by Peter Watson
Not Picasso. Until then, he had been feeling his way. He had a recognisable style, but the images he had painted – of poor acrobats and circus people – were hardly avant-garde. They could even be described as sentimental. His approach to art had not yet matured; all he knew, looking around him, was that in his art he needed to do as the other moderns were doing, as Strauss and Schoenberg and Matisse were doing: to shock. He saw a way ahead when he observed that many of his friends, other artists, were visiting the ‘primitive art’ departments at the Louvre and in the Trocadéro’s Museum of Ethnography. This was no accident. Darwin’s theories were well known by now, as were the polemics of the social Darwinists. Another influence was James Frazer, the anthropologist who, in The Golden Bough, had collected together in one book many of the myths and customs of different races. And on top of it all, there was the scramble for Africa and other empires. All of this produced a fashion for the achievements and cultures of the remoter regions of ‘darkness’ in the world – in particular the South Pacific and Africa. In Paris, friends of Picasso started buying masks and African and Pacific statuettes from bric-a-brac dealers. None were more taken by this art than Matisse and Derain. In fact, as Matisse himself said, ‘On the Rue de Rennes, I often passed the shop of Père Sauvage. There were Negro statuettes in his window. I was struck by their character, their purity of line. It was as fine as Egyptian art. So I bought one and showed it to Gertrude Stein, whom I was visiting that day. And then Picasso arrived. He took to it immediately.’53
He certainly did, for the statuette seems to have been the first inspiration toward Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. As the critic Robert Hughes tells us, Picasso soon after commissioned an especially large canvas, which needed reinforced stretchers. Later in his life, Picasso described to André Malraux, the French writer and minister of culture, what happened next: ‘All alone in that awful museum [i.e. the Trocadéro], with masks, dolls made by the redskins, dusty manikins, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism-painting – yes absolutely…. The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things…. The Negro pieces were intercesseurs, mediators; ever since then I’ve known the word in French. They were against everything – against unknown, threatening spirits. I always looked at fetishes. I understood; I too am against everything. I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! … all the fetishes were used for the same thing. They were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent. They’re tools. If we give spirits a form, we become independent. Spirits, the unconscious (people still weren’t talking about that very much), emotion – they’re all the same thing. I understood why I was a painter.’54
Jumbled up here are Darwin, Freud, Frazer, and Henri Bergson, whom we shall meet later in this chapter. There is a touch of Nietzsche too, in Picasso’s nihilistic and revealing phrase, ‘everything is an enemy! … They were weapons.’55 Demoiselles was an attack on all previous ideas of art. Like Elektra and Erwartung, it was modernistic in that it was intended to be as destructive as it was creative, shocking, deliberately ugly, and undeniably crude. Picasso’s brilliance lay in also making the painting irresistible. The five women are naked, heavily made up, completely brazen about what they are: prostitutes in a brothel. They stare back at the viewer, unflinching, confrontational rather than seductive. Their faces are primitive masks that point up the similarities and differences between so-called primitive and civilised peoples. While others were looking for the serene beauty in non-Western art, Picasso questioned Western assumptions about beauty itself, its links to the unconscious and the instincts. Certainly, Picasso’s images left no one indifferent. The painting made Georges Braque feel ‘as if someone was drinking gasoline and spitting fire,’ a comment not entirely negative, as it implies an explosion of energy.56 Gertrude Stein’s brother Leo was racked with embarrassed laughter when he first saw Les Demoiselles, but Braque at least realised that the picture was built on Cézanne but added twentieth-century ideas, rather as Schoenberg built on Wagner and Strauss.
Cézanne, who had died the previous year, achieved recognition only at the end of his life as the critics finally grasped that he was trying to simplify art and to reduce it to its fundamentals. Most of Cézanne’s work was done in the nineteenth century, but his last great series, ‘The Bathers,’ was produced in 1904 and 1905, in the very months when, as we shall see, Einstein was preparing for publication his three great papers, on relativity, Brownian motion, and quantum theory. Modern art and much of modern science was therefore conceived at exactly the same moment. Moreover, Cézanne captured the essence of a landscape, or a bowl of fruit, by painting smudges of colour – quanta – all carefully related to each other but none of which conformed exactly to what was there. Like the relation of electrons and atoms to matter, orbiting largely empty space, Cézanne revealed the shimmering, uncertain quality beneath hard reality.
In the year after Cézanne’s death, 1907, the year of Les Demoiselles, the dealer Ambroise Vollard held a huge retrospective of the painter’s works, which thousands of Parisians flocked to see. Seeing this show, and seeing Demoiselles so soon after, Braque was transformed. Hitherto a disciple more of Matisse than Picasso, Braque was totally converted.
Six feet tall, with a large, square, handsome face, Georges Braque came from the Channel port of Le Havre. The son of a decorator who fancied himself as a real painter, Braque was very physical: he boxed, loved dancing, and was always welcome at Montmartre parties because he played the accordion (though Beethoven was more to his taste). ‘I never decided to become a painter any more than I decided to breathe,’ he said. ‘I truly don’t have any memory of making a choice.’57 He first showed his paintings in 1906 at the Salon des Indépendants; in 1907 his works hung next to those of Matisse and Derain, and proved so popular that everything he sent in was sold. Despite this success, after seeing Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, he quickly realised that it was with Picasso that the way forward lay, and he changed course. For two years, as cubism evolved, they lived in each other’s pockets, thinking and working as one. ‘The things Picasso and I said to each other during those years,’ Braque later said, ‘will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them any more. It was like being two mountaineers roped together.’58
Before Les Demoiselles, Picasso had really only explored the emotional possibilities of two colour ranges – blue and pink. But after this painting his palette became more subtle, and more muted, than at any time in his life. He was at the time working at La-Rue-des-Bois in the countryside just outside Paris, which inspired the autumnal greens in his early cubist works. Braque, meanwhile, had headed south, to L’Estaque and the paysage Cézanne near Aix. Despite the distance separating them, the similarity between Braque’s southern paintings of the period and Picasso’s from La-Rue-des-Bois is striking: not just the colour tones but the geometrical, geological simplicity – landscapes lacking in order, at some earlier stage of evolution perhaps. Or else it was the paysage Cézanne seen close up, the molecular basis of landscape.59
Though revolutionary, these new pictures were soon displayed. The German art dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler liked them so much he immediately organised a show of Braque’s landscapes that opened in his gallery in the rue Vignon in November 1908. Among those invited was Louis Vauxcelles, the critic who had cracked the joke about Donatello and the Fauves. In his review of the show, he again had a turn of phrase for what he had seen. Braque, he said, had reduced everything to ‘little cubes.’ It was intended to wound, but Kahnweiler was not a dealer for nothing, and he made the most of this early example of a sound bite. Cubism was born.60
It lasted as a movement and style until the guns of August 1914 announced the beginning of World War I. Braque went off to fight and was wounded, after which the relationship between him and Picasso was never the
same again. Unlike Les Demoiselles, which was designed to shock, cubism was a quieter, more reflective art, with a specific goal. ‘Picasso and I,’ Braque said, ‘were engaged in what we felt was a search for the anonymous personality. We were inclined to efface our own personalities in order to find originality.’61 This was why cubist works early on were signed on the back, to preserve anonymity and to keep the images uncontaminated by the personality of the painter. In 1907— 8 it was never easy to distinguish which painter had produced which picture, and that was how they thought it should be. Historically, cubism is central because it is the main pivot in twentieth-century art, the culmination of the process begun with impressionism but also the route to abstraction. We have seen that Cézanne’s great paintings were produced in the very months in which Einstein was preparing his theories. The whole change that was overtaking art mirrored the changes in science. There was a search in both fields for fundamental units, the deeper reality that would yield new forms. Paradoxically, in painting this led to an art in which the absence of form turned out to be just as liberating.
Abstraction has a long history. In antiquity certain shapes and colours like stars and crescents were believed to have magical properties. In Muslim countries it was and is forbidden to show the human form, and so abstract motifs – arabesques – were highly developed in both secular and religious works of art. As abstraction had been available in this way to Western artists for thousands of years, it was curious that several people, in different countries, edged toward abstraction during the first decade of the new century. It paralleled the way various people groped toward the unconscious or began to see the limits of Newton’s physics.
In Paris, both Robert Delaunay and František Kupka, a Czech cartoonist who had dropped out of the Vienna art school, made pictures without objects. Kupka was the more interesting of the two. Although he had been convinced by Darwin’s scientific theory, he also had a mystical side and believed there were hidden meanings in the universe that could be painted.62 Mikalojus-Konstantinas Ciurlionis, a Lithuanian painter living in Saint Petersburg, began his series of ‘transcendent’ pictures, again lacking recognisable objects and named after musical tempos: andante, allegro, and so on. (One of his patrons was a young composer named Igor Stravinsky.)63 America had an early abstractionist, too, in the form of Arthur Dove, who left his safe haven as a commercial illustrator in 1907 and exiled himself to Paris. He was so overwhelmed by the works of Cézanne that he never painted a representational picture again. He was given an exhibition by Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer who established the famous ‘291’ avant-garde gallery in New York at 291 Broadway.64 Each of these artists, in three separate cities, broke new ground and deserve their paragraph in history. Yet it was someone else entirely who is generally regarded as the father of abstract art, mainly because it was his work that had the greatest influence on others.
Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. He had intended to be a lawyer but abandoned that to attend art school in Munich. Munich wasn’t nearly as exciting culturally as Paris or Vienna, but it wasn’t a backwater. Thomas Mann and Stefan George lived there. There was a famous cabaret, the Eleven Executioners, for whom Frank Wedekind wrote and sang.65 The city’s museums were second only to Berlin in Germany, and since 1892 there had been the Munich artists’ Sezession. Expressionism had taken the country by storm, with Franz Marc, Aleksey Jawlensky, and Kandinsky forming ‘the Munich Phalanx.’ Kandinsky was not as precocious as Picasso, who was twenty-six when he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In fact, Kandinsky did not paint his first picture until he was thirty and was all of forty-five when, on New Year’s Eve, 1910–11, he went to a party given by two artists. Kandinsky’s marriage was collapsing at that time, and he went alone to the party, where he met Franz Marc. They struck up an accord and went on to a concert by a composer new to them but who also painted expressionist pictures; his name was Arnold Schoenberg. All of these influences proved crucial for Kandinsky, as did the theosophical doctrines of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. Blavatsky predicted a new age, more spiritual, less material, and Kandinsky (like many artists, who banded into quasi-religious groups) was impressed enough to feel that a new art was needed for this new age.66 Another influence had been his visit to an exhibition of French impressionists in Moscow in the 1890s, where he had stood for several minutes in front of one of Claude Monet’s haystack paintings, although Kandinsky wasn’t sure what the subject was. Gripped by what he called the ‘unsuspected power of the palette,’ he began to realise that objects no longer need be an ‘essential element’ within a picture.67 Other painters, in whose circle he moved, were groping in the same direction.68
Then there were the influences of science. Outwardly, Kandinsky was an austere man, who wore thick glasses. His manner was authoritative, but his mystical side made him sometimes prone to overinterpret events, as happened with the discovery of the electron. ‘The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly, the stoutest walls crumbled. Everything became uncertain, precarious and insubstantial.’69 Everything?
With so many influences acting on Kandinsky, it is perhaps not surprising he was the one to ‘discover’ abstraction. There was one final precipitating factor, one precise moment when, it could be said, abstract art was born. In 1908 Kandinsky was in Murnau, a country town south of Munich, near the small lake of Staffelsee and the Bavarian Alps, on the way to Garmisch, where Strauss was building his villa on the strength of his success with Salomé. One afternoon, after sketching in the foothills of the Alps, Kandinsky returned home, lost in thought. ‘On opening the studio door, I was suddenly confronted by a picture of indescribable and incandescent loveliness. Bewildered, I stopped, staring at it. The painting lacked all subject, depicted no identifiable object and was entirely composed of bright colour-patches. Finally I approached closer and only then saw it for what it really was – my own painting, standing on its side … One thing became clear to me: that objectiveness, the depiction of objects, needed no place in my paintings, and was indeed harmful to them.’70
Following this incident, Kandinsky produced a series of landscapes, each slightly different from the one before. Shapes became less and less distinct, colours more vivid and more prominent. Trees are just about recognisable as trees, the smoke issuing from a train’s smokestack is just identifiable as smoke. But nothing is certain. His progress to abstraction was unhurried, deliberate. This process continued until, in 1911, Kandinsky painted three series of pictures, called Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions, each one numbered, each one totally abstract. By the time he had completed the series, his divorce had come through.71 Thus there is a curious personal parallel with Schoenberg and his creation of atonality.
At the turn of the century there were six great philosophers then living, although Nietzsche died before 1900 was out. The other five were Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce, Edmund Husserl, William James and Bertrand Russell. At this end of the century, Russell is by far the best remembered, in Europe, James in the United States, but Bergson was probably the most accessible thinker of the first decade and, after 1907, certainly the most famous.
Bergson was born in Paris in the rue Lamartine in 1859, the same year as Edmund Husserl.72 This was also the year in which Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared. Bergson was a singular individual right from childhood. Delicate, with a high forehead, he spoke very slowly, with long breaths between utterances. This was slightly off-putting, and at the Lycée Condorcet, his high school in Paris, he came across as so reserved that his fellow students felt ‘he had no soul,’ a telling irony in view of his later theories.73 For his teachers, however, any idiosyncratic behaviour was more than offset by his mathematical brilliance. He graduated well from Condorcet and, in 1878, secured admission to the Ecole Normale, a year after Emile Durkheim, who would become the most famous sociologist of his day.74 After teaching in several schools, Bergson applied twice for a post at the Sorbonne but fai
led both times. Durkheim is believed responsible for these rejections, jealousy the motive. Undeterred, Bergson wrote his first book, Time and Free Will (1889), and then Matter and Memory (1896). Influenced by Franz Brentano and Husserl, Bergson argued forcefully that a sharp distinction should be drawn between physical and psychological processes. The methods evolved to explore the physical world, he said, were inappropriate to the study of mental life. These books were well received, and in 1900 Bergson was appointed to a chair at the Collège de France, overtaking Durkheim.
But it was L’Evolution créatrice (Creative Evolution), which appeared in 1907, that established Bergson’s world reputation, extending it far beyond academic life. The book was quickly published in English, German, and Russian, and Bergson’s weekly lectures at the Collège de France turned into crowded and fashionable social events, attracting not only the Parisian but the international elite. In 1914, the Holy Office, the Vatican office that decided Catholic doctrine, decided to put Bergson’s works on its index of prohibited books.75 This was a precaution very rarely imposed on non-Catholic writers, so what was the fuss about? Bergson once wrote that ‘each great philosopher has only one thing to say, and more often than not gets no further than an attempt to express it.’ Bergson’s own central insight was that time is real. Hardly original or provocative, but the excitement lay in the details. What drew people’s attention was his claim that the future does not in any sense exist. This was especially contentious because in 1907 the scientific determinists, bolstered by recent discoveries, were claiming that life was merely the unfolding of an already existing sequence of events, as if time were no more than a gigantic film reel, where the future is only that part which has yet to be played. In France this owed a lot to the cult of scientism popularised by Hippolyte Taine, who claimed that if everything could be broken down to atoms, the future was by definition utterly predictable.76