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
Georges Braque: Maisons à L'Estaque, 1908 Kunstmuseum Bern, Hermann und Margrit Rupf-Stiftung © HUNGART 2006 il pense traduire la nature entière par les combinaisons d'un petit nombre de formes absolues. [...] personne n'est moins occupé que lui de psychologie et, je pense, une pierre l'émeut autant qu'un visage." 3 " 1 The process behind the transformation of substance was also noted by the American writer Arthur Jerome Eddy: "The theory of Cubism [...] embraces the presentation of the very substance and nature of the persons and objects by means of a technic in which planes are the vital feature." 35 The new pictorial language also created a shift in the ways certain kinds of metaphors were created. In Picasso's Paysage avec deux figures of 1908, for example, the stylistic means of the painting allow the artist to conflate the reclining woman on the left with the surrounding landscape, and the standing woman on the right with the tree that she seems to be virtually part of. But the means for doing so are something like the opposite of those that Matisse had used in Japonaise au bord de l'eau. Instead of being based on a dialogue between different kinds of brushwork and color, Picasso employs an underlying formal unity that is based on the imposition of sameness rather than the exploitation of contrast. Shortly afterward, Matisse would shift his own symbolic means in response to his awareness of such Cubist devices, as can be seen in his Nu au bord de la mer of 1909. Here the painterly options that Matisse had employed in his 1905-1906 works were no longer open to him, and he instead began to use the kinds of linear conflation that Picasso had previously developed, partly in response to Matisse's own 1907 paintings. Braque's 1908 L'Estaque paintings make a claim to truth that is very different from that made by his Fauve pictures. The 1908 paintings reflect his interest in the geometric substructure (rather than the tremulous brushwork) of Cezanne's late paintings, and in the linear and stable (rather than the chromatic) aspects of Seurat's paintings. Such paintings give a sense of being normative in part because of their sense of an underlying grid that exerts an abstract conceptual pressure upon what we are looking at. They make the suggestion that we are not simply seeing a landscape but also seeing ideas. In part this is articulated by the geometry, but to a large degree it is also articulated by the sense that there is a syntax imposed on what we are shown, which acts as a systematic mediation of it. The pictorial language corresponds not so much to how we perceive the physical world, but to how thought-processes occur in the mind. Herein, I believe, resides one of the central divergences in the ways in which Fauve and Cubists responded to the relationship between painting and nature. While the Fauves were concerned with a human-scale and organic world, the painters who would soon be called Cubist emphasized the depersonalized and the mechanical. This was effected most obviously through geometry, and most extremely through the crystalline paradigm that they began to employ. Braque's 1908 L'Estaque landscapes may be seen not only as a move against Impressionism and against photographic naturalism, but also against the Fauve version of personal expression, against the very notion of individuality and subjectivity. In many ways, Cubism inherited the place formerly held by Neolmpressionism. It provided a conventional language —a kind of lingua franca —for painting, and it placed emphasis on the intellectual rather than the sensual. In doing so, it also provided a strong alternative to what many writers at the time considered to be the "decorative" nature of Fauve painting. (In a very real sense, Cubism was culturally construed as being "male" in relation to Matisse's kind of "female" decorative painting; but that issue is outside our present scope.) 36 In its claim to providing a systematic pictorial language, Cubism provided a vehicle which could be adapted and used by artists of quite various temperaments and abilities. (Gleizes and Metzinger's Du "Cubisme" is in a sense teleological, like Signac's book, in that it sees Cubism as the logical conclusion of what has come before, as "la peinture même.") Moreover, in contrast to the Fauve painters, one of the functions of the Cubists' systematic syntax (as with Neo-lmpressionism) was the disavowal of overt emotion. It provided a way of avoiding sentimentality, and also of avoiding the banality of the banal. (A similar phenomenon is apparent in literature, in the poetry of Mallarmé, or in Joyce's Ulysses, for example, where the syntactical structures perform a similar function —where the fracturing of the narrative, and the intrusion of the syntax on it, transform the very nature of the imagery.) It is no surprise that so many of the supporters of Cubism were concerned with analogies between painting and language, since so many of them were poets working in the Symbolist tradition. Although some of them had been enthusiastic about Fauve painting, their enthusiasm for it waned considerably after the invention of the more overtly sign-like and linguistic style that Cubism came to embody. And to be sure, the increasing sense of the absence of the physical subject matter in Cubist painting after 1909 must have struck a resonant chord with their awareness of a similarly pervasive sense of absence in Mallarmé's poetry.
