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

"a construit et composé," in the spirit of a scientific investigator.

22 Apollinaire also praised Seurat for the meticulous attention he paid to composition,

23 and André Lhote emphasized the Cubists' interest in paintings like Le Cirque, which he saw as aiding "à déterminer les rapports qui unissent cet art systématique au Cubisme débutant in 1910."

24 The Cubists, as Lhote later remarked, borrowed directly from Neo-lmpressionism, but they did so without being preoccupied by prismatic color which had been so dear to Seurat

—and to the Fauves.

25 Such reformulations reflected the divergence of goals that occurred in 1907-1908, when avant-garde painters

—including the former Fauves

—began to favor stable, geometric forms and sober color over the fluid, organic forms and bright colors that had characterized Fauve painting. And these shifts were closely related not only to the divergent and contradictory ways in which the paintings of Seurat and Cézanne could be understood, but also to the systematic qualities that both of them seemed to have in common. Seurat's networks of dabs or dots

—and the historical account of his method given in Signac's book, D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme

—provided the basic syntactical idea on which much of the new painting was based. In effect, Signac posited the notion of the language of painting being a sign system with a fairly consistent syntax, whose organizing principles could be understood as existing separately from their semantic content. The most important innovation that came out of Neo-lmpressionism was the notion of the divided touch as a constituent element of a grid-like system of small, repetitive brush marks that clearly and systematically distinguish themselves from what they are representing, even as they are representing it: the image is seen through a kind of screen, which has an existence somewhat independent from what it represents. Interestingly, Signac considered Cézanne to be the only one of his contemporaries who was using an approach similar to Neo-lmpressionism: "Cézanne, en juxtaposant, par touches carrées et nettes, sans souci d'imitation ni d'adresse, les éléments divers des teintes décomposées, approcha davantage de la division méthodique des néo-impressionnistes."

26 Signac, focused as he was on the historical development of the idea of the systematic network of marks, saw in Cezanne's apparently systematic and repetitive paint application a kindred method. And on the surface of things, so to speak, it seemed to be such. But in fact, what Cézanne created was profoundly different

—and also more complex and difficult. (This is probably why most of the avant-garde painters who came to maturity during the first decade of the century passed through some sort of Neo-lmpressionist stage before they were able to grasp Cézanne.) In Cezanne's paintings the repetitive brush strokes do not act simply as a screen, but instead constantly interact with and interrupt the representational field into which they are set. These interruptions in the continuity of the representational field call particular attention to the internal relationships within the picture. The various formal tropes within such paintings comprise a kind of equivalent to Symbolist poetics, as described by Jean Moréas: "un style archétype et complexe: d'impollués vocables, la période qui s'arc-boute alternant avec la période aux défaillances ondulées, les pléonasmes significatifs, les mystérieuses ellipses, l'anacoluthe en suspens, tout trope hardi et multiforme."

27 This relationship between Mallarméan poetics and Cezanne's paintings was well understood by Morice (himself a poet), who in 1907 wrote of Cezanne's watercolors that they were like parts of a "Livre d'un écrivain moins occupé du sens des mots que de leurs belles sonorités; il n'achève pas toujours sa phrase ou bien, tout à son exclusive recherche, à cette perpétuelle observation de la 'copulation des syllables' (ce mot est de Mallarmé), il oublie le verbe de la proposition pincipale, ou le sujet, mais il ne manque jamais l'accord."

28 Such an emphasis on the internal language of painting necessarily allows for moments of representational ambiguity that are very much like the equivalent of semantic breakdown in Symbolist poetry. And in this context, semantic breakdown is conceived of not only as a possible by-product of certain kinds of language usage, but as a desirable

—even necessary

—element in the creation of meaning. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that it was actually Morice (rather than Vauxcelles) who first used the word "cubisme," in a review of the 1909 Salon des Indépendants. After a discussion of the stylistic changeability of Matisse and "le chemin dangereux et divers qu'il a choisi," Morice turned his attention to how artists such as Braque (whom he saw as "le chef des audacieux") had renounced such diversity. But Morice was not entirely convinced by Braque's work, and added: "Etje crois bien voir que M. Braque est victime, en somme, 'cubisme' à part, d'une admiration trop exclusive ou mal réfléchie, pour Cézanne."

29 Morice's use of the phrase "'cubisme' à part" indicates that he was as critical of the formulaic approach implied by his use of the word "cubisme" as he was of Braque's subjugation to the powerful influence of Cézanne, or of the diverse and unpredictable subjectivity of Matisse's painting. Morice's statement thus sums up one of the mam underlying issues that painters faced at the time: the perceived polarity between excessive, even aimless subjectivity and the excessively rigid use of formulae. 3. As has often been remarked, there was significant overlapping between the painters classified as Fauves and those later called Cubists, especially in the cases of Derain and Braque. And of course, as early as 1905, the impulse toward dematerialization in Matisse's painting anticipated practices later associated with the Cubists. Looked at retrospectively, several of the paintings that Matisse did in early 1907— such as Nu bleu and Nu debout (Tate Gallery)

—could easily be mistaken for proto-Cubist works; seemingly more "cubist," in fact, than anything produced by Picasso or Braque at that time. Many of the issues that preoccupied French painters between roughly 1905 and 1910 were common to both Fauves and Cubists. Rather than being seen as two completely unrelated movements, Fauvism and Cubism may more profitably be seen as two manifestations of similar concerns regarding the "situation" of painting at the time, in which ideas were being posited that went very much against the Renaissance tradition, and in which the artists involved aspired to find a more spiritual, and more independent kind of painting

—a notion of painting that would exist as a parallel or even alternative to the natural world, rather than as a direct representation of it. But at the same time, there were certain inherent contradictions built into this process. One of these had to do with the tension between what might be called the linguistic and musical aspects of painting

—between a de-