Passuth Krisztina – Szücs György – Gosztonyi Ferenc szerk.: Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2006/1)
AT HOME AND ABROAD - JACK FLAM: Fauvism, Cubism, and European Modernism
This, I believe, is why Matisse reacted so badly to the L'Estaque landscapes that Braque submitted to the jury of the 1908 Salon d'Automne, which Matisse famously criticized as being composed of "petites cubes" and voted to reject. 3 ' Given Matisse's sympathy to avant-garde painting generally, and to Cézannist painting in particular, we might well ask ourselves why he reacted so adversely to these 1908 landscapes, which Braque himself considered as homages to Cézanne. 32 I believe there were two main factors. The first is that Matisse was put off by what he perceived as the aggressive and purposeful misreading of Cézanne that Braque's canvases embodied. (And this was made even more profound by Matisse's awareness of Picasso's equally violent misreadings of Cézanne around the same time). Matisse felt that he had a privileged understanding of Cézanne, and Braque's paintings flew in the face of it —not least by the way he had translated Cezanne's approach into a kind of geometrical formula. The second had to do with a battle that was already underway, and which would be continued during the next several years, over the question: Who owns Cézanne? This was one of the struggles that dominated the period between 1907 and 1911, and which was to all intents and purposes triumphantly resolved in favor of the Cubists in Gleizes and Metzinger's Du "Cubisme." There they criticized Courbet for remaining, like the Impressionists, "l'esclave des pire conventions visuelles," because he ignored that "pour découvrir un rapport vrai il faut sacrifier mille apparences, il accepta sans nul contrôle intellectuel tout ce que sa rétine communiquait." Against this Gleizes and Metzinger set the contribution of Cézanne, which for them legitimized the dominance of Cubism: "Cézanne est l'un des plus grands parmi ceux qui orientent l'histoire. [...] Il nous apprend à dominer le dynamisme universel. Ils nous révèle les modifications que s'infligent réciproquement des objets crus inamimés. [...] Son oeuvre [...] prouve irrécusablement que la peinture n'est pas —ou n'est plus —l'art d'imiter un objet par des lignes et des couleurs, mais de donner une conscience plastique à notre instinct. Qui comprend Cézanne pressent le Cubisme. Dès maintenant nous sommes fondés à dire qu'il n'est entre cette école et les manifestations précédentes qu'une différence d'intensité et que, pour s'en assurer, il suffit d'envisager attentivement le processus de ce réalisme qui, parti de la réalité surperficielle de Courbet, s'enfonce avec Cézanne dans la réalité profonde et s'illumine en obligeant l'inconnaissable à reculer. [...] Sous peine de condamner toute la peinture moderne, nous devons tenir pour légitime le Cubisme qui la continue et, partant, voir en lui la seule conception possible actuellement de l'art pictural. Autrement dit, dans le présent le Cubisme est la peinture même." 33 The question of course was not simply who owns Cézanne, but how Cézanne was to be understood. For as with Seurat, who was alternately interpreted either in terms of color and luminosity or in terms of stability of form, so Cézanne could also be interpreted in opposing ways. If one looks back at Braque's paintings during the two years preceding 1908, one understands that the L'Estaque paintings marked a radical turning point for him. At the time that Braque had painted his first Fauve canvases, at Antwerp in the summer of 1906, he had given emphasis to luminosity and to organic forms. This latter point —the use of organic forms —is especially important. For in all of Braque's 1906 landscapes, and in those that he did at La Ciotat in 1907, even the rocks are rendered as curvilinear and made to seem organic. But in Braque's 1908 landscapes, this organic and biomorphic formal paradigm is abruptly replaced by what might be called a crystalline conception of landscape. Everything, including objects that are usually characterized by biomorphic forms, is rendered in an an angular and geometric way which makes it appear to be non-organic; and everything seems to exist in an unnaturally remote space-time continuum. Stylistically, this conception of the crystalline comes from Cezanne's late works, in which the forms became increasingly transparent and the objects they depicted were perceived as somewhat insubstantial loci of facetings, in which even solid objects were often rendered as if in terms of the faceted planes of crystals. But Cezanne's paintings, of course, also included arabesque-like curves that served as signs of the biomorphic and organic, and that to some degree rooted them in a more human space and time. The geometry of Braque's paintings, on the other hand, functioned as another kind of ideological marker, which had to do with stability rather than fluidity, with ponderousness rather than spontaneity, and with objectivity rather than subjectivity. This is not to say that these 1908 paintings by Braque —or any other Cubist paintings, for that matter —are actually any less subjective than those that Matisse had done at Collioure in 1905, or that Braque himself had done in 1907. But in the way they use geometry, these paintings assume the rhetoric of objectivity. Moreover, form and subject are more integrally —and more radically —united in these paintings than they had been in Braque's earlier works. That is, the idea of a painting being composed of a "depictive entity," of seeming to be comprised of a unified substance that has its own qualities, independent of its subject matter, is taken further than it was in his Fauve works. These first Cubist paintings were sometimes characterized in the early writings as being mineral or stone-like in nature. Morice wrote of Braque's 1908 landscapes that in them he had shaken free of "la plausibilité générale des forms," that instead "il procède d'un a-priori géométrique auquel il soumet tout le champ de sa vision, et Pablo Picasso: Paysage aux deux figures, 1908 Musée Picasso, Paris © Photo RMNI © René-Gabriel Ojéda © HUNGART 2006
