'Essential Cubism' reviewed "The last optimists in Western art"

Scan page 11

many-sided nature WHAT does your mother look tike? It probably wouldn't be merely diplomacy which prevents you from describing her as a complex fragmented pattern of angular shapes.

That, however, is how you might describe a famous work called "My Mother" by Juan Gris, one of the handful of artists who revolutionised painting in the first two decades of this century.

Gris's more famous artistic comrades were George Braque and Pablo Picasso and the movement, or rather style, which they collectively established became known as Cubism - a name coined by art critics and not by the painters themselves.

Only the paintings done by Picasso and Braque in 1907 and 1908 can strictly be called culture. cubist (literally made up of cubes). But the name is now AQUESTION OF SOLIDARIT Ipdependent Trade Unions in South Africa Bob Sutcliffe reviews the 'Cubism' exhibition which is at the Tate Gallery until July 10 used to describe a whole series of related paintings done from 1907 to about 1919.

That, at least, was the time when Cubism was a revolutionary movement in art - a movement in the vanguard of The Marxist critic •John Berger, one of the most illuminPublished by Socialist Forum for Southern Africa Solidarity.

Available (at 90p plus 20p post) c/o SO, 28 Middle Lane, London N8.

do6 BOb Fine ating writers on Cubism, has argued that, though Cubists like Braque continued painting in the style after 1920, it had by then become a conservative form. Cubism was revolutionary for only a brief moment of history.

Beautiful

The beautifully compiled exhibition, Essential Cubism, at the Tate Gallery pulls together a wonderfully large collection of paintings from that revolutionary movement.

How revolutionary was it? Some idea of that can be given by the way even today - three-quarters of a century after they were painted - many of these paintings, though very familiar, lock extremely modern.

How much more modern they must have seemed in 1907! This exhibition is designed in such a way that you can get some idea of what that initial impact must have been.

The first picture you see is a landscape by Braque which looks almost exactly like the paintings which the great landscape painter Paul Cezanne was doing at the same time. It is as if the seedling of cubism in these landscapes was transplanted from Cezanne to Braque. since the pictures are presented shortly in roughly chronological order, how the seedling developed in an explosion of growth in the fertile imagination of Picasso, Braque and their friends.

Juan Gris expressed the nature of the revolution wrought by the Cubists as "simply a new way of representing the world" Picasso, in apparent contrast to this, said that 'Cubism has kept itself within the limitations of painting, never pretending to go beyond it."

These statements express two sides of Cubism. It was about the world in the sense that none of the Cubist paintings are abstract, however much they may look it at first sight. They are all paintings of something in the world.

Juan Gris's picture of his mother might not be acceptable to the state authorities as a passport likeness, but it is still a picture of his mother and not just a design.

But the Cubists were not so revolutionary in their choice of subject matter even though they chose to paint everyday objects rather than exotic or sophisticated ones - more gin bottes and daily newspapers than bowls of flowers or elegant people and buildings and views. n their choice of materials - ney were more revolutionar especially the collages made of wallpaper and newspapers. In this, ^ John Berger observes "they challenged the whole bourgeois concept of art as something precious, valuable and to be prized like jewellery."

But Cubism's real revolution was in how it depicted these things. Its "new way" consisted in finding an answer to the contradiction between the fourdimensional nature of reality and the two dimensional 'prison" of painting which hitherto seemed forced to restrict its depiction of reality to a single vantage point and a single instant of time.

Cubism, by shattering its objects, was a way of viewing them simultaneously from different vantage points - or showing how their appearance changed during a period of time. It was in Berger's words "the most complex view of reality ever attempted in the visual arts."

The object of a Cubist painting is integrated and whole in the mind of the artist. But in the two dimensional painting it has been fragmented, almost dissected, to reveal its interconnected many-sided nature.

These fragmented images can then be reintegrated in the mind of the beholder of the painting.

One of the things which makes these Cubist paintings exciting to look at is that a creative effort is clearly required of the viewer.

John Berger has written that 'Before Cezanne, every painting was to some extent like a view seen through a window. Courbet had tried to open the window and climb out. Cezanne broke the glass. The room became part of the landscape, the viewer part of the view. (Success and Failure of Picasso, p. 55).

Unfortunately if you wanted to become part of the view in this exhibition to the extent of buying the catalogue you would have to pay the outrageous sum of £10.

For 40p you can buy a fairly informative Tate Gallery booklet called 'What is Cubism?" This, however, is an example of the tendency condemned by John Berger to see Cubists entirely in the context of art history, thereby losing their historical significance.

Berger's own writing on Cubism is scandalously not even mentioned in the pamphlet's bibliography. For that reason it is worth ending this review with a lengthy quotation from John Berger's own evaluation of the historical significance of Cubism:

"Usually it is explained purely in terms of art history. By so-called Marxist critics in Moscow it is condemned together with Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism, as modernist and decadent. To do this is ludicrously unhistorical.

'Dadaism and Surrealism were the result of the 1914 war. Cubism was only possible because such a war had not yet been imagined.

"As a group the Cubists " vere the last optimists in West ter art, and by the same token t heir work still represents the n nost developed way of seeing yet achieved. 'It is to Cubism that the next serious innovators are bound to return.

•'Today the magnitude of the Cubists' achievement is unappreciated in the West beca luse of our overpowering sense of insecurity and An; T8I (Their paintings fetch b ligh prices - but as treasures f rom another world).

"It is unappreciated in the Soviet Union because there the official view of the visual art 8 is still that of the ninetee inth cent Cubis i achievemell the the appreciated, it will not- be possible to explain it in term 8 of personal genius alone. The comparison with the ei arty Renaissance will again apply.

•The Cubists were at a pi Dint of startling coincidence. T hey inherited from ninetee inth century art the revolution promise of dialectical mater ialsim. They sensed at the t of this century the promise 1 of the new means of product hon with all its world implicatio Ins. They expressed their con quent enthusiasm for the fut ure in terms which are justified by modern science.

"And they did this in the i one decade in recent history whet D it was possible to possess si uch enthusiasm and yet igno ere, without deliberate evasion, the political complexities and ter involved. They painted the gr bod omens of the modern world" (Success and Failure of Picas pp. 70-71).

Scan page 12

Socialist Organiser no. 132 May 19 1983 Page 12 am at Brockwell Park, Brixton, and march to Hyde Park. Called by National

----- pull-quotes -----

Lawrence Welch

Dissecting reveal

the obiect to object ded