Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-To-Reel Collection “Cubism As Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976

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Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976

FEMALE 1 Yup. This goes around your neck. And just figure out what we’re going to do about it.

ROBERT ROSENBLUM (inaudible)

FEMALE 1 [Mod?]. All right.

ROBERT ROSENBLUM (inaudible).

FEMALE 1 That’s really it — wait —

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Yeah. Because I’m getting sort of —

FEMALE 1 Let’s have a — a reading on the sound levels, please?

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Does this sound like the right volume? Can everyone hear me? Fore and aft, front and back, side to side? [00:01:00]

FEMALE 2 Good evening and welcome. Robert Rosenblum’s extraordinarily wide-ranging contributions to our understanding of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century art are far too extensive to be even cursorily summarized here. They are characterized, on the one hand, by formidable erudition, and on the other, by exceptional, and seemingly effortless, lucidity. Most striking of all, perhaps, is their breadth of view. They force one to look back at unsuspected sources for an artist’s style, and forward to often unexpected consequences of his influence. In his book on cubism, for instance, Robert Rosenblum dealt not only with that style itself, but with its assimilation and reflection in the work of Chagall, Klee, Malevich, Marc, and others. In Transformations, [00:02:00] he dealt not only with the virtually unchartered and continually changing notion of Neoclassical style, but also made connections between the art of Blake and Braque, Ankha, and Matisse, and Flaxman, and the later masters of abstraction.

In his most recent book, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, Mr. Rosenblum takes a strikingly original and even — in his words — “eccentric northern route” and poses a fundamental challenge to traditional conceptions of the entire history of modern painting.

In the mid-1960s, Robert Rosenblum was the first to probe and elucidate the complex wit and humor that lay behind the use of lettering in cubist collage. And at about the same time, he was also one of the first to recognize the importance of pop art and to carefully define the characteristics [00:03:00] of its style. It’s singularly appropriate, therefore, that he, with his uncanny ability to make unexpected connections, would choose to speak today on cubism as pop

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 art. It’s with special anticipation and pleasure that I welcome and introduce Robert Rosenblum. (applause)

ROBERT ROSENBLUM Well, I’ll have to try to live up to that, but I can do it at least nominally by talking about the subject announced in my title, “Cubism as Pop Art,” which I hope is [00:04:00] a surprising juxtaposition. And I will try to defend by, to begin with, some sweeping generalizations.

The first generalization occurred in this building about four years ago. I think it was in 1972 when the Guggenheim Museum had an exhibition of Nero, except that it was a Nero exhibition, the likes of which no one had ever seen or proposed before. Namely, it dealt exclusively with works of the ’20s and the ’60s in Nero’s oeuvres. And suddenly, one had a curious déjà-vu feeling about Nero, namely, that, at times, as in pictures like this one on the right [slide] he could even anticipate, as the show demonstrated, [00:05:00] the Color Field painting of the 1960s, which I exemplify in the Olitski on the left. The generalization I have in mind is an old one — I think T.S. Eliot wrote about it — which has to do with the fact that all new works of art drastically change — especially if they’re important works of art — our perceptions of the past that, again, can be exemplified in the way that, say, Frank Stella — sticking to the ’60s, which is where pop art is going to be located — that Frank Stella changed our views of the history of abstract painting.

For instance, the Delaunay that you see on the right -– and there are better examples along the ramps upstairs -– is a Delaunay of the 1930s, and it’s the kind of picture that probably, until the 1960s, was rather undervalued in favor of his early work. [00:06:00] But with the advent of artists like Stella, Hard-edge, color abstraction, and so on, in the ’60s, these pictures of the ’30s suddenly began to have a fresh luster. They looked newly accessible, and they looked like works which somehow provided support for a newly constructed genealogical table in the history of twentieth-century art.

The same thing, needless to say, occurred in the aspects of new minimal styles of the 1960s, so that suddenly -– in looking at works like these, say the Tony Smith sculpture, the cube, Die, on the left, of ’62, or a Don Judd, on the right, of 1968. In looking at these things, suddenly we wanted to chart a new ancestral table for the early evolution of twentieth-century art and, [00:07:00], well, for one thing, even Josef Albers, in the 1950s, began to loom a little larger as a sort of father figure, not to mention the fact that the later 1960s suddenly saw a whole flurry of research, interest, appreciation in the works of Malevich, which you see exemplified on the right, in a work — a black square on a white ground — whose dating is still a vexed issue, but is really thanks, I would say to the appearance of minimal styles in the ’60s that we can look with enthusiasm, interest, freshness, and so on, at these earlier twentieth-century prototypes.

The same general point can be made in a confrontation like this, the Oldenburg, Soft Toilet, on the left, raises all sorts of questions [00:08:00] and it looked, to be sure, quite insolent, in the mid-’60s. But among the questions it raised, it was, again, some sort of ancestral table in earlier twentieth-century art, and lo and behold, among other people, the Salvador Dali, who is usually held in contempt with –- by serious-minded critics and historians – Salvador Dali seemed to be appropriate as artist who, before Oldenburg, began to make malleable, mushy, pliable, hard

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 objects like the famous soft, Camembert-like watches in The Persistence of Memory, or looked at from yet another point of view, that of how to astonish the bourgeoisie, the Oldenburg toilet might be thought of in conjunction with certain Dada insolence such as the famous Duchamp Fountain, the urinal on its side, that [00:09:00] was proposed at an exhibition in this –- on this side of the Atlantic in 1917.

New art always makes us look at old art, and if it’s good new art, or important new art, it makes us look at it in a very, very different way. I would say, for instance, that the appearance of Lichtenstein in the ’60s, once we got used to him, made us reconsider the style and the sources of Seurat, especially in his late work, of which I show you a detail out of The Circus on the right. Recent research, for instance, on Seurat has indicated that he was much influenced by the techniques of color reproduction of the 1880s, techniques of chromolithography and the use of, sort of, mass-produced blue, yellow, red dots in Seurat of [00:10:00] the period, 1889, ’90, ’91, suddenly seems to strike a shock of chord recognition in the use of Ben-Day Dots in the art of Lichtenstein of the ’60s, just as the dependence on the rather grotesque caricatures of the human form, such as you see in the clown head over here, suddenly has parallels in Lichtenstein’s adaptation of similar humanoid creatures from comic strips and the like.

Again, even the work of Jasper Johns in the late ’50s and early ’60s, begin suddenly to reveal unexpected resonances in the very early twentieth century, especially within the domain of Analytic cubism. And the Johns Map on the left — with its fusion of shuffled graded planes [00:11:00] moving from dark to light, with the stenciled letters weaving in and out of these complicated spaces — suddenly this begins to look different in the context of an analytic cubist picture by Picasso, such as the 1912 work you see on your right. And that really brings us now to the –- have I lost my connection here? Well, maybe I’ll holler for them.

That brings us to the proper subject of this lecture, which is really to explore a — somewhat more closely –- connections that I would like to find, or consider, between cubism and pop art. The general attitude toward cubism — the general preconception or prejudice about it — is that it is a [00:12:00] highly cerebral, ivory tower sort of art that has to do with the architecture of picture-making, and that seems to have been conceived and executed in a kind of ivory tower vacuum, rather remote from the contemporary world of Paris, where it was invented between, say, 1908 and ’12. That image is certainly borne out, underlined by many cubist works, such as the ravishingly intellectual, sort of conceptual, art piece that you have on the right, an analytic cubist drawing of 1910, or its rather, more, full realization in terms of this full length nude by — recently acquired by — the National Gallery in Washington. Looking at pictures like this, one can really attest to that intellectual character of cubism that seemed to be exclusively [00:13:00] concerned with questions of aesthetics, with questions of the formal manipulation of planes in the shallowest of spaces.

May I have the next, please? Yes, I don’t know, maybe that –- if that could be repaired, or whether I’ve done something. Otherwise, I guess we can just do it vocally. The picture on the right, which we, in New York, all know from the Museum of Modern Art, begins, however, to add another level, another element, another mix in this cerebral world of cubism that seems to be so pure, so unadulterated, until about 1911. The painting on the right, when we refer to it, we

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 call Ma Jolie, and Picasso helpfully entitles it on the bottom, as if he were offering us a kind of museum plaque that is going to identify the name of the picture.

[00:14:00] Thanks to the growing curiosity about the sources of cubist art, the meaning of words, the milieu in Paris that created these images — thanks to this, we have learned, through all kinds of research in the last 10, 15 years, that those letters are, by no means, innocent, and that they have any number of meanings, one of which has to do with the, well, the affectionate name that Picasso then gave his mistress, Ma Jolie — “My Pretty One” — but it also, it turns out, has to do with a refrain, a phrase from a very, very popular Parisian song of the time, which old French men, to this day in the 1970s can still recall. It was one of the top 10 around 1911. Therefore, if you stop to think about what the picture must have looked like then [00:15:00] in 1911, there must have been a kind of distressing disjunction between this, sort of, crazy labyrinth invented by some very strange artist, and the sudden appearance of the most grossly popular public tune, rather, as if, say, the title of the Beatles song, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” suddenly appeared in the middle of an early Frank Stella.

The -– next, please -– in fact, at just about this juncture in the history of cubism, 1911, ’12-ish, there suddenly seems to be an absolute assault of words, of letters, of signs that seem to pollute, as it were, the very pure air of earlier cubism with this absorption of what is [00:16:00] specifically urban about modern visual experience. The Picasso on the left is an example of the sort of scrambled word puzzles that we find in these years, 1911-12, just an entire barrage of fragments of signs, letters, and so on. And even when we are working in a more modest scale, just a little table still life, as in the drawing by Juan Gris on the right, we can suddenly see what is specifically modern about Paris that is introduced into the painting. For instance, the match striker over here — a very modern object — says, among other things, that is an ad for the aperitif Dubonnet, just a bit of popular commercial advertising of a kind of ad that you can still see in the Paris subway, where the Dubonnet ads come in three syllables, [00:17:00] DU-BON- NET, which is reflected in the construction of the ad over here.

Could we have the next, please? We can begin to see in more modest drawings by Picasso, the influx of this kind of modern urban imagery. And I propose this pair of drawings that Picasso executed in the summer of 1912. There’s an inscription there, it’s the ninth of August 1912, while he was in Marseille, visiting the city from the country. These are suddenly pictures that almost offer a kind of reprise of the, sort of, stroller mentality of the Impressionists in the 1870s, sort of moving along the streets, looking at café tables, looking, for instance at a café over here with an awning that says “appellatif” — [00:18:00] pedestrians, horses, that scaffolding of buildings are something that really is a kind of tourist’s eye view of the city of Marseille, which even includes a reference to the street sign, La Canebière, which is the main drag in Marseille leading right into the port, which is also represented by the anchor, which you can see in the middle of the scaffolding up there. These are pictures that, suddenly, in the context of these strange linear hieroglyphs, offer little spots of the most vivid and, one hastens to add, the most vulgar sort of pop reality street signs, or words, the names of beers, like that over there, Munich Beer –- bière — and it is exactly the kind of veneration and absorption of this kind of urban imagery [00:19:00], that we can read about in Apollinaire’s famous poem of 1913 called “Zone,” which is really a, sort of, paean of praise to the modern city. Let me just read you Appollinaire’s inventory of the things that he loves. I quote: “prospectuses, catalogs, posters, newspapers and

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 cheap detective stories, inscriptions on walls, street signs, nameplates, notices,” in fact, almost all of the things that one can find in the cubist painting of the period 1912 to ’14.

May we have the next, please? One should remember that the great cities of Europe in the early twentieth century, then, as now -– perhaps even a little more — were absolutely covered with posters. And this can be topically [00:20:00] demonstrated in a Fauve [Fauvist?] painting by Dufy of 1906, which is a picture which you see on the left of [Stroller’s?] –- à Trouville — at the French resort, on the northern coast. And the picture is really almost entirely about the rendering of the vivid colors, the sort of geometric patterns of the mass-produced shapes, lettering, and so on, of the posters that decorate the street. That is a curious sensibility, a curious sort of thing to record, and it is one that at Trouville could be multiplied ad infinitum in terms of a great city like Paris, which was absolutely a living collage in the early twentieth century.

The cubists themselves immediately began to see this after 1911-12, [00:20:00] and, for one thing, they included in their works — as in the case of the Braque of the 1913 on the right — posters of the most up-to-date kinds of things that had to do with the modern world. This one, for instance, is a cinema poster. Suddenly a whole list of what you could see at the movies in Paris that week, something which seems perhaps very remote to us in the 1970s because this is just the silent films. This is 1913, but which — put yourself in the shoes of somebody in 1913 — must have looked grossly impudent, in terms of sullying the pure air of art with something as commercial as ads, as a schedule of the local movies.

Next, please. One of the most amusing [00:22:00] and telling examples of this injection of posters, ads, all kinds of commercial imagery into cubism, can be seen in these two Picasso’s of 1912, which reflect, quite directly, the look of a, sort of, schematic diagrams that you advertise: new wrap, factory-made products. These both contain ads for that object, K-U-B, Kub, including the price over here, 10 centimes, along with other billboard imagery up on the -– in the upper right hand corner in that Picasso. And this is, in fact, an ad for a bouillon cube, which was called K-U-B, Kub, and which was usually advertised in terms of a kind of schematic diagram — [00:23:00] plain, solid geometry that represents a cube, the form of the bouillon cube itself. This was clearly appealing to Picasso, who saw the wit in the combination of that ad and the name of the movement he had invented. And he quickly absorbed it, for a multitude of reasons, being usually as complicated and multi-leveled as he was, into these cubist pictures.

I can –- can we have the next, please? On the right, I can, incidentally, show you one relic of this, although there are some that actually have the same diagram. There is a little tin for bouillon cubes, in which the product is still preserved in three dimensions into the 1970s.

Could we have the next, please, left and right? [00:24:00] And even Piet Mondrian, who was not exactly famous for his sense of humor, was fascinated, it would seem, by this evidence, with the juxtaposition of something as gross as an ad for bouillon cubes, which you could see out of his Montparnasse window in the winter of 1912 — that, the combination of that and the name of the famous Parisian movement, cubism. In this drawing over here on the left, I think you can just make out there’s a liqueur up here, and over here, you can just make out the letters K-U-B, an ad for the bouillon cube, which he dutifully records in the most empirical, a most Impressionist window view way. Later on, this is all annihilated, in terms of a more, [00:25:00] spiritual goal,

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 but it’s interesting to see, that you can just make out the ghosts of the letters K-U-B in the lower right quadrant of that now, almost, but not quite, abstract painting.

Can we have the next, please? Another point I’d like to introduce here about the relationship of cubism to the new facts of city life, of Paris life, has to do with the intrusion of all kinds of foreign bodies into the, again, hitherto pure realm of art, which only had to do with the drawing and oil painting. As we all know, in sort of a textbook catechism fashion — and things like that are always suspect — this is supposed to be the first [00:26:00] Picasso collage, or first cubist collage, presumably executed in May of 1912. There are endless things to say about it, but what I would like to say tonight, in this context, is that something more perhaps should be said about exactly what it is that Picasso has intruded upon the sacrosanct domain of oil painting and drawing, by way of a foreign body, by way of a new material. What has always been identified as imitation chair caning takes up the ground of this collage painting/drawing, and my point this evening is that this is a curious choice, because it suddenly seems to select from a world of machine-made fabrics, textiles, designs, and so on, as something which not only has all kinds of complicated metaphysical [00:27:00] implications — true or false, fact or fiction, and so on — but it really is a rather, sort of, cheesy, Woolworths kind of item to include in a work of high art. In fact, the imitation materials that began to appear in the works of Picasso and Braque, are really the kind that you could get in the most low-class stores in Paris: cheap imitation wood grain, like that which Braque uses over here. That is characteristic, not only of the cubist play with true and false, but of their willingness to look at, afresh, or really for the first time, the visual possibilities of these machine-made textures, which were available at the local Monoplie or Prix Unique, depending on where you — which five-and-ten-cent store you went to in Paris. In this context, it should be recalled that Braque himself had been trained [00:28:00] as, what the French call a peintre décorateur, so he was completely in tune with these fakes, with these cheap surrogate materials for people who couldn’t afford real chair caning, or for people who couldn’t afford a real wood paneling.

The next, please. The same thing could be said about this little papier collé by Picasso on the left, which, instead of painting apples arduously, the way Cézanne would have done it, chooses, instead, fruit illustrations from some sort of a cheap catalog — again, expressing a kind of fascination with the commercial artist’s way of rendering these forms, not fully modeled, but just to, sort of, relief protrusion, very much in accord with that shallow space of [00:29:00] cubism, but also adding a kind of dissonant note, in terms of that, sort of, commercial artist anonymity with which the fruit is described. With this in mind, that whole realm of cheap materials, of abundant factory-made supplies, is constantly recalled in the work of these masters, sometimes even literally, in terms of the use of department store imagery in some Picasso collages of the period. This one, for instance, includes references to the two great Paris department stores, which you can still visit today: the Bon Marché, where we are introduced to the lingerie and rotary department, and over here, the Samaritaine, which as we know, if you’ve been to Paris, is so well located for metro connections. Among other things that appear in this little collage of [00:30:00] Picasso is that strange woman, which I would have you look hard at, because we’re going to come back to her later. This a – sudden, strange substitute for fancy, high-minded figure drawing and painting, which became practically illegible in Picasso’s art of the teens in the early phases of cubism. Suddenly, that is, the human figure is re-introduced, and not in the language of cubism, or even in the language of academic techniques of the nineteenth century,

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 but rather, again, in the language of a, sort of, popular, commercial illustrator, totally anonymous, who does these, sort of, flat cartoon drawings that Picasso’s eye has seized on in the local newspaper.

Can we have the next, please? With this in mind, one should [00:31:00] remember that, well, nothing is new under the sun, and the peculiar give-and-take between high and low art, which I am trying to outline in cubism, had long precedence in the later nineteenth century. For instance, the work of Seurat, his late work, that is, has been demonstrated by Robert Herbert, among others, as it being dependent upon popular poster illustrations by such an artist as Jules Chéret of the 1870s or ’80s. The poster for the Folies-Bergère over there on the right being one of the several sources for Seurat’s almost Lichtenstein-like view of people doing high kicks — the so- called Chahut — in a popular dance hall.

Could we have the next, please? [00:32:00] And one should also remember that even the most refined of artists — artists like Bonnard — were perfectly capable, in the 1890s, of descending — if that is the direction to refer to — from his intimate domestic scenes, to work in a more popular commercial medium, such as poster designs and the like, for new periodicals, for instance, La Revue Blanche of the 1890s, in which he offers an almost proto-cubist, if I may so call it, a combination of images and letters, words and silhouetted forms that seem constantly to be weaving in and out of each other, and that constantly, as well, defy our ability to read this as an illusion, or as a [00:33:00] flat sign. Toulouse-Lautrec, needless to say, is a most conspicuous member of this pre-cubist, late nineteenth-century generation, which seemed to be able to move from high art to low art, as in the case of this Toulouse-Lautrec poster, advertising something to read by the Abbé Foure in Le Matin, with all kinds of almost proto-cubist shufflings of different typefaces, Gothic and non-Gothic, in terms of the lettering that, again, as in Bonnard, is mixed up with the imagery.

Could we have the next, please, on the right? And even the very, very whispery symbolist Maurice Denis of a neo-Catholic persuasion, could, at times, get mixed up — get sullied — with the world of commercial illustration, as in this newspaper [00:34:00] ad that he was willing to contribute to with his very, very sinuous art nouveau lady, holding up the name of the newspaper Dépêche de Toulouse, something that, again, indicates how widespread the give-and-take between high art and low art was in the generation that preceded the cubists.

Could we have the next, please? The point may be further refined, I hope, by seeing the way in which Picasso himself, when he absorbs bits of paper or images from the commercial world, seems frequently to depend on the poster designs of the period. This little still life on the left of 1914 in Philadelphia has, among other things in it, [00:35:00] a reference to the French cigarette paper, JOB, which you can see over here, a floating disembodied plane along the wine glass. And that ad on the right, from the 1890s, by a woman poster artist Jane [Archet?] is just one of many for that product that could be seen all over Paris. In fact, Picasso’s observation of these commercial facts is so acute — could we have the next, please — that in writing the letters of the cigarette paper J-O-B, he actually imitates the lozenge-shaped “O” that appears as the logo of the cigarette paper, and that, incidentally, as you can see in the export brand on the right, is still operative in the 1970s.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976

Could we have the next, please? [00:36:00] With this in mind, it should, I think, again, be stressed, that most of the cubist artists, like these masters of the 1890s we’ve just been talking about, were perfectly willing, especially to make money, which they have to do, as starving young artists, to get mixed up in commercial design, as is evidenced by these two Picassos from the 1890s that have to do with his making a couple of (inaudible) by working, with his hand, for the famous Bohemian Barcelona café, Els Quatre Gats, “The Four Cats.” There is a sort of, Toulouse-Lautrec-y, or really, more English-looking ad for the café on the left, and here on the right, is a funny kind of confusion of a waiter, with the name of the café [00:37:00], and then he is holding in his hand, almost like cubist fact or fiction, in French, one would say the plat du jour. Here it is in Catalan, the plato del dia, that is, the dish of the day. There is, already, a kind of preparation point for Picasso’s later mix of sign and image.

Could we have the next, please? With this ambience of restaurants, one may think, I think, fresh, of some of the pictures of food that Picasso executed in the years 1913, ’14, ’15. For instance, the one on the left is a restaurant still life of 1914 that includes, amidst [00:38:00] these very flat and cubist planes, renderings of a loaf of bread and a kind of rare roast in the middle that have a bit of almost comic-like strip of crudity, again mimicking, at a certain distance, the schematic designs of anonymous commercial artists. One should remember, in this connection, that Picasso — we have [Birgitte?] Stein as proof of this — loved American comic strips of the time, and certainly, he was fascinated by that very, very primitive and flattened rendering of images that recurs again and again in many representations of food and human beings at this time. Curiously, in the work at the right — one of the earliest return to realist moments in Picasso’s evolution of 1914-15 — we have a kind of [00:39:00] ironic inversion of what is happening here, that is, what you see is a drawing that suddenly looks as though, well, even [Ang?] might have accepted it in his class, except for the fact that the subject could hardly be less like that which the great nineteenth-century master would have sanctioned, namely, what it is, it’s not even apple still life like Cézanne, or asparagus like Manet — it is something absolutely contemptible as a subject for a highly polished academic drawing, namely, a couple of biscuits and what the French call gaufrettes, which even has, stamped on it, by factory, La Sultane, a trademark, which still can be found and bought today. This is a wonderful bit of inverse insolence: recording something as banal as that, in terms of an Angelesque [00:40:00] technique.

Could we have the next, please? The same kind of thing is true of Juan Gris’s pro— pre-cubist work, that is, he, too, like Picasso, is often involved in commercial enterprises that seem to have, later, repercussions in his cubist work. In the first decade of the century, especially around 1908, he did illustrations for the French humoristic periodical L’Assiette au Beurre, “Butter on the Plate,” or “Plate with Butter on It,” and it is an illustration like the one on the left that certainly gives us a feeling of recall in the context of these fragmented words that appear plastered flatly all over the [00:41:00] background of this argumentative political scene — words that suddenly have a new life, in terms of, say, the representation of real posters in the Juan Gris on the right of 1913 — a picture of a bullfighter, El torero, with all of these Spanish signs around him.

Could we have the next, please, left and right? And again, in these rather economically conceived and executed popular illustrations for L’Assiette au Beurre, Juan Gris very often approaches the, sort of, schematic cartoon strip look that Picasso so admired in American comics. The one on the left, for example, flattens out the figures to (inaudible) kids dimensions,

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 and also includes this, kind of, [00:42:00] diagrammatic perspective that seems to have a new lease of life, within the orbit of cubist painting, as in the picture on the right, of 1914, that has the same, sort of, diagonal construction, suggesting some, sort of, commercial artist idea of a swift space delineator, and even including such curious things say, as the hand over there — a sort of, rounded modeled representation of fingers, almost hand printing the paper or the hat above, as the, sort of, sinister figure here, who may be a reference, incidentally, to the popular detective at the time, Fantômas, from the movies — that seems to have almost a kind of comic strip look, in terms of these new means of rendering space, as well as rendering such things as the human figure.

Can we have the next, please? [00:43:00] Speaking of Fantômas, that French detective of the silent movies, who was all the rage then, as he seems to be when he was revived, along with Andy Warhol’s Sleep in the mid-’60s — they’re very, very long, silent movies that go on and on for days — they seemed to appeal to 1960s endurance. Anyway, here is a Juan Gris on the left, which, incidentally, includes a reference, Fantômas — I don’t know if you can see it — the [values?] are so close, on with the masked, sinister expression of the detective. Another point that I wanted to make about this, however, is the way that the often defined cubist inversion of lettering, moving from light to dark, or vice versa, not letting us know what is opaque and what is transparent [00:44:00] — that is something, again, that is prophesied in many of the commercial images of the 1890s by high and brilliant artists like the Bonnard ad for the exhibition of Peintres-graveurs, from 1896, on the right.

Can we have the next, please? Many of these artists really tried to absorb, as fully as possible, everything that was specifically new about the early twentieth century, in a way that paralleled, and what usually preceded, what the Futurists were doing on the other side of the Alps. These pictures, famous works by Roger de La Fresnaye on the left, and Delaunay on the right, both deal with the popular theme of [00:45:00] aeronautics — the title of this one on the left, The Conquest of the Air, is a popular slogan of the time. And once more, we have to realize we are so casual about taking jets these days, that in 1913-14 — when these pictures were conceived and executed — the idea of taking wing was something thrilling and something brand new, as a uniquely twentieth-century experience. Again, it should be suggested, I think — can we have the next, on the right? — that this kind of imagery seems really to be absorbed from the countless posters that decorated — or defiled, depending on your point of view — Paris in these years, posters like the one on the right that have the combination of modernism and rhetoric, old-fashioned rhetoric that we feel in Delaunay’s [00:46:00] and Roger de La Fresnaye, or to add a couple more examples — the next on the right, please — this one from Bordeaux, which again, seems to offer a kind of flattened comic strip prototype for the kind of diagrammatic rendering of the pilots and aviation equipment that we find in many of these artists’ work.

Can we have the next, please? And, indeed, it’s no surprise to discover, as people who worked on Delaunay have done, that this master very frequently copied — well, that is too literal a word — recreated popular photographs, prints, and so on, of moderns, specifically modern Paris. Here is one example in Delaunay’s art: the painting on the left of the Cardiff team of 1912-13, which depends, [00:47:00] in part, on the right, upon a postcard of the Eiffel Tower, the biplanes and the Great Wonder Wheel — the Ferris wheel of Paris, La Grande Roue — that was still up at

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 that time near the Eiffel Tower, and that can be seen on the print on the right, a kind of parallel of modern amusement activity, with the form — rotating form of propellers.

Could we have the next, please? On the right, the rest of the picture, again, as has been suggested, takes us to the world of La Vie Sportive — the title, by the way, the caption in one of Picasso’s clippings — and shows us now the Cardiff team, which, thanks to Angelica [Rubenstein’s?] researches on the Rousseau and the Guggenheim collection, we can now be certain are playing rugby, and not soccer.

Could we have the next, please? [00:48:00] How do we get from there — there, being Paris — to here, here being, well, Manhattan? One way to do it, obviously, is through some of those American artists of the world between the two great wars, who absorbed cubist experience in Paris, or either directly, or through reproductions of works of art that were seen on this island, and who began to adapt them to American purposes. One of the most conspicuous candidates in this particular category is clearly Stuart Davis, who, in 1916, designed a very cubist decoration for a soda foundation in Newark, New Jersey — no longer [00:49:00] standing, alas — Sparks was the name. And, as you can see, the cubist scramble of words from Paris cafés is now transported across the Atlantic to tell us about parfaits and sundaes and flaps and so on, that could be bought at any local soda fountain in the United States, a curious kind of resurrection, moving from alcohol to less impure drinks.

Could we have the next, please? Davis, among other things, seized upon the possibilities of incorporating all kinds of packaging and labels of a sort first absorbed by cubist art into his work. There on the right is a picture of 1921 of cigarette papers, which I would propose as an American descendant of the [00:50:00] JOB wrapper over here in the Picasso of 1914, or, I suppose, as the most famous example — could we have the next, on the right, please? — the Lucky Strike of 1921. We have, sort of, the American translation of all of the smoking equipment and popular ads that tend to float and hover around the cubist table tops of Picasso and Braque.

Could we have the next, please? The newly discovered, or venerated, American artist, Gerald Murphy, again offers curious parallels with cubist precedent. He was presented here in New York recently, as the wonderful artist he is, and is one who seemed, in the context of the 1920s in Paris, [00:51:00] suddenly to venerate those objects of modern mechanized, or purist, life in the period of reconstruction, right after the First World War, in a way that seemed perfectly fresh, perfectly American. And yet, the fact of the matter is, that many of the things that seem to be so new about Gerald Murphy, have prototypes — precedents in time — in the work of cubist artists who were active before the First World War. The brilliant heraldic painting on the left by Murphy includes all kinds of things that are specifically modern twentieth-century inventions like the safety matches, the fountain pen, and the safety razor. The use of the fountain pen, for one thing here, is a kind of symbol of extreme modernity. [00:52:00] It’s hard for us to remember in a world where we only have ballpoint pens, and where, people, I guess, under the age of 21, would not know what to do with an old-fashioned fountain pen. It’s hard to remember that these were, at one point, in the twentieth century, very, very modern gadgets, and that fact was instantly recorded by a cubist artist in 1914 — the one you see on the right, that is, Diego Rivera, who was, at the time, a card carrying cubist painter, and who represented, of all strikingly unfamiliar and newfangled things, a fountain pen that has apparently just written his

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 name and address in a pneumatique, a little cablegram, or telegram, that he just received on the Rue de Départ, right near, incidentally, where Mondrian was living at the same time in looking at the bouillon cube ad out his window.

Could we have [00:53:00] the next, please, on the right? And, if Gerald Murphy seems to be particularly new, innovative about his infatuation with safety razor, which, in his case, has personal connections — we learned in the catalog of the modern exhibition, Museum of Modern Art exhibition that Murphy’s own family had been responsible for the attempt, the invention of the safety razor, and tried to patent it, but Gillette beat them out. So did George Braque, because already before 1914, in the collage on the right, Braque was perfectly willing to take this symbol of modernity — something new, a new gimmick, a safety razor — and he, with characteristic cubist complication, doesn’t use a real label, but takes out instead and add, for a Gillette safety [00:54:00] razor, and lets it float in lieu of a real paper-thin razor blade, or a blade thin piece of paper, in the middle of his table.

Could we have the next, please? Again, Gerald Murphy, in his, what would seem to be a very modern, or moderne for the 20s and 30s, a sensibility for the abrupt juxtaposition of something that is very icy: a cocktail shakery, Radio City Music Hall-ish, with a kind of old-fashioned Victorian illustration, like that on the cigar box. This is a sensibility that may seem American, or of the ’20s and ’30s, but it is one that is, again, prefigured by the Parisian cubists, such as in the work of Juan Gris, on the right, of 1914, which, again, in the middle of a very geometric [00:55:00] scheme, shows us, suddenly, the label of an Anis del Mono bottle, something to drink. In there, you see, again, this kind of abrupt collision of old-fashioned commercial illustration with the new twentieth-century geometric rhythms.

Could we have the next, please? In fact, all sorts of strange, new things, even to eat, newfangled food coming from the United States, for instance, began to make its appearance in the art of the cubists and their orbit, such as the surprising intrusion of a piece of a box of Quaker Oats in this painting by Juan Gris on the left, including even, in French, the man, the mark of the Quaker [00:56:00] — others ask of this brand, with that, sort of, pop image of the Quaker in the middle, this is a kind of a surprising appearance of modern packaged breakfast food, in the middle of a cubist environment, which is then purified into more hygienic terms by Severini in 1917.

I need hardly tell you what the next slide is going to be — could we have it, the next on the right, please? And, as you see, nothing is new under the sun.

Could we have the next, please, left and right? In the same way, I would say, I would propose that Picasso’s sensibility to the rendering of objects as [00:57:00] performed, or perpetuated, by commercial artists is something that had a new lease on life again on this side of the Atlantic. The rendering, for instance, of the roast over here, or the piece of bread, has a kind of déjà vu feeling when we look at it, or is it the other way around, next to the Lichtenstein rib roast on the right — a work by, again, an artist who wouldn’t have liked the 1950s way of rendering such an object, but liked the commercial way of doing it.

Or, could we have the next, please, left and right? Or, in the case of such a parallel, a Léger of the 1920s, of a hand that is demonstrating how to use a siphon. We have, in this work of

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976

[00:58:00] 1924, a kind of prefiguration of Lichtenstein’s equally commercial — a magnification of an attractively manicured hand that is showing us how to use a spray. Thanks to a British art historian, who is recently on these shores, Christopher Green — and he’s just publishing a book on Léger and his milieu — I have been able – could we have the next slide on the right? — to get a photograph from his forthcoming book, which I think makes my point as clear as possible. This would seem to be a very advertising source, a Campari ad of 1924, which inspired Léger in the painting on the left. And, needless to say, that is exactly the kind of thing that Lichtenstein was going to do some 40 years later.

Could we have the next, please? Once one opens this Pandora’s Box, if it is that, [00:59:00] one can find all kinds of strange recalls, strange resonances between the art of the ’60s, the pop art of that decade, and that of cubism. Lichtenstein’s idea, for instance, of a most witty and startling one, representing allusions of a back of a picture, and making us wonder what is the picture and what is the frame — that has been preceded in 1914 by this astonishing little collage by Picasso, now in the Houston Museum of Art, in which most of the picture is taken up by a characteristically cheesy imitation — fancy baroque ornamental frame, and the map with all the splatter on it — is again, the equivalent of some sort of mechanized spray decorative technique, upon which this most fragile little drawing is located, with, [01:00:00] incidentally, if you can see it, the lettering Ma Jolie, again, that popular tune.

Could we have the next, please? And it might even be said that — I don’t know if that could be better focused on the left? It might even be said that in recent Lichtenstein’s last year or two, these decorative strips, rather Kenneth Noland-like of, freezes and tabletures, we have, as it were, a post-cubist absorption of these modern schematized decorative vocabularies that have been hardened, mechanized from that glorious handicraft past in a way that seems to parallel the sort of thing that Braque and Picasso were doing in their adaption of these cheap decorative materials from a world of popular aesthetics. [01:01:01]

Could we have the next, please? Even the use of a sort of monotonously repetitive and rather tawdry wallpaper, flower patterns and the like in Picasso’s art — there is an example on the right where you have an absolutely regular parallelogram module in the background of this common flower design — this is the kind of thing that resurfaces in the 1960s, and some of Andy Warhol’s tongue-in-cheek wallpaper strips that go on and on and on, and we have the — next please — we might even see, in terms of Picasso’s fascination, in particular, with the shuffling of words and objects in restaurants, looked at in [01:02:00] mirrors, or through plate-glass windows, such as the restaurant sign over there — that’s Klee’s — the names of the things to eat, tripe and veau and things like that, the rendering of the roast over here. All of these things seem to have a sudden re-appearance, but not necessarily in the pop artists of the ’60s, but in certain aspects of Photorealism in the ’70s, such as in this work of Don Eddy, where the confusion of transparent and opaque, sign and image, is almost as complicated as it is in a cubist picture, and probably depends upon that same urban experience that Picasso and his fellow cubists were among the first to notice, and to digest into, high art.

We have the — next, please? I’ll be through shortly. This even pertains [01:03:00], needless to say, to the domain of sculpture. And if it can be said that Picasso was absolutely brazen in terms of three-dimensional design or release, in permitting the total blasphemy of traditional sculptural

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubism as Pop Art” by Robert Rosenblum, 1976 subjects: no more allegories, no more myths, no more pictures about Love and Death, and Life and Maternity and the sort, no more statues, that is, instead, just the most commonplace studio snack, such as the one on the right, with, I think, probably a piece of cheese, two slices of sausage, a knife, a glass of wine. This is as brazen for its time, 1914, as Claes Oldenburg was in the 1960s in the usurping of the mythological, wholly sculptural world of people like [01:04:00] Ferber, or Lasso, or Lippold, or with something as gross as a pair of hamburgers.

Could we have the next, please? And, needless to say, the same point may be made, in the context of Jasper Johns’ sculptural revolutions, in idea, as well as in subject, once more intruding, as he did in 1960, upon that heroic, mythical, remote domain of abstract sculpture of the 1950s. There were such things as paint brushes and a Savron coffee can, the 1960 equivalent to that gross intrusion in Picasso’s sculptural repertory, in 1914, of the most commonplace café object: a glass in which one drinks absinthe, there, of all things, is a real spoon, a fake cube of sugar [01:05:00], through which, incidentally, the absinthe was poured, so that it would be mixed through the strainer and drunk, which would impossible in this fragmented cubist glass. The point is, in a way, that this is the Parisian 1914 equivalent of this breakthrough in subject, the sculpture, that we have in Johns’ or Oldenburg’s work of the early ’60s.

Lastly, may we have the next two, please? I would just like to conclude by asking rhetorically, the general question, that is, the gist of my lecture. We all know now, that this is fastened to history, that such images as Lichtenstein’s Girl With the Beach Ball, over here, is dependent upon an ad that you can still see daily in the New York Times, and that this, in turn, [01:06:00] was aggrandized into such deities — goddesses — of the comic strips, such as the one on the right.

Now the question is, really — can we have the last slide? — is it possible — last slide on the right, please? — that this American goddess was actually born in the papier collé — in the pasted papers of Picasso and his friends in Paris before the First World War. Thank you very much. (applause)

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Cubism As Pop Art / Robert Rosenblum, 1976/5/4. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York