Class 5: The Multiple Image A. Pablo’s Music 1. Title Slide 1 (Picasso: Brick Factory at Tortosa, 1909, Hermitage) 2. Charlus: “Viens, poupoule” 3. Picasso: Moulin Rouge and Moulin de la Galette I threw that in to give us a rousing start. It is a French music-hall song of around 1900, about a working- class Parisian taking his wife to see a show. Last week, I showed you some pictures of night life by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) and others, and wondered what kind of music they might have heard, so I looked it up. The pictures are paintings of Paris night spots made by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) in 1900 and 1901, just after he came to Paris. He is my featured artist of the day, though I want to look at him over the next two decades. 4. Picassso: Old Guitarist (1904, Chicago) and Three Musicians (1921, Met) Here are two well-known paintings of his that also have to do with music. The Old Guitarist (1904, Chicago) is from his so-called “blue period”; the Three Musicians (1921, NY Met) is from the postwar- period. Both are more approachable than much of the work that came in between, though their styles are quite different: one somewhat realistic, the other clearly not so. But can you find anything they might have in common? Primarily, I would say, the extreme flattening of the picture plane, which is something we have seen building up in several of the recent classes. 5. Picasso: Girl with a Mandolin (1910, MoMA) and other paintings How did Picasso get from one to the other? Here are three pictures that come in between the other two: Girl with a Mandolin (1910), The Guitarist (1911), and Violin (1912); I chose them to keep up my musical theme; I’ll show them larger later. All three are what a normal art-lover would call Cubist, which is—in a very general sense—my main theme today. But they are different. The Girl with a Mandolin is quite recognizable as what the title says; she even has something of a personality, and a real name, Fanny Tellier. In The Guitarist, you would need to be told that this is a person playing an instrument; it is significant that this is equally often catalogued as The Mandolinist. There is no human figure, so far as I know, in The Violin; it is simply an arrangement of slightly overlapping flat shapes, several of which make reference to the Violin of the title. 6. All five Picasso pictures together. Put them all together on a single slide, and you see that Picasso enters into a very special phase around 1910 through 1912. He was not alone in this; his friend Georges Braque (1882–1963) was painting right along beside him—“yoked together like two mountaineers,” as he later said—and their styles at the time — 1 — were virtually indistinguishable; in some ways Braque was even in the lead. I have certainly no intention in this class of treating them separately. But I want to make two points: 1. This phase of pure Cubism, Analytical Cubism as it’s called, was very short—1910 to 1912 or thereabouts—though ripples from it are still being felt today. 2. While the path through Cubism taken by Picasso and Braque plots the main course of the movement, there were numerous other artists and art movements that intersected with it briefly or moved along a tangential trajectory, and still more who branched off in other directions later. In today’s class, I hope to map the mainstream of Cubism fairly coherently. But I don’t want this to become just another art history class, especially when its topic is so challenging. To me, the most interesting thing about Cubism, just as it was for Impressionism a generation or two earlier, is the possibilities it offered to artists working in other styles and even other media. As Peter Gay, one of the main authors I have read in preparation for this course, said: “All of modernist painting drew dividends from the dismemberment that the Cubists were visiting on their subject matter; it was like a license granted artists to reassert their high status in a striking variety of ways.” So I will follow what I am calling Picasso’s Path with a number of Excursions and Intersections, involving poetry, music, and dance, as well as the visual arts. And I will occasionally interrupt my account of Picasso’s journey to offer short Detours into some other medium—think of my music-hall opening as the first of these. B. Picasso’s Path 7. Picasso: Au lapin agile (1905), with Cézanne: Mardi Gras Still on the theme of music and night-spots, here is another fairly early Picasso: a Harlequin clown. We have already seen his use of the white-face clown in the poster from 1900 I used as the first slide in the first class. Admittedly, I can easily see the influence of Toulouse-Lautrec in the subject and the painting of the woman, but there is another influence, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). Look at the treatment of the face and hands, and also how the implied perspective of the counter is immediately denied by pulling the figures forward into the flat plane. 8. Cézanne: Boy in a Red Waistcoat (1890, NGA DC), with detail Or take Cézanne’s Boy in a Red Waistcoat (1890) down the road in the National Gallery. Picasso was fascinated by Cézanne, not least by his handling of paint. Look at the way the surface is broken up on the front of the boy’s pants or on the wall to his right, and think of the similar break-up in Cubist pictures. And look at the curtain: the fullness of the folds suggests depth, and yet the multiplication of curtains has the opposite effect, of flattening up the background so that the boy almost seems a part of it. Cubism will make much use of similar push-pull effects, of depth both suggested and denied. — 2 — 9. Cézanne: Mont Sainte-Victoire from Bibémus Quarry (1897, Baltimore BMA) 10. — the above with detail of Mont Sainte-Victoire (c.1906, NY Met) Perhaps you know this landscape from 1897; it is right here in the Baltimore Museum of Art: Mont Sainte-Victoire from Bibémus Quarry from 1897. There was a big retrospective of Cézanne’s work in 1904, and the younger generation saw and marveled. Now we get the flattening of the picture plane more than ever: the distant mountain is pulled up and towards you; even the sky does not recede, as skies normally do. And everything is united by having a similar paint texture of little overlapping planes. This gets even more marked in Cézanne’s very late works, as this detail from one of his last versions of the subject, now in the Met, should show. 11. Braque: Houses at L’Estaque (1908, Lille), with Cézanne detail Here is a picture by Braque made down in Cézanne country when the new Cubist style was just beginning to brew. Picasso was doing something similar, but Braque’s landscapes most clearly show the debt to Cézanne. What he has done, in effect, is to take the hints of houses among the trees in the foreground of one of the older painter’s landscapes, blow them up, compress them, and turn them into a geometry that is both more solid and less naturalistic than the original. 12. Picasso: Les demoiselles d’Avignon, earlier fragments But how did Braque get into this? I have got to go back a year to trace another force that shaped the Cubist style. In May of 1907, Picasso began work on a large canvas that he kept strictly hidden in his studio. Now known as Les demoiselles d’Avignon (the Ladies of Avignon), it in fact referred to five prostitutes from a brothel in Barcelona; here is a fragment, showing two of the ladies and most of a third; I will reveal the rest in a moment. The subject may have had something to do with Picasso’s fear of death generally, and of syphilis specifically—and he had certainly not practiced much continence in his own life! Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) had died of the disease in Tahiti only a few years before, and Picasso was fascinated by what he saw as the occult symbolism in his art. Much later, Picasso would describe his own painting as “his first exorcism.” 13. Gauguin: Oviri (Death), 1894, Paris Orsay, with African masks One day in June, Picasso takes a break, and goes to visit the sculpture museum at the Trocadéro. On impulse on his way out, he ventures into the Ethnographic Museum next door and is struck by a display of African masks. It is as though he had been handed powerful talismans, the raw material of magic. On his return to Montmartre, he sets feverishly to work. As one witness described it, “His eyes widen, his nostrils flare, he frowns, he attacks the canvas like a picador sticking a bull.” He replaces the heads of two of the Ladies with African masks, he greatly alters the modeling of the standing figure at the right, and for the fifth figure, in the lower right corner, he does something that nobody has ever tried before. 14. Picasso: Les demoiselles d’Avignon, transformation (1907, NY MoMA) Picasso allows selected friends to come and see it. Most think he had gone mad, even Georges Braque. But Braque comes back again and again to study it, then goes to look again at Cézanne, then goes down — 3 — south the paint landscapes like the one we’ve just seen, and when he comes back, he discovers that he and Picasso are now very much on the same page, and the page is a totally new one.