as a result of the comparison. When used in combination with the token tassel-and-stud, as in Braque’s The Portuguese, the simulated typography was able to yield an even more dramatic effect. Appearing to change places in depth with the tassel-and-stud, the stenciling of The Portuguese draws the physical surface itself momentarily into the illusion: the surface “seems pulled back into depth along with the stenciling,” with the result that its presence is, for a brief instant at least, effectively canceled or negated.27

26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., p. 74.

Georges Braque. The Portuguese. 1911. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy Giraudon/Art Resource, New York.

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The only problem was that familiarity appeared to weaken the effect. By 1912 Picasso and Braque had begun selectively adding sand and other foreign materials to their pigments, in the hope that, by emphasizing and bringing to the fore still larger areas of the actual surface, the desired illusion might be prolonged. In the end, however, this strategy, too, proved insufficient. And, of course, it was bound to; insofar as the intention was to overcome (and not merely to deny) the literal flatness of painting’s material support, the effort was doomed to failure from the start. Again, according to “Collage,” it is precisely this nonreconciliation to flatness—to, we might say, the unavoidable conditions of its own existence— that characterized Cubism, and presumably modernist painting more generally. It is also what generated for it a history. Faced with the impossible demand to simultaneously spell out and overcome its literal flatness, Cubist painting was driven to ever more extreme measures; its history appears, as a result, as a succession of retrospective, dialectical responses to its inability to free itself from its own extra-aesthetic contingencies. Alternatively, we might say: the history of Cubism was propelled by a negative dialectic. This phrasing has the advantage of pointing up the extent to which, in the first part of the essay at least, Greenberg’s logic runs parallel to that of Adorno, for whom art and its history were likewise the products of nonreconcilia- tion.28 Adorno’s term “negative dialectics” was clearly intended to invoke Hegel, and to suggest an opposition to the dialectic of Hegelian philosophy. But because that opposition is itself dialectical, there is a strong sense in which Adorno’s project also demands to be seen as continuous with Hegel’s own.29 The point of contention for Adorno is that moment posited by Hegel, the moment of absolute knowing, in which dialectical history is at last brought to an end. At this point, according to Adorno, all of history’s driving oppositions—between subject and object, Spirit and Nature—are made to resolve themselves, without remainder and to the benefit of Spirit, in the monumental unity of the Hegelian system as a whole. Adorno’s ambition was to prize the negative, dialectical core of Hegelian thought free from that system and its conciliatory, undialectical conclusion. Significantly, however, Adorno refused to dismiss Hegel’s conception of a totalizing system as merely an idealistic construct (although he did adamantly deny its claims to truth). Rather,

28. Although similarities between Greenberg’s criticism and the views of Adorno have been frequently remarked, the most sustained comparison to date of their writings, by Peter Osborne, has instead underlined dissimilarities. Osborne’s presentation of Greenberg, however, is largely based on a simplified reading of “Modernist Painting,” with the result that Greenberg’s notion of autonomy is reduced to “the idea of specifically aesthetic ‘values’” that are aligned to “the formal properties of the physical medium.” Thus, for Osborne, “the idea of autonomy becomes inextricably linked within Greenberg’s work to that of self-referentiality.” As I hope I have already made clear, my ambition for the present essay is that it will dispel precisely these associations, so that we might begin to understand Greenberg’s “self-criticism” as something other than self-referentiality. See Peter Osborne, “Aesthetic Autonomy and the Crisis of Theory: Greenberg, Adorno, and the Problem of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts,” New Formations 9 (Winter 1989), pp. 31–50. 29. See, in particular, Theodore W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

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he saw that system as having been concretely realized in the twentieth century under the forces of advanced capitalism: Satanically, the world as grasped by the Hegelian system has only now, a hundred and fifty years later, proved itself to be a system in the literal sense, namely that of a radically societalized society. . . . A world integrated through “production,” through the exchange relation- ship, depends in all its moments on the social conditions of production, and in this sense actually realizes the primacy of the whole over its parts; in this regard the desperate impotence of every single individual now verifies Hegel’s extravagant conception of the system.30 According to Adorno, modern, autonomous art—art, that is, committed to an exploration of its own formal means—allows us at least a momentary glimpse of freedom from this oppressive social reality. Such work is not easily folded into the machinery of the culture industry, and as a result is increasingly alienated from society at large. But that alienation does nothing to lessen the work’s social significance; on the contrary, it creates the distance necessary for effective social critique. Art is social, Adorno argued, primarily because it stands opposed to society. Now this opposition art can mount only when it has become autonomous. By congealing into an entity unto itself—rather than obeying existing social norms and thus proving itself to be “socially useful”—art criticizes society just by being there.31 As a recent commentator on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory put it, “Autonomous art, hence, is social and historical not because it is externally determined by society, although it is that, but also because . . . it strives to stage the conflict between itself and its determinations.”32 Its autonomy arises precisely as a result of its demonstra-

30. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, p. 27. Although it lacks the reference to Hegel, the following passage, from Greenberg’s “The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture” (1947; Collected Writings, vol. 2, p. 163), makes much the same claim: There is also the fact that a society as completely capitalized and industrialized as our American own, seeks relentlessly to organize every possible field of activity and consump- tion in the direction of profit, regardless of whatever immunity from commercialization any particular activity may have once enjoyed. It is this kind of rationalization that has made life more and more boring and tasteless in our country, particularly since 1940, flattening and emptying all those vessels which are supposed to nourish us daily.

31. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christian Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 321. Except where noted, all other quotations from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory will be taken from Robert Hullot-Kentor’s more recent (and generally better) translation of the text. 32. Gregg M. Horowitz, “Art History and Autonomy,” in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 263–64.

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tion that those determinations do not in fact determine—or, rather, that they only underdetermine—its appearance. Autonomous work attempts to show that all potential constraints on its freedom, whether these inhere in cultural institutions, received conventions, or the very materials out of which the work itself is made, are not in actuality constraining; only in this way can the art object resist being assimilated to preformed categories of understanding. But, obviously, the constraints are also required to make their appearance in the work, as it is there that they must be confronted and negated. Every autonomous work is bound as a result to show what does not bind it, and in this way necessarily reveals its inability to escape entirely from the world it aims to transcend.33 Modern, autonomous art has a history, on this view, because it fails to be free and yet remains unreconciled to that failure. Thus, in Adorno’s account, “production develops as if the new work wanted to recover what the earlier work, in becoming concretized and therefore, as ever, limiting itself, had had to renounce.”34 This, as we have seen, is very much the way that early Cubism proceeded in the history of it recounted by “Collage.”35 Through the inclusion, first, of letters and numbers and, later, of sand and other materials that would lend it visible texture, the Cubist paintings of 1911 and 1912 called forth the literal surface of the canvas specifically as a means to its negation. If the ultimate impossibility of that task meant that every work was bound to a certain (ontological, rather than aesthetic) failure, it did nothing to discourage the production of new works

33. In his excellent essay “Art History and Autonomy,” pp. 273–74, Gregg Horowitz explicitly raises the question of what autonomous art looks like, and offers the following pertinent response: The traditional answer in the post-Kantian tradition of philosophical aesthetics is that it looks like freedom, an answer that has led to the idealist valorizations of aesthetic autonomy in Schiller and the young Nietzsche, Clement Greenberg at his worst, and Clive Bell at his best. However, . . . the proper answer is that autonomous art looks like the failure of freedom.

It must be said, however, that the work could not conceivably appear in any other way. “The totally objectivated artwork would congeal into a mere thing,” Adorno wrote; however, “if it altogether evaded objectification it would regress to an impotently powerless subjective impulse [something without substance or visibility] and so flounder in the empirical world” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], p. 175). 34. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 209. 35. It seems relevant here to note that Adorno invokes Picasso’s Cubism at a number of points within his Aesthetic Theory. Perhaps most directly related to the concerns of the present essay are the comments on p. 256, which discuss the papiers collés in relation to the presumed opposition between autonomous and social art. (“This dichotomization is false,” Adorno argues, “because it presents the two dynamically related elements as simple alternatives.”) Cubism is held up as the example of autonomy while, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Surrealism is made to stand for a social art: “But cubism itself revolted, in terms of its actual content [Inhalt; here Adorno seems to be referring specifically to the appropriated materials of collage], against the bourgeois idea of a gaplessly pure immanence of artworks. Conversely, important surrealists such as Max Ernst and André Masson, who refused to collude with the market and initially protested against the sphere of art itself, gradually turned toward formal principles, and Masson largely abandoned representation, as the idea of shock, which dissipates quickly in thematic material, was transformed into a technique of painting.”

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designedto takeup the struggle.36In the end, as Greenbergtells it, the accumulation of stenciling and textures threatened to overwhelmand therebycollapse the distinction between depicted and undepicted flatnesses that it had been the explicit purpose of those devices to produce. But it was at just this point, and presumably as a direct result of those earlier failures, that either Picasso or Braque-the question of priorityis still a matterof some dispute-hit on the idea of papier colle. To be sure, this new ploy raised the stakes considerably. The pieces of paper thatwere affixedquite tangiblyto the surfacedeclared that surface with an unprecedented literalness.The risk was even greater now that undepicted flatnesswould become "the main event of the picture,"effectively subsuming any and all implications of depth.37 The brilliance of the new medium, according to Greenberg, was that within the narrowingconfines of this opposition between literal surface and illusionisticdepth-and at the very momentwhen literalsurface seemed on the brink of becoming the only term- papier colle arrived at a solution in which illusionism was transformedbut therebypreserved, and in such a way as even to evince a certain priority.It is worth quoting Greenberg at some length on these matters,particularly as he sees them playingout in a specificwork: In the upper center of Braque's firstcollage, FruitDish [1912], a bunch of grapes is rendered withsuch conventionallyvivid sculptural effectsas to liftit practicallyoff the picture plane. The trompe-l'oeil illusion here is no longer closed withinparallel flatnesses,but seems to thrustthrough the surface of the drawingpaper and establish depth on topof it. Yet the violentimmediacy of the wallpaper stripspasted to the paper, and the only lesser immediacyof the block capitals that simulatewindow lettering, manage somehow to push the grape cluster back into place on the pictureplane so that it does not 'jump." At the same time, the wallpaper strips themselvesseem to be pushed into depth by the lines and patches of shading charcoaled upon them,and by theirplacing in relation to the block capitals; and these capitals seem in turnto be pushed back by theirplacing, and by contrastwith the corporealityof the woodgraining.Thus everypart and plane of the picture keeps changing place in relative depth with everyother part and plane; and it is as if the only stable relation leftamong the differentparts of the picture is the ambivalent and ambiguous one thateach has withthe surface.38

36. Here, too, Horowitzhas phrased mattersparticularly well: "It is ... the failureto win thatkeeps art in motion,keeps it unreconciled,thus battlingagainst the realm of externaldetermination, which itselfgrows more obdurate with each failure.Art, far fromdying of failure,would die of success" (Horowitz,"Art History and Autonomy,"p. 276). 37. "Collage,"p. 75. 38. Ibid., p. 76.

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One would be hard-pressed, it seems to me, to arrive at a description much better than this. It manages to convey not only the complexity of the visual experience afforded by Braque’s Fruit Dish, but also, in the quickening pace of its narrative, something of the excitement that a viewer in the grip of that experience is likely to feel. Just here, however, in Greenberg’s evident (and understandable) enthusiasm for the papiers collés, we begin to detect a subtle shift in “Collage,” away from the negative-dialectical argument with which the essay began toward something much more fully and affirmatively Hegelian. By the end of the essay, in fact, we will be asked to believe that the papiers collés managed to achieve, at last, what earlier works had not: “the seamless fusion of the decorative with the plastic,”39 which is to say, the over- coming or “sublation” of the opposition between literal and depicted flatnesses that, until this moment, had been presented as the driving tension behind the

39. Ibid., p. 81

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development of Cubist painting. The key to this reconciliation, Greenberg suggests, lies with papier collé’s potential for optical illusion. Of the works of 1912, he writes: Flatness may now monopolize everything, but it is a flatness become so ambiguous and expanded as to turn into illusion itself—at least an optical illusion if not, properly speaking, a pictorial one. Depicted, Cubist flatness is now almost completely assimilated to the literal, undepicted kind, but at the same time it reacts upon and largely transforms the undepicted kind—and it does so, moreover, without depriving the latter of its literalness; rather, it underpins and reinforces that literalness, re-creates it.40 There is a distinctly triumphalist tone to these passages, roughly of the sort that, in quest epics, typically marks the narrative climax. Here, as with those other epics, it also tends to encourage a backward glance, a brief retracing of the circuitous path leading to this point. From a retrospective vantage, however, the route suddenly appears very different than it had on the outbound journey, when the way forward seemed much more purely ad hoc, a matter of chance and opportunity. Now the contours of “Collage” appear to have resolved them- selves into a neatly ascending (Hegelian) spiral, whose line of development we might easily imagine Greenberg articulating as follows: In the first turn of events, Picasso and Braque coupled a quasi-Impressionist, decorative flatness with the sort of sculptural shading that had traditionally been the hallmark of pictorial illusion; the result was the depicted flatness of high Analytic Cubism (the paintings of, roughly, 1910 to 1912). In the next round, the continuity of that depicted flatness was tied to its literal counterpart—and the outcome this time was an optical illusionism that constantly seemed to displace the surface and remake it elsewhere.41 It would be left to the later papiers collés and, following them, to Gris’s paintings, only to liquidate the vestiges of sculptural shading that still clung to Braque’s Fruit Dish. In this way it could be made evident that the optical illusion of the collages might be produced without the aid of any pictorial illusion whatsoever— that the physical surface could be displaced and re-created out of shapes that were unimpeachably flat. Again, in the case of Gris’s paintings, it was, Greenberg argued, the prominence of their blacks that effected the desired result.

40. Ibid., p. 77. The corresponding passage in “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” is perhaps a little more direct in its presentation of the matter. With the papiers collés, we are told, “pictorial illusion begins to give way to what could be more properly called optical illusion” (Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, p. 64). 41. It might be said that Greenberg’s opticality functions here (and in other texts) much like absolute knowing does for Hegel. Certainly one interpretation of absolute knowing—the one held, for instance, by Adorno—is that it represents the moment when subjectivity, having at last assimilated all otherness, brings an end to dialectical history.

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The clearly and simply contoured solid black shapes on which Gris relied so much in these paintings represent fossilized shadows and fossilized patches of shading. All the value gradations are summed up in a single, ultimate value of flat, opaque black—a black that becomes a color as sonorous and pure as any spectrum color and that confers upon the silhouettes it fills an even greater weight than is possessed by the lighter-hued forms which these silhouettes are supposed to shade.42 In writing these sentences Greenberg presumably had in view something like the black chevron just right of center in the lower half of Gris’s Still Life; it does indeed appear to take off as an independent shape, advancing in front of even the lighter-colored “newspaper” (the bluish rectangle partially inscribed “Le Journal”), which, on a different level, it serves as shadow. Here again, as Greenberg said of the earlier papiers collés, “every part and plane of the picture keeps changing place with every other part and plane; and it is as if the only stable relation left among the different parts of the picture is the ambivalent and ambiguous one each has with the surface.” Because that ambiguity arises now within a painting devoid of sculptural modeling—and so upon a surface that would otherwise seem merely patterned and two-dimensional—Greenberg also claims that Gris’s work has successfully “transcended” the decorative: “transcended and transfigured” it into the “monumental unity” of the painting as a whole.43 Plainly, with this declaration of a “monumental unity,” the reworking of the essay’s initial, negative dialectic into a more fully Hegelian doctrine of affirmation and reconciliation is complete. Greenberg’s prose is seamless enough that, on a first reading, the labor of that reworking is not readily apparent. If, however, we can manage to resist succumbing to the rhetorical elegance of his argument, and so keep our eyes fixed squarely on the works in question, we are eventually bound to notice certain features of those works that were simply papered over in the later sections of “Collage.” Even Greenberg himself engaged in this sort of revision, with the footnote he added to the essay in 1972. There he admitted that Picasso and Braque had not abandoned sculptural shading soon after the invention of papier collé, as “Collage” had originally reported (and as the structure of its narrative seemed to demand): in fact, “Picasso and Braque continued to use discrete shading off and on well into 1914, and in Picasso’s case even longer.”44 A similar repression seems to have been involved in Greenberg’s analysis of Gris’s paintings. Anyone at all familiar with those works is likely to be given pause by the essay’s complete disregard of their “pointillist” passages, which are at least as prominent a feature as are the opaque blacks. They might even be seen to produce

42. Ibid., p. 82. 43. Ibid., p. 83. Specifically, Greenberg says, “And here, at last, the decorative is transcended and transfigured, as it had already been in Picasso’s, Braque’s and Léger’s art, in a monumental unity.” 44. Ibid., p. 82.

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a similar effect. They might be seen, that is, not as fossilized shading, perhaps, but as reified luminosity (something akin to Seurat’s Neo-Impressionism made even more patterned and systematic), whose frank two-dimensionality nonetheless refuses to adhere to the literal surface—or even to a single, consistent plane in depth.45 If Greenberg passed over these passages in silence, it was perhaps because they raised the specter of a decorativeness beyond all possibility of redemption or transcendence. To the extent that they pointedly recall the stippled wallpaper that, in 1914, Picasso pasted into several of his papiers collés, they allude to precisely the sort of “relatively trivial interior decoration” whose proliferation, according to Greenberg, had first set modernism in motion.46

45. Note, for example, the neck of the bottle in Gris’s Still Life: Its silhouette is articulated on the left by a field of green dots against a yellow ground, in the middle by an undifferentiated green, and at right by blue stippling on a green field. Even though it is the same green hue in all three cases—and even though, if we make ourselves focus exclusively on it, its continuity from one field to the next is plainly evident—each area, in fact, appears to separate itself from the others as an independent shape and to advance slightly forward of them, or else recede a little in depth. There is with these stippled areas, in other words, the same kind of spatial oscillation and ambiguity that Greenberg detailed in his account of the paintings’ “sonorous” blacks. 46. There are seven works in all that use this stippled wallpaper. For illustrations, see Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years 1907–1916, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1979), pp. 681, 683, 685, 686, 689, 793, and 799.

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Wallpaper in general was a standard element of Picasso’s collages, and it was so from the very beginning: for example, an ocher-and-yellow floral pattern appears prominently in what is probably his first papier collé, Guitar and Wineglass, from November of 1912. It is a striking fact—surely more than merely coincidental—that the artist’s insertion of such explicitly decorative elements into his Cubist collages followed almost immediately upon the very public insertion of Cubism into an explicitly decorative context. I am thinking of the Maison Cubiste, the suite of rooms modeling the interior of a bourgeois home that was part of the 1912 Salon d’Automne.47 Displaying furniture and wallpaper patterns by a group of young designers led by André Mare, the Maison also showcased the paintings of Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and many of the other so-called Salon Cubists. The participation of Gleizes and Metzinger seems particularly difficult to explain, given that they had argued in Du Cubisme—published while the Salon d’Automne was still open and receiving visitors—that their work was the very antithesis of decoration.48 It appears to have been the absence of any discernible Cubist influence upon the furnishings of Mare and his cohort that allowed Gleizes and Metzinger to rationalize their involvement with the project. The antidecorative diatribe of Du Cubisme was aimed specifically at the Art Nouveau belief that a painting should

47. The Salon of that year ran from October 1 until November 8. 48. “Many consider that decorative preoccupations must govern the spirit of the new painters. Undoubtedly they are ignorant of the most obvious signs which make decorative work the antithesis of the picture” (Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme [Paris: Figuière, 1912], translated in Robert Herbert, Modern Artists on Art [New York: Prentice-Hall, 1964], p. 5).

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harmonize with its surroundings. And Art Nouveau—or rather, a popularized, mass- produced version of it—was being widely marketed in the newly opened ateliers of the French department stores.49 If Au Printemps’s showrooms seemed to foretell a future in which paintings would take their place within a coordinated decorative ensemble (each work designed to harmonize with the furniture, and playing up some of its subtler hues), the more or less traditional décor of the Maison Cubiste could be seen to serve, on the contrary, as an offsetting frame, reinforcing the painting’s autonomy and integrity. For his part, Mare hoped that an alliance with Cubist painters and sculptors would give his designs a certain cachet, and sharply differentiate them from the mass-produced commodities marketed to the public through the department stores’ displays. But, of course, the whole enterprise was open to multiple interpretations. Even if it was intended to underline the integrity of the Cubist paintings hanging there, and to emphasize the qualitative differences between the artisanal tradition represented by Mare and the mass production of the department stores, the very resemblance of the Maison Cubiste to Au Printemps’s ateliers d’art threatened to scramble those distinctions. In many ways, it simply concretized the threat of art’s assimilation to interior decoration. Complicating the situation further was the fact that many avant-garde artists— from the Nabis to the Fauves, and including, on occasion, Cubists such as Gris himself 50—openly embraced the characterization of their work as “decorative.” Years after the fact, Matisse all but conceded that their unqualified acceptance of the term had been naive—or worse, actually complicitous with the marketing strategies of the French department stores: Finally, after the rediscovery of the emotional and decorative properties of line and color by modern artists, we have seen our department stores invaded by materials, decorated in medleys of color, without moderation, without meaning. . . . These odd medleys of color and these lines were very irritating to those who knew what was going on and to the artists who had to employ these different means for the development of their form.

Finally all the eccentricities of commercial art were accepted (an extra- ordinary thing); the public was very flexible and the salesman would take them in by saying, when showing the goods: “This is modern.”51

49. For a discussion of the Maison Cubiste within the history of the French decorative arts, see David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 169–79; and Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 79–102. 50. In 1921 Gris informed Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler that, the dealer’s protests to the contrary, his work was in fact accurately characterized as “decorative.” “Clearly it is decoration,” Gris wrote. “One need not be afraid of words when one knows what they signify, but all painting has always been decoration.” Cited in Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 123. 51. “Matisse’s Radio Interview: First Broadcast, 1942,” cited in Poggi, In Defiance of Painting, p. 140.

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As for Picasso, neither he nor Braque ever took up Matisse’s praise of the “decorative,” and, according to Kahnweiler, both were openly contemptuous of paintings made “to ‘adorn’ the wall.” From as early as 1907, Kahnweiler says, Picasso “perceived the danger of lowering his art to the level of ornament.”52 And yet, in the months and years immediately following the run of the Maison Cubiste, the artist regularly incorporated wallpaper fragments within his papiers collés. What’s more, in the case of the 1914 series, those fragments were ones that clearly pointed up the difficulty of distinguishing modernist art (certainly of the Neo-Impressionist variety) from “relatively trivial interior decoration.”53 In this context it seems crucial to note that the wallpapers of that series sometimes served—as they do in Pipe and Sheet Music—to duplicate the frame.54 Frames have traditionally provided the visible marker of a work’s autonomy, clearly demarcating the boundary between that work and everything else outside. But the frame’s own status is, for precisely that reason, ambiguous and contradictory. At once external to the painting and essential to its appearance as a thing apart, the frame both obviously belongs to the work and, just as evidently, doesn’t.55 Picasso’s wallpaper-framed collages seem to be making an analogous claim regarding the boundary—the all-important (in)distinction, as it were—between modern art and the merely decorative. And they encourage us to see his earlier wallpaper works in very much the same vein. In Greenberg’s history of Cubism, the invention of collage had marked an epochal moment, the moment, as he said, when the decorative surface of the work was at long last “transcended and transfigured,” dissolved into the purely subjective space of optical illusion. Of course, that history was dependent upon the repression of the commodified, mass-produced nature of many of the elements of Cubist collage. Unlike the collages themselves, Greenberg refused to admit even the potential presence of the literally and commercially decorative within the field of modern art. Our own attention to the specific materials of those collages now suggests a slightly different history, one in which the invention of papier collé is, however, no less epochal. Through its invention, we might say, the threat of the decorative—the possibility that modern painting might in fact be assimilated to decoration (or entertainment) pure and simple—was, at long last, openly acknowledged.56

52. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism (1916), trans. Henry Aronson (New York: Wittenborn, 1949), p. 7; cited in Rosalind Krauss, The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 181. 53. Tellingly, in the spring of 1914, just at the time that Picasso began working on this series, a serial- ized essay by André Mare appeared in Montjoie!, which advocated a return to primitive woodblock printing methods for wallpaper, and blamed modern mechanical techniques for a decline in the present quality of production. See Mare, “Le Papier peint,” Montjoie!, nos. 4, 5, and 6 (April, May, and June 1914). 54. There are a total of four collages from the spring of 1914 that employ wallpaper frames (Daix 683, 684, 685, and 787). Two of these—Pipe and Musical Score and Glass and Bottle of Bass—feature the stippled wallpaper pattern. 55. On the status of the frame and its implications for the autonomy of art, see Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), especially section II, “The Parergon,” 37ff. 56. On the notion, and the structure, of acknowledgment, see Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and

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I hasten to add that it was not, for all that, openly accepted. Just as earlier Cubist paintings had foregrounded their literal surface in a determined effort to negate it, so Picasso’s wallpaper collages seem to advertise their imbrication with the merely decorative precisely so that they might make crucial differences apparent.57 On this view, the project of the papiers collés is continuous with that of earlier, Analytic Cubism, except that, where those earlier works had taken it upon themselves to acknowledge (and negate) the physical fact of their material surface, the papiers collés also acknowledge the social fact of painting’s equivocal position in relation to the culture industry of late capitalism. They amount to the recognition that, if art does in fact cease to exist or to matter in this world, it will be less because it has reified into a mere object than because it has capitulated to a voracious subjectivity, seeking pleasure, demanding entertainment. We might compare Picasso’s use of wallpaper in this regard with his equally frequent employment of newspaper in the papiers collés. As Krauss has shown, newspaper was a material under considerable tension in the avant-garde world of 1912.58 It had been roundly condemned by Stéphane Mallarmé, whose Symbolist aesthetic and views on the autonomy of art clearly held a strong attraction for Picasso.59 Angered by the newspapers’ increasing commodification of literature— including their serialization of novels commissioned explicitly for that purpose—Mallarmé went on the offensive. He argued that, even apart from the quality of the writing it presented, the newspaper was vastly inferior to the book, in that its pages confronted the viewer with column after column of monotonous gray type. Furthermore, its composition was driven, he said, by hierarchies of power (which determined what would appear on the front page, what on the last); and, worst of all, it sacrificed the sensuous fold of the book to the unrelieved flatness of the open newsprint page.60

Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 238–66. 57. In saying this, I am largely agreeing with Christine Poggi, who has argued that Picasso’s and Braque’s papiers collés represent a “complex and paradoxical relation to mass culture,” in that they suggest simultaneously “a denial of the precious, fine art status of traditional works of art as well as an attempt to subvert the seemingly inevitable process by which art becomes a commodity in the modern world” (In Defiance of Painting, p. 128). To phrase things in terms of “denial,” however, sounds a distinctly false note for me; it might be better to say that the papiers collés effectively recognize that the distinctness (or “purity”) art was once able to take for granted is no longer tenable. It is what each work must demonstrate for itself, even as it acknowledges its entanglements with the extra-aesthetic. I would also argue that Picasso’s and Braque’s papiers collés are not identical in this regard (see note 66 below). 58. Krauss, “The Motivations of the Sign,” Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992), pp. 261–86. See also Poggi, In Defiance of Painting, p. 141ff. 59. On the relation between Picasso and Mallarmé, see David Cottington, “Cubism, Aestheticism, Modernism,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, pp. 58–72. 60. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le Livre, instrument spirituel,” in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945), pp. 378–82. See also Christine Poggi, “Mallarmé, Picasso, and the Newspaper as Commodity,” in The Yale Journal of Criticism 1, no. 1 (1987), pp. 133–51; and her revision of that argument in her book In Defiance of Painting.

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In the newspapers’ corner, by contrast, was Picasso’s friend Guillaume Apollinaire, who admired the papers for their ability to speak in a plurality of voices, and who, in his own heteroglossic poem “Zone,” embraced nearly all of commercially printed popular culture: You read the handbills, catalogues, posters that sing out loud and clear— That’s the morning’s poetry, and for prose there are the newspapers, There are tabloids lurid with police reports, Portraits of the great and a thousand assorted stories.61 The newspapers of Picasso’s papiers collés cannot be said to adhere to either of these positions. As Krauss has shown, they are not of a piece with Apollinaire’s unqualified acceptance, yet their very appearance within the collages places them at some remove from Mallarmé’s conviction that the newspaper could not possibly serve as a vehicle for genuine aesthetic experience. Rather, Picasso employed newspaper, but in such a way as to negate its most pernicious effects. The fragments within his collages are made to embody precisely “those precious aesthetic possibilities that Mallarmé had insisted were the exclusive prerogative of the book: the capacity to figure forth the fold as that metaphysical ‘turning’ of the page that opens the work of art onto the abyss or chasm of meaning; and the ability to transmute the gray drone of the marks on the page” into signifiers for light, transparency, and depth.62 That we are dealing with a determinate negation, and not some final sublation or transcendence, is made all too apparent by those scholars who, ignoring Cubism’s dialectical impulse, persist in reading the columns of type as if those passages were nothing more or other than the newspaper from and against which the work of art actually took shape.63 Understanding how the newspaper fragments function within Picasso’s papiers collés—and how that functioning ought to discourage us from reading the text or attributing its views to Picasso—should by no means prevent us, however, from recognizing the potential social and political significance of the works themselves. As Adorno argued, such significance is won specifically through the work’s autonomy, which is to say, its overt display of nonreconciliation.64

61. Cited in, and translated by, Krauss, “The Motivations of the Sign,” p. 277. Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Zone” seems like an explicit riposte to Mallarmé’s assertion that “le vers est partout dans la langue où il y a rythme, partout, excepté dans les affiches et à la quatrième page les journaux,” Oeuvres completes (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945), p. 867. 62. Krauss, “Motivations of the Sign,” pp. 281–82. 63. The most concerted effort in this regard is to be found in Patricia Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 121–42. See also Yve-Alain Bois’s “The Semiology of Cubism,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p. 203, where he aptly characterizes the “recourse to newspaper [as] a Mallarméan (or formalist) answer to Mallarmé’s disdain: even this product of modern industry can be deautomatized, deinstrumentalized, opacified, ‘poeticized.’” 64. It is worth noting that David Cottington has recently sanctioned a similar argument for the political significance of Mallarmé’s work, holding that Mallarmé’s prose poems constituted a “counter-

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Whether art becomes politically relevant or indifferent—an idle play or decorative frill of the system—depends on the extent to which art’s constructions and montages are at the same time de-montages, i.e., dismantlements that appropriate elements of reality by destroying them, thus freely shaping them into something else. The unity of the social criterion of art with the aesthetic one hinges on whether art is able to supercede empirical reality while at the same time concretizing its relation to that superceded reality. Art that succeeds in doing this has a prerogative: it may dismiss the question posed by political practitioners as to what it is up to and what its “message” is.65 What makes Adorno’s comments so thoroughly apposite to the present context is not simply their explanation of the antagonistic relationship between autonomous art and existent social formations, nor even their sugges- tion that the appropriate structural model for that relationship is to be found in collage or montage.66 The relevance of his comments lies also in their impli- cation that the “decorative” names but a “frill” or extension of the “system”—which is to say, work that is either a product of the culture industry or ready fodder for it. “If decoration can be said to be the specter that haunts modernist painting, then part of the latter’s formal mission is to find ways of using the decorative against itself.”67 This time the words are Clement Greenberg’s, and, although they were not written specifically as commentary on the development of Cubism and the advent of papier collé, they manage to serve nicely in that capacity nonetheless. In fact, they seem particularly apt to an understanding of Picasso’s wallpaper collages, which not only acknowledge the specter of the decorative, but confront that decorativeness in one of its most insidious forms: as the bland

discourse,” which turned the “language of dominant discourse against itself.” Ironically, however, Cottington—who has also sanctioned and amply documented an understanding of Picasso’s Cubism in relation to the aestheticism of Mallarmé—is unable to see the artist’s papiers collés as performing a similar negation. Instead he argues that their “pretensions to counter-discourse are compromised” by their “complicity” with “the aesthetic hierarchies of dominant culture.” This, it seems to me, is symptomatic of the fact that Cottington persistently identifies references to the “popular” in Picasso’s art with the working classes (rather than with commodity culture), and refuses to consider aesthetic experience as anything other than the purview of an economic elite. See Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), especially pp. 137–43. 65. For this passage, I have used the Lenhardt translation of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 362. The corresponding passage appears in the Hullot-Kentor translation on pp. 255–56. 66. Elsewhere in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno specifically states that the “act from which all montage derives” was Picasso’s use of newspaper in his papiers collés. See the Hullot-Kentor translation, p. 258. 67. Clement Greenberg, “Milton Avery” (1958), in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 200. It is, I think, worth noting that, whereas “Modernist Painting” had emphasized the need for painting to distinguish itself principally from the sculptural and the literary—that is, from “any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art”—here those concerns clearly take a backseat to the threat of the decorative. And what this suggests in turn is that

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prettiness of bourgeois interior decor.68 That these collages are also “de-collages,” turning the decorative against itself, is readily seen, for example, in Guitar and Wineglass. Around the periphery of that work the wallpaper represents nothing other than wallpaper itself: a flat, continuous background against which the still life elements of the composition are arrayed. But the section just beneath the sound hole of the guitar seems drawn forward (precisely by its relation to that overlaid “hole”), where it is reconstituted as the guitar’s surface and so made to reside, at least momentarily, on a completely different plane in depth. It is, of course, only a tentative move, an opening salvo. Yet still it seems right to declare: la bataille s’est engagé[e]. Over the next eighteen months Picasso’s means would become progressively more sophisticated, as he discovered ever new ways to dissolve the wallpaper’s opacity or displace its surface in depth. In Pipe and Sheet Music, for example, from the spring of 1914, the stippled mauve wallpaper lends itself to at least three contradictory interpretations, each one suggesting a radically different spatial configuration for the elements of the picture as a whole. Like so many other Cubist still lifes, this one sets up and exploits what Christine Poggi has described as a willful confusion between table and tableau.69 The brown rectangle at the center of the composition asks to be read, in one light, as a tabletop—freed from both gravity and perspective, but nonetheless supporting the pipe and the pages laid beneath it, and casting a heavy shadow on the floor. In another light, however, that rectangle appears simply as the vertical plane of the picture proper; in this reading the mauve wallpaper reverts back from its earlier designation as the shadowy surround of the table (the space of traditional easel painting), and becomes again simply wallpaper, or at least the matte surface on which the small collaged still life is mounted. And still there is a third possibility. Long ago Kahnweiler made the suggestion—more recently elaborated by Krauss—that the work is also capable of producing the illusion that it is not a picture frame that we are looking into, but rather the ornate frame of a mirror.70 At such moments the wallpaper continues to designate a flat, opaque surface, but it is now a surface dis- placed to the far side of the room—the wall behind our backs—with the result that the work acquires an almost Meninas-like spatial complexity.

modernist painting was always driven by its dialectical opposition to decoration, but—because that threat was too dire—the accompanying anxiety was constantly displaced onto the safer encroachments of literature and sculpture. In this way it became possible to reconstrue the prospect of painting’s failure as still a failure within the realm of the aesthetic, and so to imagine that successful paintings yet remained completely sealed off from the insidiousness of “decoration.” On such matters as they pertain to Michael Fried’s notion of “theatricality,” see Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself, pp. 9–10. 68. It seems to me a striking fact that Picasso’s use of patterned wallpaper is much more extensive than Braque’s. Braque’s preference was for faux bois papers that raised questions of representation and similitude, but carried few of the social and aesthetic implications of Picasso’s chosen materials. 69. See Poggi, “Frames of Reference: Table and Tableau in Picasso’s Collages and Constructions,” in In Defiance of Painting, pp. 58–89. 70. See Krauss, The Picasso Papers, p. 161ff.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320826452 by guest on 02 October 2021 Picasso. Guitar and Wine Glass. 1912. © 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Collection of the McNay Art Museum, Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay.

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It seems important here to insist that, although optical illusion plays a role in this experience of the collage, and so also in the negation of the wallpaper’s unambiguous planarity, illusion per se does not appear to be the main goal of the work. It is but one of the means employed to undo the certainties of the wallpaper—to turn its consistently repetitive surface into a kind of arbitrary sign, which, because of that arbitrariness, lends itself to various conflicting readings, as a sort of multidimensional “pun.” We might describe Picasso’s papiers collés in general as working to negate not just the literal flatness of the materials they employ, but also the banality of those materials. In the case of the wallpaper collages the material in question is superficial, ingratiating, monotonous: the kind of surface whose only function is to please, and which asks for nothing more than our inattention. If we find Picasso’s collages compelling, it will be because of the way that they are able to make those materials over, by contrast, into works of surprising depth and difficulty. And, of course, “by contrast” should be emphasized here, since the process is driven by a dialectic of negation. In fact, Adorno’s account of art’s negative-dialectical relation to society at large is perhaps nowhere better seen than in Picasso’s wallpaper collages. The unrelieved repeti- tiveness of the wallpaper patterning offers an experience that is a perfect example of perceptions conforming to preestablished categories of understanding. As the designs themselves affect no change in the pattern of our thought, they are nothing more than “idle play,” a “decorative frill of the system.” But Picasso’s collages—the successful ones, at least—by demonstrating their nonreconciliation to the ineluctable flatness and banality of the wallpapers are able to achieve some measure of autonomy. They seem to cut themselves out from the prefabricated world, the world as it already exists, and to which, in some sense, they are obviously still attached.71 If this is not, ultimately, the argument that Greenberg made for Picasso’s papiers collés, it remains the case that it is an argument we are unlikely to have been able to formulate without him. Greenberg’s “Collage” opens with a clear articulation of the negative-dialectical workings of Cubism—albeit without

71. In her recent book The Picasso Papers, Rosalind Krauss discusses several of Picasso’s wallpaper collages in terms that have substantial overlap with my analysis of those works here; indeed Krauss’s text has informed my understanding of the papiers collés considerably. Her insistence that the relation between modern art and the decorative be seen as dialectical is an idea that I have obviously taken very much to heart. But her suggestion that we understand that dialectic on the model of “reaction for- mation”—and that Pipe and Sheet Music represents one of the earliest manifestations of that condition in Picasso’s art—does not seem quite adequate either to registering the pervasiveness of the decorative’s threat, or to imagining what a “healthy” response to it might be. (If every appearance of decoration in Picasso’s work is to be diagnosed as a case of reaction formation, we would have little choice but to believe that his best course would have been a more thorough repression.) I prefer to think of the papiers collés under the model of acknowledgment: the collages openly acknowledging the presence of the decorative in order that its worst qualities and consequences might be negated. Of course, this still leaves open the possibility that the attempted negation will be unsuccessful and that the work in question, despite any and all intentions to the contrary, will appear merely and simply decorative. In those cases, I concede, the model of reaction formation has a certain applicability.

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couching the discussion in precisely those terms. (In general Greenberg tends to avoid theoretical terminology in favor of descriptive language that, in its best moments, is closely aligned to the material specificities of the works in question.72) The one theoretical or philosophical term that Greenberg does use, and insist upon, is “self-criticism.” He both identifies artistic modernism with “a self-critical tendency” and warns that activities unable to avail themselves of such self-criticism are those most likely to be assimilated to entertainment pure and simple. Phrased in this way—and in view of our discussion of the negative dialectic at work in “Collage”—Greenberg’s modernist “self-criticism” appears closely related to what Adorno referred to as art’s autonomy, its manifestly oppositional relation to society at large. Self-criticism might be regarded, then, as yet another name for that dialectical process through which art continues to make and preserve a place for itself in the modern world. It is self-critical only to the extent that the works involved genuinely place themselves at stake and hold themselves in that condition: assuming neither art’s inviolability nor, of course, its simple nonexistence.73 And those works will be successful in turn only to the extent that they are able to distinguish themselves from other kinds of objects of cultural production—to the extent that they make some critical difference visible. That art cannot, in the end, completely escape its resemblance to and imbrication with those other cultural products also condemns it, as we have seen, to a certain failure. But it is just this failure that generates a history for art—which means that works can only be produced or understood in relation to that history, and to the particular concrete works within it that make a claim on us as art. For me at least, much of what makes Picasso’s papiers collés so compelling is their difficult, dialectical relation to the earlier history of Cubism as that history is articulated by Greenberg in his essay on collage. And while it may be true that that essay misses the full significance of the papiers collés through its refusal to engage with the particularities of the materials they employ, it is also true that art history stands open to a similar accusation in regard to “Collage.” The specificity of its argument, its nuance, has been repeatedly disregarded in favor of generalities and preconceptions. Admittedly, Greenberg himself, especially in “Modernist

72. In its worst moments, Greenberg’s writing becomes disconnected from the works he is purportedly describing and settles into generalities and preconceptions. The discussion of the papiers collés in the latter half of “Collage” might be taken as a case in point. By totally failing to register the nature of the materials employed, so that it might emphasize instead their dissolve into optical illusion, Greenberg’s essay very much follows the form of the Hegelian dialectic; this, as Adorno complained, inevitably collapsed the distinction between subject and object at the expense of the latter. If Adorno’s negative dialectic was meant to correct for the “too-ready and too-complete erasure of the object” in Hegel’s philosophy, then the present essay might be said to attempt a similar recuperation of the materiality of the papiers collés in “Collage.” On the relation of subject and object in Adorno’s aesthetic theory, see Tom Huhn, “Kant, Adorno, and the Social Opacity of the Aesthetic,” in Huhn and Zuidervaart, The Semblance of Subjectivity, pp. 237–57. 73. This is a paraphrase of Stephen Melville’s description of “radical self-criticism”; see Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself, p. 16.

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Painting,” is guilty of this same charge—so that perhaps the primary lesson to be drawn is about the sheer difficulty of keeping generalities and preconceptions at bay.74 Adorno once wrote that progress (by which he meant simply the way forward to something new, for the intellectual or critic, no less than for the artist) was “nothing else but persistently grasping the material at the most advanced level of its historical dialectic.”75 Again, it might be said that this is precisely what Greenberg failed to do in his discussion of Picasso’s papiers collés. Yet what strikes me as the much more interesting fact is that, when those papiers collés are placed alongside “Collage,” the two, in effect, grasp one another, revealing the historical dialectic at work—at the most advanced level—in their respective material. My own paper has largely been an effort to articulate that phenomenon—and so to explain in the process the nature of my own particular attachment to “Collage.”

74. In fact it seems to me that the dialectical struggle narrated in “Collage,” against an apparently inexorable flattening, has an “unhappy” correlate in the relation of the three closely related essays, “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” (1958), “Collage” (1959), and “Modernist Painting” (1960). The greater depth of the argument of “Collage” (a depth won through the recognition of how literal flatness might be turned dialectically against itself) is largely drained away in “Modernist Painting”; and that loss is at least in part the result of Greenberg’s succumbing to the illusion of transcendence that had first been raised in “Collage.” 75. Adorno, “Reaktion and Fortschritt,” (1930), Moments Musicaux: Neugedruckte Aufsätze, 1928 bis 1962 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), pp. 153–54; cited and translated by Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 50.

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