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Home , Czech Cubism, Emil Filla, Otto Gutfreund, Roger de La Fresnaye

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Note: you are reading an excerpt from: James Elkins, “Failure in Twentieth-Century ” (unpublished MS) Revised 9.2001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 and postmodernism altogether. [ sections deleted ]

Czech 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-, are little studied.3) It’s also well known outside the , thanks to at least five international exhibitions beginning in 1989-90: Czech Modernism, Kubismus in Prag, , 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 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 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 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. My agenda in this book leans away from Clark’s relentless paring-down of essential works: I am concerned more with what he omits than what his explanation achieves. That is not to say I am simply critiquing his account, or downplaying its force. On the contrary: only writing like Clark’s has the capacity to unravel what can still be meant by cubism: but if his description is to be fully useful it needs to be augmented by a history of what, exactly, those misguided uses and misuses, expansions, and adaptations could be in 1911, 1912, and just afterward, both in Paris and in . We need to know, for instance, what a committed and fascinated outsider like Bohumil Kubista could have made of Picasso’s project. In a larger sense, we need an account of Czech and other cubisms that begins from a position as demanding as Clark’s and works carefully outward to the reaches of blank incomprehension and uncaring pastiche. The only honest way to do that, I think, is to start with an account very close to Clark’s: which means admitting that cubism, especially from 1909 to 1912, could be misunderstood: that it did have a point, and that nearly everyone—often including Picasso himself—misinterpreted it. It goes without saying that national pride is very much in question here: it is as important for the Czech art market, including its academic elements, to possess an indigenous movement, as it was for Kubista and his friends to see their work as Czech. Some of the theories that Kubista invented, some of the pictorial strategies he and others deployed in their paintings, and some of the special pleading that still goes on in Czech scholarship, need to be taken unflinchingly as defense mechanisms to guard Czech’s cubism’s independence from France. Ultimately, the price for that manufactured autonomy is a falling-off in pictorial invention and in scholarship: which is why I want to start again from assumptions as wary as Clark’s. To begin with a generalization, which poses an immediate limit to the inquiry. The later world-wide dissemination of cubism, from the 1920s onward, has mainly been through reproductions, and often those reproductions have been of second-rank cubists. (1883-1956), (1881-1953), (1881-1946), Fernand Léger (1881- 1955), and (1885-1925) are disproportionately influential outside France, as are the many cubists who went to Paris in the 1910s and 1920s and brought back first-hand knowledge to their countries. A study of international cubism after could begin with Metzinger, Gleizes, Léger and others, taking them as cubism’s effective starting point. Gleizes’s Part Two – 6 – 7: Missing the point

and Metzinger’s deliberate simplifications of Picasso’s and Braque’s cubism were instructive and relatively easy to understand for foreign artists trying to come to terms with cubism. They showed how cubism could nearly be thought of as a formula: how a manageable number of specific strategies could be repeated and applied to an entire canvas, and how a relatively simple set of compositional rules could generate an acceptably cubist painting. In brief: second-rate and second- generation French cubists (and later, work by Picasso himself) made cubism look as if it could be defined, packaged, and exported: as if, in Clark’s terms, it could be a language. (Or at least a pidgin.) The best non-French painters never quite took cubism tout court, but considered it as a series of closely related strategies from which they could pick and choose; the worst looked at Gleizes or Léger and thought they saw what Nicholas Wadley calls “a pre-digested ‘instant cubism’” that was undemanding and useful as a “ready-made new academism.”12 So it needs to be said at the beginning that cubism was taken as a language, a new form of representation, a set of semiotic signs, and many other things besides, and that level of misunderstanding was essential for its comprehension and the dissemination. The question I want to ask about Czech cubism—how it missed Picasso’s point—therefore has these two boundary conditions: on the one hand, Kubista and other Czech painters showed no signs they thought of Picasso’s work as one-off experiments or inimitably unsystematic essays in “counterfeit” representation; on the other hand, it appears Czech cubists never claimed that Picasso’s work was a method that could be taught to just anyone. Their understandings and misunderstandings lie between those limits, and so do our readings and misreadings. The dichotomy tallies Kramáfi’s and Lahoda’s assesments. Moving beyond it means trying understand, on a case-by-case basis, what the Czech cubists thought that Picasso thought he was doing. I propose to do this in the only way I can: an abbreviated survey of particular issues raised by the principal Czech cubists, each in turn. This will certainly sound more like criticism than art history: but that’s as it should be, because these questions are critical by nature. Once we have provisional answers, we can begin to understand what cubism—in whatever country it is made—has come to mean. Czech cubism began with close followers of several western European styles. Antonín Procházka (1882-1945), for example, painted Les Joueurs de cartes (1908) in what appears to be a close approximation to Cézanne’s picture of the same theme.13 By late 1912 Procházka was using analytic cubism, but in an unstable manner. His Prometheus is like a composition seen through bottle glass: the eighteenth-century undulations make it intact through their cubist transformation. His Concert from the same year is a prototype of the shattered-glass variants of cubism, where the picture’s inner structure is given up in a rush of shards. Together Prometheus and Concert point to two opening possibilities in the game of adopting Picasso: the one is cubism Part Two – 7 – 7: Missing the point

as embellishment (where the facets are in league with sinuous rococo contours, vibrant lighting, and the other peraphernalia of Baroque illusionism), and the other is cubism as a sliced-up photographic . In the first possibility, cubism is one of two things: either it is akin to composition because it takes places in the picture itself, or it’s an operation performed on a picture that is already nearly complete. In the second possibility, cubism is a machine for new representations of the world. The two are Procházka’s versions of the same misunderstandings Clark chronicles: the notion that cubism is a way of paying attention to painting’s “base materiality”; and the twin misapprehension that cubism is the new linear perspective, the Copernican revolution that comes packaged with its own user’s manual (and a handy monograph outlining the new scientific epistemology). By 1915 Procházka was working up a respnse to synthetic cubism’s new colors and textures, and again he crossed straight over several of cubism’s borders. He began painting scratchy surfaces, plastered with thickened paint. His (1915-16) is nearly as illegible as Picasso’s portraits from the summer of 1910, and it is thicker than most of Picasso’s paintings from that decade.14 Procházka didn’t seem to notice how Picasso’s pictures have built-in limits: colors were kept within certain limits of dissonance, and textures were made to harmonize or be simply, rather than multiply, disjunct. Bust of a Girl (1915, VeletrÏní Palác, Prague) is full of Orphist rainbows: it’s a kind of indigestion of synthetic cubism. The Still-Life (1921, plate ) is composed of rainbow-hued carpet remnants, and it has a kind of impacted sweetness. By Picasso’s standards, Procházka’s later cubist paintings are over the top, spilling cubism’s essential restraints in the name of a more intense expressiveness that just isn’t available within cubism’s means. Procházka’s cubism is marked, as the art historian Lenka BydÏovská says, by a certain “skittishness,” and it is not difficult to see in Procházka’s work a lack of interest or misunderstanding when it comes to cubism’s limits.15 That may be a first parameter of Czech cubism: it is predicated on the idea that cubism is a practice sans frontières, with territory that needs to be explored, and boundaries that need to be transgressed. This is where my question begins to become more visible: what would Procházka have said if someone had asked him why Picasso hadn’t already crossed those same boundaries? Wasn’t Picasso aware of the nature of his own project? (1882-1853) may never have been cut out to be a cubist. When he discovered cubism in 1910, he had already painted several deeply emotional expressionist pictures in the wake of the Munch exhibition in Munich in 1905. In Czech education, the Reader of Dostoevsky (1907) is a standard image: it depicts a sallow middle-aged man has been reading, and has sunk into a black swoon. Díte ulesca (Child Near a Forest, 1907) is one of the century’s great unaccountable pictures: an insecure child, insecurely painted, sits planted on the ground at a small crossroads, and fixes us with a rueful, determined expression. The baby isn’t dead, but it is iceberg-blue and coated Part Two – 8 – 7: Missing the point

with hoarfrost. Above it is a wooden roadside crucifix, hung with a furiously blushing Christ.16 Filla may have started from Munch, but he made something so different that Munch nearly doesn’t need mentioning. Filla in 1907-1909 was as good as any painter in Europe, but then he discovered cubism—or rather, a set of shifting rules he took to be cubism. Miroslav Lamac, author of a book on Czech cubism, muses over Filla’s attachment to the new style. “His attachments had lain elsewhere,” Lamac says, and his brand of cubism ended up “cosy and lyrical.” It may be a symptom of Filla’s disaffection, or rather of the particular way that cubism surprised him, that he became the first Czech painter to “react pictorially to all the basic principles of both analytical and synthetic cubism.” 17 (Of course in this context, I wonder what those “basic principles” were.) Filla combines facility with disaffection: he flies from perfect 1912-style cubism (done in 1915) to very adept 1915-style cubism (done in 1916), from analytic portraits to synthetic still lifes, from minor works to major compositions and back. I mentioned his with an Art Magazine (1914), the painting with the trompe-l’oeil brush laid on top: it would be a jeu d’esprit, if it weren’t so sincere. Filla has the virtuosity and disengagement of a cynical star pupil: a strange state of affairs for a painter who was also capable of heartfelt paintings like the Reader of Dostoevsky. Lamac’s verdict may be a bit overgenerous; Vojtech Lahoda says more soberly that Filla “somewhat arbitrarily combined various phases of cubism as he had observed them in the work of Picasso, Braque, and others.”18 Just how arbitrary, and how facile? The Salome II looks abandoned, despite criticism that assumes it is whole: Herod’s face is over-finished, and it appears that Filla wasn’t sure how to bring the remainder of the picture to an equivalent pitch of detail. Still Life with a Guitar (1926) is a lax bit of color-by number dashed off as if he were nervous or in a hurry to get on to a serious picture. The result isn’t at all spontaneous or expressive. I suspect that for Filla, all of cubism’s options looked a bit off because his real affections lay elsewhere. It’s patently not the case, for example, that Filla’s Bathers (1911-12) uses “shifting angles, and irregular planes to create an energy on the canvas analogous to sexual arousal,” as Steven Mansbach says.19 The painting isn’t sexual in any way I can identify, unless the least hint of a hip counts as an aphrodisiac. Bathers is a carefully balanced study in form and outdoor lighting, even though it probably should have been a study in arousal, or at least in the kinds of incomprehensible emotions Filla knew how to paint before he found cubism. It appears Filla hiself thought of cubism as an especially truthful form of representation, one that “directly illustrated a new kind of physics”: in other words, he bought into one of the most popular current explanations which served, as Steinberg has argued, to keep peoples’ minds off the strange project they were actually engaged in.20 At the least, I would count Filla’s convenient theory as evidence that Bathers is about painting and not arousal: and at the most, I would hazard the guess that whatever part of Filla’s thought wasn’t occupied by theories was very Part Two – 9 – 7: Missing the point

much entangled in emotions, both common and exotic. I wonder if Filla ever thought he was discovering the phases of cubism one after another, or if it wasn’t more a matter of searching, without much analysis, for something expressive in styles he thought were inexpressive. At least that is how I would rephrase the sometimes unfortunate term “cubo-,” which is used to cover too many practices in central and eastern Europe. (Filla’s abysmal later career, which I will touch on in a later chapter, could also be enlisted to show he was skating across styles rather than excavating them.) Or perhaps it’s not the whole phrase that needs revamping, just the second term, as I was arguing in relation to Ernö Kállai’s book. The most widely accepted thesis about Czech cubism is that the painters added a quality sometimes called spirituality to an essentially inert formalist exercise. There is support for that in the primary sources. In March 1915, Bohumil Kubista wrote Jan Zrzavy that Picasso’s contribution is “now a fact of common knowledge,” and that he intended to introduce “the spiritual content of the new form.” Picasso’s work was formalist, in other words, and it was now imperative to “proceed into the spiritual sphere.”21 The letter harbors a crucial ambiguity, because it can be read as Kubista’s insouciance about Picasso—his strategic misunderstanding—or his studied conclusion—his intentional misunderstanding. Kubista’s search for what he called a “strong sense of inner truth” necessarily involved the manipulation of formal structures. Mansbach comments that the two (spiritual expression and formal experiment) “might or might not be coincident.”22 The choice is crucial. What did Kubista think that Picasso thought he was doing? Making unspiritual formal arrangements? And if so, why would Picasso do that? Perhaps Kubista imagined he was reaching “beyond a superficial embrance of contemporary styles,” but it is seldom entirely clear in the contemporary scholarship how far scholars think he was right: often, it seems, historians agree with him almost entirely, and take his spiritual-formal dichotomy to heart in identifying what is Czech about Czech cubism. I am arguing that there are identifiable kinds of misunderstanding in Czech cubism, both in method and in theory; and I have been hinting that the historical reception has sometimes muddied the waters by subscribing to the equation Czech cubist = French cubist + spiritual expressionist. Procházka and Filla are not well described by that formula or its scientistic variants, and neither are Bohumil Kubista or Václav Spalá. Perhaps “lyrical cubism” (lyricky kubismus) captures it better—but it’s still a formula. Kubista (1884-1918) is the principal Czech cubist next to the sculptor (1889-1927), who is the movement’s backbone. Kubista produced pictures very rapidly, and if he had not died at the end of the First World War he might well have been one of the century’s spokesmen for international cubism. His Saint Sebastian (1912, plate ) looks at first like a grim version of Gris: it has Gris’s favorite rotating shoulder plates and his crumpled-metal way of doing Part Two – 10 – 7: Missing the point

faces.23 Yet it’s not inspired by Gris, and it is a painting with its own voice: starker, less resourceful, and less playful than either Gris or Picasso. Kubista’s originality is usually explained with reference to his expresssionist or spiritual intentions. Jaroslav Sedláfi says expressionism removed Kubista “from the austere objectivity of French cubism.”24 Lahoda has written an essay describing how Kubista’s heads around 1912 have more to do with violence, suicide, and breaks “between the rational and the mystical, the robust and the fragile, the physical and the mental” than with whatever Picasso was doing in works like the Head of Fernande (in Prague after 1911).25 Kubista and his friends perceived Picasso’s “as an effort to give expression to a new spiritual situation,” and it appears Kubista saw metaphors of cerebralism and “spirituality in general” in Fernande’s beetling brow.26 That reading seems at once true and insufficient. If Fernande’s broken temples and overhanging brow denoted spiritual angst or any of the metaphors Clark correctly calls “florid,” then why did Kubista say spirituality had to be added? Or else why—to invert the question—were gross dramas of attack and vivisection appropriate extensions of Picasso’s unaccountably reticent “formal” metaphors? The St. Sebastian is a coldly contrived work. Kubista had theories about the construction of such pictures: he developed a color , partly following Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre, and he wrote as if cubist pictures could be controlled and even systematized. The saint’s face is inserted into a triangle, and then moved off-axis to express the figure’s instability.27 A preparatory sketch shows the patient work of re-arranging ellipses and contrasts; it was much more deliberated even than Picasso’s Demoiselles d’. Yet despite all that, the picture has no unity: the top one- quarter is cartoon-expressionist (the clenched hands remain constant from the preparatory sketch); the middle is a chess-board of balanced darks and lights; and in the bottom third the saint’s body metamorphoses into the tree trunk. Clearly Kubista wasn’t thinking of the picture as a whole in a formalist sense. It’s as if the sequence of formalisms was a license, permitting Kubista to paint the saint’s half-murdered stare. Or as if the painting is a bit of heraldry: a naturalistic eye, framed by a cubist pattern, topped by emblematic arms, the ensemble set on a symbolic tree. Sometimes Kubista was incrementally close to Picasso, as if he had his ear to Picasso’s door. Still Life with Funnel (1910) is the kind of painting that needs justification: Picasso had nearly done it before him. On the other hand there are independent works like the Quarry in Braník, a look back through Cézanne at Géricault’s bluish-brown Roman landscapes. (Though it also seems to me that when Kubista is at his best he appears most inadequate, most in need of historical citations.) The St. Sebastian is a crucial work of Czech modernism because it divides the believers from the skeptics: either you say, with Kubista and his historians, that the painting adds metaphor and spirituality to cubism, or you say (as I’m inclined to) that it is also evidence of an intricate misunderstanding. Kubista saw spirituality in Picasso, but somehow thought it needed Part Two – 11 – 7: Missing the point

augmenting; he saw Picasso’s formal innovations, and somehow thought they could be simplified; and in the mix, he forgot that cubism is first and foremost a kind of painting, and not a repertoire of tricks and blanks that can be juggled and put to different uses. The last Czech cubist I want to mention, Václav Spalá (1885-1946), was never interested in the tightness of analytic cubism.28 From the beginning his work was loose, more like colored strips of paper thrown down at different angles than the solid snapped-together pieces of Kubista’s pictures. It’s a sign of just how open his paintings were that led him toward a tighter pictorial structure after 1913. To me painters like Spalá are enigmas. What could analytic cubism mean to someone who sees it as an opportunity for an escape into scattered patterns of paint? Spalá’s Road on the Island of Lapud (1915) is like an ordinary landscape, but with each brushmark rotated or ajar.29 It is almost as though a clever rearrangement could put it all in order. His Tfií pradleng (Three Washerwomen, 1913) is weak because it’s too simple, which is to say it hasn’t thought enough about the burden of cubism, and what it commits a painter to try. There is more mystery in what Spalá did (why he kept at cubism, what he took it to be, what he got from it, why he gave it up) than in other Czech cubists, and the mystery is proportional to the distance he kept from his primary sources in Paris. There must have been a part of him, even before he abandoned cubism in 1923, that found cubism somehow artificial, flawed, limited, or otherwise unnecessary. Spalá’s cubism was styled to be abandoned: it wasn’t vexed, it had nothing to prove, nothing to work out—ultimately, it wasn’t going anywhere but toward its own placid dissolution. I have been arguing for several things at once. As far as Czech cubism is concerned, the standard theories that frame the movement are not always enough to get very far into the peculiarities of the paintings. I can see the motivation for saying that Procházka, Filla, Kubista, or Spalá added spiritual or expressionist values to French cubism: after all, Kubista said so himself, and it packages Czech cubism in an appealing way. It may well be my outsider’s perspective, but I cannot see how spiritual or expressionist values (and what is the difference between the two?) can be “added” to any painting. Czech cubism has much more variety and more problems, than a phrase such as “cubo-expressionism” can possibly cover. I have also been proposing some ideas regarding cubism in general. My own understanding of what Picasso did in 1909-1912 is fairly near Steinberg’s and Clark’s: that is to say I find radical, unreproducable ambiguity was very much Picasso’s point. Often enough, that ambiguity took the form of a vacillation between metaphoric meanings and attention to the painting’s material nature, and I think Clark is right to stress the “counterfeit” nature of cubist representation: it looks like a “language”—a set of rules that could be learned—but when Picasso was most alert, he worked hard to turn that possibility into an illusion. I wonder if Procházka might have been the furthest from anything Picasso would have taken as cubism, and Filla the nearest, precisely because he couldn’t settle on any one method or Part Two – 12 – 7: Missing the point

style—because he suspected they weren’t what they appeared to be. Kubista and Spalá make me wonder how distant away an observer could be in 1910-12 and still see cubism, or rather how quickly a viewer might look and still be content that cubism was fully visible. Both Kubista and Spalá (the latter much less subtly) show just how little of cubism it seemed to be necessary to see. If they had looked harder, their own pictures would have been quite different, and it wouldn’t be so hard to answer my initial question: What did Kubista (or Spalá) think that Picasso thought he was doing? All this is based on the assumption that it is possible, and even common, for an artist to miss another artist’s point. It wouldn’t make sense to say that a painting which misses some other painting’s point must be bad: there is no ready connection between getting the point and making successful art. But it also wouldn’t make sense to insist that Picasso had no “points” to be missed. If that were so, then how could there be any account of cubism, not to mention Clark’s, that could possibly sustain its position? To someone who encounters them for the first time, the Czech cubists may seem terribly distant from Picasso and Braque. But cubism had a remarkable reach. I can’t resist concluding with my favorite Czech modernist, Jan Zrzavy (1890-1977). An artist as downright weird as Zrzavy doesn’t really belong in this book at all: he should be in a monograph on uncelebrated masters. His reaction to cubism, mediated through his friendship with Kubista, was eccentic to the point of being incomprehensible: instead of taking cubism as a lesson in straight lines, he understood it arcanely, as a matter of curves.30 Lahoda says Picasso’s Head of Fernande “meant nothing” to him: perhaps even less than nothing, in the sense that Zrzavy often looks like an anti-cubist.31 Zrzavy’s “cubist” paintings are entirely unfragmented—in fact they are softly rounded, and smooth to a fault. One of his first “cubist” paintings—and one of the few that have pointy objects and straight lines—is a Sermon on the Mountain (1912, plate ). It couples Bohemian versions of Italian trecento mountains with Picassoid cylinder-and-egg figures.32 Historians who have studied this painting alongside its preparatory “perspectival” sketch point out that the geometry flattens the picture instead of defenestrating the subject the way cubist facets would. The painting is anything but cubist, really; is very close to some drawings by Domenico Veneziano that blend half-hearted spatial constructions with flattening surface geometry. Sermon on the Mountain is neither cubist nor anti-cubist, and yet Zrzavy’s work after 1912 would not have been possible without his oblique contact with cubism: it just goes to show how far cubism could reach, and how it could lose everything about itself and still exert some arcane pressure on new painting. So in the end Semon on the Mountain must still be cubism, washed up on some unimaginably distant shore.

* Part Two – 13 – 7: Missing the point

Not only is it possible to miss the point of major masters and movements: it is the usual state of affairs. Most artists, historians, and critics, fail to see what is essential in most painting. It can be next to impossible to winnow the worthwhile from the transitory, especially when a movement is still in progress and no one has a good perspective on it. In the late 1970s, when the French minimalist movement called Supports/Surfaces was in full swing, Pierre Buraglio made several works that use actual windowframes.33 He took old frames, often ones that had been repainted many times, and put new glass in them, or stretched wires where the glass had been. Fenêtre (1977) is a three-pane window, painted an unpleasant light green and set with several sheets of glass—blue in the center, and split panes of blue and white at the top and bottom. The glass is fresh, and recalls Donald Judd’s industrial-quality constructions; but the frame is delapidated, and is reminiscent of Duchamp’s battered Fresh Widow or even the Spanish door in Etant donées. Several decades after Supports/Surfaces Fenêtre does not quite work, because the painterly quality of the frames does not serve minimalism’s purpose. Supports/Surfaces embraced the accidental qualities of supports more than American minimalism, but at the time it must have been less clear that what is at stake in minimalism is the erasure, or minimalization, of painterly plenitude. It is just as easy to miss the point in emulating older art. There is a kind of artwork—I would like to think it is in gthe majority—that is kept alive by its complexities, by the contradictions and irresolutions that provoke continued reassessment. Painters who emulate such work tend to look for straightforward qualities in order to simplify their models and render them assimilable. To take a famous example: historians have not yet decided what is so compelling about Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère but it certainly has something to do with the combination of inconsistent mirror reflections and the barmaid’s vacant face. In a sense, we are her customers, but in another sense the man in the top hat is her customer—the possibilities are hard to juggle, and it is very likely Manet did not think them through.34 All that is missed in Marcel Leprin’s La belle carabatière, where a happy barmaid looks off to one side, entirely evading the question of customers, the ennui of her job, the fascination of the gaze, and even the Montmartre ambience (plate ).35 Leprin’s style is a little flattened, in the manner of Suzanne Valodon, and that helps smooth out Manet’s rough edges and ensure the viewer is entertained and untroubled. Anyone can miss a point, either in an ongoing style or in an historical one. The subject of this chapter is probably the commonest fault of failed painting, and it is a criterion I have been tempted to take as a guiding concept. A painter like Adolphe Monticelli ([ ]), so irreparably out touch with the most interesting painting of his time, could be accused of many things, and found wanting by most of the criteria I am exploring. But most importantly he fundamentally missed the point of much of Western painting: he mistook his idols Titian and Van Dyck (conflating the two, which was a common late nineteenth-century misapprehension shared by Watts and others); he Part Two – 14 – 7: Missing the point

made egregious miscalculations about the nature of western painterly technique (equating it with freeform palette-knife work); he misgauged the importance of painters like Courbet and Manet; and he missed the strengths of secondary masters like Diaz and Corot.36 After 1871 Monticelli repudiated many older artists, opening the way to his mature style at the cost of missing the point—the force, the meaning, the importance—of virtually all Western post-Renaissance painting. If even populist art publications have a hard time excusing Monticelli, the reason may be less a matter of his lack of skill, his sometimes astonishingly primitive style, his sentimentality, his bourgeois vulgarity, his aristocratic pretensions, his misuse of photography, his regionalism (he remained devoted to Marseilles), his lack of irony about his work, or even his many attempts at anachronism, than the fact that he did not comprehend his chosen métier.37 Or consider André Beaurepaire’s painting called Entre terre et mer (plate ).38 At first glance it is a billowing abstraction, with a profusion of brick-red sails or clouds. Yet the whole seems to be disposed in a familiar pattern, and there are some cut-out figures huddled in the center. Then all at once it is clearly Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. A large white shape at top center is the sail, and there is Géricault’s dark sky, the blue sea, the tilted mast, and the famous diagonal thrust. It is Géricault’s painting, made abstract and decorative (Beaurepaire has had a long career designing theater backdrops). Entre terre et mer misunderstands the Raft of the Medusa in part because Beaurepaire does not take Géricault’s purpose seriously. The Raft is about a specific tragedy and the ensuing scandal, and it is also about the Davidian tradition of history painting. The Raft was Géricault’s response to the Davidian project, and as such it was a matter of high ambition (even today, it dwarfs the other paintings in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre): but Beaurepaire discards that along with Géricault’s politics. Entre terre et mer has something of Géricault’s composition, but it forgets the original’s meaning and takes it as a clever arrangement of diagonals and curves. That is a double misunderstanding: Beaurepaire doesn’t see, or doesn’t care, that the composition is enmeshed with Géricault’s purpose; and he doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, that composition per se is always so enmeshed. I say Beaurepaire misunderstands Géricault in part because he doesn’t take Géricault seriously. The other side of this coin is that Beaurepaire could also have set out to travesty Géricault, in the manner of Larry Rivers’s or Mel Ramos’s appropriations of Old Masters—but that does not seem to have occurred to him either. Beaurepaire’s painting is a triple misunderstanding, but it is still a relatively simple case. What are we to say about Géricault’s own misunderstandings—if they can even be called by that word—in his own earlier paintings? As Thomas Crow has pointed out, Géricault’s horses fail by Davidian standards, because their volumes are ineptly, “romantically,” imagined. In a painter of Géricault’s stature, there would hardly be sense in saying that those paintings take a wrong turn, or Part Two – 15 – 7: Missing the point

fail to come to terms with David’s work: except for the fact that Géricault himself turned back to David in the Raft.39 I am not well enough versed in this period to elaborate on these speculations, but I want to suggest that misunderstanding is a viable category for all levels of achievement. As Harold Bloom pointed out long ago, every artist can misunderstand important, even essential aspects of previous work, and those misprisions will direct what can be done for better or worse. The stronger the reading, Bloom thinks, the greater the artist. Perhaps: but weak misreadings can be found in strong art, and so can strong correct readings. When a painter’s elisions of the past appear as errors and oversights, then it may be time to call the work a failure. The worst thing about missing the point is that it takes you out of the stream of history (and puts you in books like this one). I’ll close with a final example—a famous problem and an artist who couldn’t see it at all. Clark spends a long, intricate chapter in Farewell to An Idea on the photographs that appeared in Vogue in 1951, in which a fashion model posed in front of Pollock’s paintings. They were good publicity but they also presented a severe problem for Pollock and abstract expressionism by implying Pollock made good wallpaper. Vogue proposed, in effect, that interior decoration was “the sort of place reserved within capitalism for painting like Pollock’s.” It is an ongoing problem in the reception of abstract expressionism. The answer, Clark says, lies in part in painting’s refusal to seal itself into aesthetics: its ability to be both camouflaged as ornament in someone’s livingroom, and also a place where “Gothic-ness, paranoia, and resentment” can make themselves heard.40 The Vogue spread, and the problems it raises, have been widely studied, and they are at the crux of current conversations about visual culture and the relation between high and popular art. What is to be said, then, about Hans Stuchlik’s Two Models on No. 125 (plate )? The painting is fairly complex—there are two models present, one occluded except for a hip, a foot, and some hair—but the idea is painfully simple. Stuchlik also paints nude models (including a nude self-portrait) in front of generic gestural abstractions, and he paints contorted groups of nude models, wearing grotesque masks, wrestling with canvases by Albers, Haring, Lichtenstein, Picasso, Baselitz, and Wesselman.41 A picture called The War of Forms I (Kampf der Formen I, 1985) has models wearing Speedo briefs, with pointy-nosed masks tied to their rear ends, their backs, and their breasts, doing frenzied obeisance to a monument made of paintings tied in a bundle. The message is evidently the freedom of human movement and life in the face of the oppressive Old Masters. For me Stuchlik’s pictures have the opposite effect: they demonstrate decisively that freedom cannot be so easily bought. Stuchlik has entirely missed the point of Pollock’s anxiety about decoration, and pushed himself right out of the conversations about modernism. Part Two – 16 – 7: Missing the point Part Two – 17 – 7: Missing the point

Notes to Part II, Chapter 5

1 Mitchell, “The Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, edited by Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 20. I thank Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith for this reference; he quotes it in “The Life of the Land [on Elizabeth Magill],” exh. brochure (Southampton: Southampton City Gallery, 1999), n.p. 2 In addition to sources cited below, see: Miroslav Lamac, Modern Czech Painting, 1907-1917, translated from Czech by Arnost Jappel (Prague: Artia, 1967); 1909-1925, Impressionismo, simbolismo, cubismo: arte a Praga: arte a Parigi [exhibition of paintings from the National Gallery, Prague] (Milan: Electa, 1988). [3! 708.37 P912I] 3 For Russian cubism, see Kirill Zdanevich and Cubo-Futurism, Tiflis 1918-1920 (New York: Rachel Adler Gallery, 1987); and Juliette Stapanian, [Vladimir] Mayakovsky’s Cubo-Futurist Vision (Houston: Rice University Press, 1986). The Russian cubist Daniel Wladimir Baranoff Rossiné (1889-1944) is studied in Pierre Breuillaud-Minondin Marie José Mausset, Baranoff Rossine" Pierre Breuillaud-Limondin (Paris: Université de Paris VIII, 1980), and see also Jean Claude Marcadé, L’avant garde russe (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). [pamphlets P-02230] Swiss examples are reproduced in Dieter Koepplin, Kubismus: Zeichnungen und Druckgraphik aus dem Kupferstichkabinett Basel (Basel: Das Museum, 1969). [3! 708.949432 O321k—check for Swiss artists] 4 Czech Modernism, 1900-1945 (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1990); Kubismus in Prag: Malerei, Skulptur, Kunstgewerbe, Architektur, edited by Ji_í Svestka und Tomas Vlcek (Stuttgart: G. Hatje, 1991; Düsseldorf: Kunstverein für fir Rheinlande und Westfalen, 1991); [4 709.437 N494] Miroslav Lamac, Cubisme Tchèque (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992); [4 709.437 L21c] Vergangene Zukunft: Tschechische Moderne, 1890 bis 1918 (Vienna: Künstlerhaus, 1993). [Tomas can sand a copy] Czech Avant-garde 1918-1938 5 The essential texts are Steinberg, “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” Other Criteria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), [ ]; and Clark, Farewell to an Idea, chapter 4, “Cubism and Collectivity,” 169-224. My own description, which largely agrees with Steinberg’s, is in Streams into Sand: Links between Renaissance and Modern Painting (New York: Gordon and Breach, forthcoming), chapter 6, “Piero, Picasso: The Aesthetics of Discontinuity.” 6 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 223. 7 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 221. 8 The words are from Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 216, 221. 10 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 212, 427 n. 36. 11 Vojtech Lahoda, ÒThe Melancholy of the Avant-Garde: Zdenek Rykr and Revision of Modernism,Ó Umení 45 no. 3-4 (1997): 298-324, p. 322, n. 2. Lahoda cites his own _esky kubismus (Prague: [ ], 1996), 114-22. 12 Nicholas Wadley, in Lamac, Modern Czech Painting, 9. 13 Antonín Procházka ([ ]jen-Listopad: Moravsk[ ] Galerie v Brne, 1982); A[ ] Kutal, Antonín Procházka (Olomouc: [ ], 1959); A[ ] Lamac, Osma a Skupina vytvarnych umelcE [The Eight and the Group of Plastic Artists] (Prague: [ ], 1988). 14 For illustrations see Lamac, Modern Czech Painting, fig. 61 and colorplates X and XIV. 15 Byd_ovská, ÒProcházka, Antonín,” Grove Dictionary of Art. 16 For reproductions see Lamac, Modern Czech Painting, colorplates I and IV, and Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, 20-21. 17 Lamac, Modern Czech Painting, 76, 104. 18 Vojtech Lahoda, “Filla, Emil,” Grove Dictionary of Art. Part Two – 18 – 7: Missing the point

19 Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, 38. 20 Filla’s words are quoted in Vojtech Lahoda, ÒIn the Distorted Mirror and Behind the Mirror,Ó in Czech Art 1900-1990 in the Collection of the Prague City Gallery, House of the Golden Ring, edited by Jaroslav Fatka (Prague: Tiskárna Flora, n.d.), 81-144, quotation on p. 88. 21 Quoted in Mahulena Neslehová, Bohumil Kubista (Prague: Odeon, 1993), 19, and in Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, 326 n. 64. 22 Modern Art in Eastern Europe, 41. The following quotation is from ibid., 47. 23 Bohumil Kubista, 1884-1918 (Prague: Na Galerie, 1993); [B 759.37 K95b] Neslehová, Bohumil Kubista; Jaroslav Sedláfi, Bohumil Kubista (Bratislava: [ ] , 1976). 24 Sedláfi, ÒKubista, Bohumil,Ó op. cit. 25 Lahoda, “The Primal Head: Picasso’s Head of Fernande (1909) from Vincenc Kramá_’s Collection, and Czech Cubism,” Bulletin of the National Gallery in Prague 3-4 (1993-1994): 92- 103, quotation on p. 92. 26 Lahoda, “The Primsl Head,” 95-96, 94 respectively. 27 Jaroslav Sedláfi, ÒKubista, Bohumil,Ó Grove Dictionary of Art. 28 See Vojtach Lahoda, ÒSpalá, Václav,Ó Grove Dictionary of Art. [Editor: insert ÒÿÓ over the ÒaÓ in VojtachÑnote the name also occurs in 2 other footnotes, and once in the text.] 29 The painting is reproduced in Lamac, Modern Czech Painting, fig. 72. 30 Lenka Byd_ovská, ÒZrzavy, Jan,Ó Grove Dictionary of Art. 31 Lahoda, “The Primal Head,” 100. 32 Jan Zrzavy, 1890-1977: Vystava ke stému vyrocí narození (Prague: Narodní Galerie, 1991). See also Dílo Jana Zrzavého, 1906-1940 (Jan ZrzavyÕs Work, 1906-1940] (Prague: [ ], 1941), a major mid-life retrospective; and Jan Zrzavy, edited by J[ ] Brabcová (Prague: National Gallery, 1990). 33 [Pierre Buraglio] 34 Twelve Views of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère, edited by Bradford Collins ([ ]); Thierry de Duve, [ ], and my response, “[ ],” Ibid [ ]. 35 [Marcel Leprin (d. 1933)] 36 For [ ] Diaz, see [ ]. 37 Jean Bardot, “Monticelli, Magicien de la peintue féerique,” Le Spectacle du Monde 77 (August 1968): 85-87. 38 [André Beaurepaire] 40 Clark, Farewell, 365-66. 41 Kampf der Formen: Human Paintings von Hans Stuchlik (Aachen: Alano-Verlag, [c. 1988]).