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5 M i s s i n g t h e p o i n t , n o t p l a y i n g w i t h a fu l l d e c k Note: you are reading an excerpt from: James Elkins, “Failure in Twentieth-Century Painting” (unpublished MS) Revised 9.2001 This page was originally posted on: www.jameselkins.com Send all comments to: [email protected] Part Two – 2 – 7: Missing the point There is no doubt that the classical and romantic genres of landscape painting evolved during the great age of European imperialism now seem exhausted, at least for the purposes of serious painting. Traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape conventions are now part of the repertory of kitsch. — W.J.T. Mitchell1 Niels Bohr had no problem understanding Einstein’s arguments, but in that he was not much different from the dozens, and later hundreds, of people who had disagreements with Einstein’s claims. As Bohr’s biographer Abraham Pais shows, Bohr did more than comprehend Einstein’s points: he got very quickly to the core of the matter. He understood before other people did that the quantization of light and energy might entail something even more radical: the quantization of matter. The “Bohr model” of the atom is evidence of the speed at which he zeroed in on the central problem. Later, his arguments with Einstein show his awareness of the role played by observation in quantum mechanics, and his attempts to reconcile Heisenberg and Schrödinger show how clearly he saw that the matrix and wave models needed to be fused. In each case, it wasn’t just that he mastered the arguments: it was that he had a facility for concentrating on the fundamental issues at the expense of the many incidental phenomena that distracted other physicists. The capacity to see the point, or miss it, is commonly acknowledged in the sciences, but in the arts many people would say there is effectively no such thing as an artist’s point. Your Picasso is simply different from mine, and neither of us can be said to have missed his “point.” The word itself sounds wrong. But is it wrong? On the contrary: when works are judged historically, against other works, then it is definitely possible to miss the point of the work. (Or even to miss the point of the movement, the decade, or the century.) Many artists, I think, can be reasonably described as having missed crucial points about the art of their time, about their teachers’ art, about the movements that preceded them, and about modernism and postmodernism altogether. [ sections deleted ] Czech cubism Part Two – 3 – 7: Missing the point Czech cubism is an especially interesting regional movement because it was the most well- developed of cubist movements outside France.2 (Others, except Russian cubo-futurism, are little studied.3) It’s also well known outside the Czech Republic, thanks to at least five international exhibitions beginning in 1989-90: Czech Modernism, Kubismus in Prag, Czech Cubism, Vergangene Zukunft, and Czech Avant-garde 1918-1938.4 At the end of the century, it was suffering a bit from over-exposure, and one Czech art historian told me he wished that other periods, such as figurative art in the first half of the 1920s, were as well known outside the Czech Republic. Despite the surfeit of writing it is worth looking again at Czech cubism, not least because it is one of the best places to study cubism’s international reception. The Czech cubists throw light on the crucial question of what cubism could become when it found itself in other contexts, and how it presented itself to people who came upon it from widely differing traditions. That, in turn, illuminates some central accounts of cubism by Leo Steinberg, T. J. Clark, and others.5 Even more than Steinberg, Clark wants to argue that cubism was never a method, so it could not be exported. “Cubist painting is not a language,” he says at the end of a long chapter on the years 1911-12. Picasso and Braque were painting “as if” they had found “a whole new representational idiom.” If they had, it would have been “a new understanding of the world,” a language that could be shared, “used and abused, adapted, expanded, misread” by a widening circle of artists and critics. In the years 1911-12, Clark thinks, Picasso and Braque proceeded “as if” they were a linguistic community of two, and “as if” the “texts of practice had already pared away the flourishes and incidentals of description, giving rise to a language.” But no: cubism “is not a language: it just has the look of one.” It is “not a grammar of objects or perceptions: it is a set of painterly procedures, habits, styles, performances, which do not add up to a language-game.” It can’t be sensibly disseminated, learned, “used and abused, adapted, expanded, misread”: in fact there can’t even be native speakers. Picasso, Clark writes, worked “as if” he were one of the native speakers, but even he knew that Braque wasn’t another. Cubism in 1911-12 was “a dyad with Picasso on top.” (“He was my wife,” as Picasso said of Braque.)6 This is a very strong, and very interesting, claim. Clark means in part that cubism neither posits a new world, nor escapes from one, but plays with both possibilities: it’s a “counterfeit” representation, and hence not a language to help discover the world. Critics, Clark thinks, have long gotten this point, but shied away from its implications. There have been two basic claims: that cubism is a successful language for showing the world in a new way, and that it’s a matter of pure self-referential painting, which is built on representation’s ruins. As Clark puts it, critics and historians “have oscillated between asserting that the illusionistic means of cubism really were, if only we knew, still generating precise descriptions (though of a world made totally new), and Part Two – 4 – 7: Missing the point retreating to the metaphysical notion that the means had at last become themselves, without residue of metaphor—merely becoming or performing the material processes they ‘are’.” Each of these two positions, Clarks thinks, is only partly right: cubism gives “a metaphorical account—a florid, outlandish and ineradicably figural account—of what the pursuit of likeness now looks like, in a situation where all versions of such a pursuit have proved impossible to sustain.”7 Cubism didn’t leave the particularities of depiction for metaphor: the facets aren’t little crystalline faces, or bricks, or evidence of the fourth dimension, and the semioticians are wrong to see the paintings as sets of liberated signifiers. Rather cubism plays at illusion’s failure, presenting the knowing “counterfeit” of illusion, and “oscillating” between positing a new phenomenal world and “retreating” into painterly self-reflexivity.8 If this is on the right track, and I think it is, then cubism in 1911-12 was a kind of contingent, “counterfeit” project, not a functioning system of representation, a language, or a grammar.9 It could not be taught, learned, passed on, “used and abused, adapted, expanded,” or otherwise imitated, without first being seriously misunderstood as a new language—or, in painter’s terms, a new style. (Clark calls cubism a “style” in one of the passages I quoted; but he means “a set of painterly procedures” that are no more than individual “performances,” things that happened just once, in singular contexts.) No would-be cubist, Czech or other, could speak this counterfeit language: or to say it more accurately, a would-be cubist who thought he or she had learnt the language would be missing the point of Picasso’s achievement. Cubisms’s best achievements in in 1911-12 were inimitable solutions, shot through with reproducible ambiguities. Cubism’s most dubious achievements were its apparently consistent, or at least comprehensibly changing, methods and styles. In one sense, this result is not relevant to cubisms outside France, or even to later cubist practices within France. As Clark presents his argument, it’s not relevant to Picasso’s own work from before 1909 or after 1912, and it isn’t uniformly applicable to Picasso’s work even within the period: the Portrait of Kahnweiler (1910), one of cubisms’s high-water marks, is said to be “florid and high-spirited (not to say a bit glib),” and the Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde and Portrait of Vollard are “not very happy episodes,” whose particularization of signs and representation seem “not very distant from kitsch.”10 This is far and away the most demanding criticism of cubism that has yet been written, and its very extremism—slighting the three great cubist portraits!—makes it a touchstone for any serious account. It is a far cry, for example, from the prevailing model of Czech cubism, which has it that Czech artists were practicing Picasso’s method with something added to it. In that model (I’ll call it the standard model), cubism divides into two parts: Picasso’s, and everyone else’s. Both become methods, schools, or languages in Clark’s sense. As the Czech art historian Vojtech Lahoda puts it, in the Czech art community “the debate concerning authentic and Part Two – 5 – 7: Missing the point inauthentic Cubism concentrated on the issue of what was called ‘open’ understanding of Cubism versus its one-sided perception. Vincenc Kramáfi distinguished ‘Picassism,’ i.e., the only authentic correct brand of Cubism of Picasso (and Braque), and ‘Cubism,’ i.e., the incorrect, derived and eclectic type, practiced by Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Metzinger and Léger.”11 If the standard model is adequate, then there is not much sense in speaking about misunderstandings, and cubism itself comes ready-made as an item for international export.

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