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Crystal:Cubism The University of Manchester Research Crystal/Cubism Link to publication record in Manchester Research Explorer Citation for published version (APA): Miller, C. F. B. (2020). Crystal/Cubism. In C. F. B. Miller, & G. Brockington (Eds.), Of Modernism: Essays in honour of Christopher Green (pp. 177-203). Paul Holberton Publishing. Published in: Of Modernism Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on Manchester Research Explorer is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Proof version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Research Explorer are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Takedown policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please refer to the University of Manchester’s Takedown Procedures [http://man.ac.uk/04Y6Bo] or contact [email protected] providing relevant details, so we can investigate your claim. Download date:03. Oct. 2021 !"#$%&' /!"#$%& !.'.#. &$(()* To !nd the connection between the inner form (forme primitive) and the outer form (sécondaire) and to deduce the latter from the former, is an interesting and delicate point in crystallography. —G.W.F. Hegel1 In Léger and the Avant-garde (1976), Christopher Green coined the phrase ‘crystal Cubism’ to denote a trend that emerged in Parisian painting in the late 1910s, cognate with the wartime Call to Order: The Cubist classicism which must have seemed imminent from 1916 on was now conclusively established, Léonce Rosenberg’s galerie de l’E"ort Moderne acting as its centre. A group style had emerged. Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret were to look back on the Cubist ‘call to order’ under the title ‘Towards a crystalline state’ (Vers un cristal), and, because of the fact that the term ‘classical Cubism’ has already found for itself a !rm historical niche, this short-lived style with its accent on clarity, purity and structure might aptly be called ‘crystal Cubism’.2 The reference was to an essay, ‘Vers le cristal’, which I would translate as ‘Towards Crystal’, !rst published in July 1924 in the Purist magazine L’Esprit nouveau, then again in Ozenfant and Jeanneret’s 1925 collection, La Peinture Moderne.3 In previous texts the Purists had identi!ed the ‘!rst epoch’ of Cubism with the production of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso from 1908 to 1912, and the ‘second epoch’ with the work of epigones such as Henri Hayden between 1912 and 1918.4 ‘Towards Crystal’ turned to a third, current phase, evident in the painting and sculpture of Braque, Picasso, Juan Gris, Henri Laurens, Fernand Léger and Jacques Lipchitz. In the practices of these artists, Ozenfant and Jeanneret claimed to discover a ‘unitary motivating idea’ (une idée motrice unitaire), a ‘common conception’ that distinguished the ‘true Detail of !g. 55: Pablo Picasso, Three Women, Cubists’ from the Cubistic kitsch of advertising and design. This new, 1908 !"" authentic Cubism aspired to ‘a state of classi!cation, condensation, !rmness, rigour [fermeté], intensity, synthesis’, a trajectory they called the ‘tendency towards crystal’: In nature, crystal is one of the phenomena that most moves us because it clearly demonstrates this tendency to apparent geometric organisation. Sometimes nature shows us the way in which its forms are constructed by the reciprocal play of internal and external forces. Crystal grows and stops growing according to the theoretical forms of geometry, and man takes pleasure in these arrangements because he !nds in them evidence [justi!cation] for the abstract conceptions of geometry: the spirit of man and nature !nd a common factor, common ground, in the crystal, in the cell, everywhere where order is perceptible to the point where it proves the laws for explaining nature, in whose legislation reason takes delight [que la raison s’est complue à édicter].5 In L’Esprit nouveau, Ozenfant and Jeanneret illustrated their postulates with two works each by Braque, Gris, Léger and Picasso, and three by Laurens. The list of ‘crystal’ Cubists expanded in La !"#$%&'(! Peinture moderne, to ‘Braque, Gris, Laurens, Léger, Lipchitz, Picasso, of etc’. Evidently, that et cetera included Ozenfant and Jeanneret themselves, as alongside four Picasso paintings and a sculpture by Lipchitz, they reproduced a still life by each of the authors.6 The 1925 Petit Larousse o"ered a working de!nition of ‘cristal’ in common parlance: ‘transparent mineral substance, taking naturally the form of a regular or symmetrical polyhedron’.7 That edition also featured ‘Cubisme’ for the !rst time: ‘Modern school of art which emerged around 1910 with the intention of representing objects by synthesising them into geometric forms.’8 Synthesis and geometry: key terms in what follows. The Purists claimed to value crystal because it instantiated the ‘theoretical forms’ or ‘abstract conceptions’ of geometry, presenting a model for the mathematization of the aesthetic. ‘The essential point’, wrote the Abbé René-Just Haüy, whose work at the end of the eighteenth century transformed mineral crystallography from speculative natural history into a modern mathematical science, ‘is that theory and crystallisation ultimately come together and !nd common ground’.9 Although scienti!c crystallography had undergone a revolution with the discovery of liquid crystals in 1888 and the development of X-ray di"raction from 1912, the Purists meant this !"# 59. Pablo Picasso, Glass and Pipe, 1917. Reproduced in L’Esprit nouveau, Vol. 25, 1924 more traditional concept, analogous to what Michel Serres would ! . have in mind when he later wrote that the ‘object of philosophy, of " . # classical science, is the crystal and, in general, the stable solid, with . $%&&'( clear outlines. The system is closed, it is in equilibrium.’10 Among the illustrations to ‘Vers le cristal’, perhaps the one that conformed most closely to Ozenfant and Jeanneret’s programme, was Picasso’s little Glass and Pipe (1917, !g. 59).11 The image subordinates its objects to elementary geometry. The table, central background !eld, pipe and glass are plane !gures, closed polygonal circuits, executed with a straight edge. By comparison with high analytic Cubism, the structural opposition between !gure and ground is stable (though the background and the table overlap, tilting towards ambiguity). With its sharp vertices and discrete elements, the Glass and Pipe seems to answer the Purist call for hardness and ‘classi!cation’. At the level of the picture’s irregular polygons, its ‘crystalline’ qualities are metaphorical at best. But in the glittering particles of sand that make up the ground, the pipe and the pro!le of the glass, there is probably quartz, a literal crystal.12 ‘Vers le cristal’ echoed Picasso’s !rst public statement, which he made in Spanish to Marius de Zayas before it was translated into English and published in May 1923 in the New York magazine, The Arts. Rejecting the claim that Cubism was an ‘art of transition’, Picasso both likened Cubist painting to crystal, and asserted its autonomy at the level of the medium: !"$ Cubism is not either a seed or a foetus, but an art dealing primarily with forms, and when a form is realized it is there to live its own life. A mineral substance, having geometric formation, is not made so for transitory purposes, it is to remain what it is and will always have its own form. […] Mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis, music, and whatnot, have been related to Cubism to give it an easier interpretation. All this has been pure literature, not to say nonsense, which brought bad results, blinding people with theories. Cubism has kept itself within the limits and limitations of painting, never pretending to go beyond it.13 Crystal here conveys the artwork’s ideal, ahistorical, autonomous being, which ‘will always have its own form’. Mineral geometry models the artwork’s supposed transcendence of temporality, a conventional modernist supposition.14 The telling paradox is that in the same breath as a#rming the artwork’s autonomy from discourse, Picasso uses crystal to put Cubism into words. More than a few commentators have ignored Picasso’s warning against searching through scienti!c ‘contexts’ for Cubism’s meaning, !"#$%&'(! whether in fourth-dimensional mathematics, ether physics, general of relativity, or beyond.15 One or two exceptions aside, the science of crystals has been absent from the literature.16 Nevertheless, it is striking that whenever Cubism’s conventional metalanguage invokes planes, facets, arrises, striations, or even lattices, it rehearses the lexicon of crystallography. What follows will address the relation between Cubism and the discourse of crystals. This discourse inscribed Cubism’s horizon of expectations. In the !rst three decades of the last century, a mineral crystal aesthetics reticulated European art theory. The nineteenth-century genealogy of this aesthetics extended through Hegel to scienti!c crystallography. A diagram of this !eld will show points of intersection between crystallography and Cubism’s reception, and indicate the operation of the crystal metaphor in Cubist painting itself. My intention, however, is not to propose another set of ‘sources’ for Cubism. To the contrary, my line of inquiry will pivot from the science of crystals to a perceptual problematic at the interface between the corporeal observer and the graphic representation of polyhedral forms. From the encounter between mathematized objectivity and the contingency of subjective vision arises the motif of Cubism’s criticality – which is to say, its negativity. ▫ !#% To the extent that the Purists’ crystal artwork was an ‘act of pure creation’, it spoke to the post-Kantian assumptions of early Cubist criticism.17 Yet the valorization of polyhedral geometry implied a more ancient pedigree in Western idealism.
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