If you caught my post on how Picasso actually had two eyes on one side of his head, you probably thought I was trying to be cute and clever about cubism. Well, OK, yes, I was. But underlying my attempt at humor was an idea that I’ve been playing with for the past couple of weeks. What if cubism, at its birth, was more realistic than art historians ever give it credit for being? I’m wondering if it wasn’t invented at least partly because of the direct visual encounter — particularly in the case of Braque — with the landscape of southern France.
After countless strolls in and around Ménerbes — the tiny village where I’m currently doing an artist’s residency at the Dora Maar House — I’ve realized that many of the views I encounter — if they were to be framed into rectangular planes (i.e., turned into pictures) — look exactly like cubist paintings. Obviously, some of this comes from the fact that I’m an artist who’s seen a lot of cubist paintings. All of us tend to see the world at least in part through projecting onto it what we already know.
But although my perceptions are informed by cubism, they’re also informed by countless other things — a lot of pre-modern Western art, as well as non-Western art, along with photography, movies, the computer, and specific memories from my own life. No, I think that something more is happening when I “see” cubism here in Ménerbes. I think I’m seeing it.
I was always taught that cubism represented a radical modern revolution in which the conceptual triumphed over the perceptual. When Picasso said, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them,” he was suggesting that his abstract visual language mostly derived from what he already knew about what he was looking at (and the way that he looked at things), rather than what he happened to see in front of him.
The cubists painted not the landscape, or the still life, or the person, but the act of looking at those things — the subjectivity of seeing those things. The results were jumbled-looking paintings of landscapes, still lifes, and people, where planes elide and clumsily overlap one another. The space in cubist pictures is indeterminate, rather than clearly defined or ordered so that the things within it are fixed properly and permanently in their place.
Although cubism looks abstract to you and me, the cubists insisted it was the genuine truth (i.e., realism) because it truly accounted for the way we see the world—in multiple, fractured moments that the mind speedily sorts through and then assembles into a workable whole. Unlike previous Western art, Cubism wasn’t merely a visual experience of the world. Instead, it was a conceptual, admittedly tentative, grasp of it.
But wandering around Ménerbes, one of the many “perched villages” (these are towns that cling to the tops and sides of small mountains) in this region of southern France — I’m confronting a completely different idea. What I’m seeing — directly, perceptually, and in just about every direction I look — is a whole lot of real, in-my-face, genuine cubism. I see it most clearly in the houses as they tenaciously hang onto the sides of the town. Although many of them have been here for centuries, they look as if they’ll tumble down as early as tomorrow. They’re crammed tightly together, set on masonry foundations that have in turn been tightly wedged into the limestone rock formations that mark this region. Take a look at a couple of pictures I took that are at the top of this post. I was standing on a street in one of the highest places in the village, looking over the wall down at the houses on the streets below. What I saw was an indeterminate grouping of rooftops — a kind of actual breathing, living cubism.
After Braque spent the summer of 1908 in L’Estaque — a town I’ve seen (close to Marseilles) that’s not very far from here, which clings to a cliff just like Ménerbes does — he returned to Paris carrying a pile of radical landscape paintings. They knocked the socks off Picasso. Braque had laid down the gauntlet. After daring to paint such paintings, he and Picasso became locked together in an intense frenzy of collaboration and competitiveness. Picasso famously said that they were “like two mountaineers roped together.” It took about two years from Braque’s summer visit to L’Estaque for full-fledged cubism to erupt.
No one can know what was in Braque’s mind during that summer he spent in L’Estaque. What’s clear, however, is that in ways we don’t necessarily always notice, people’s particular experiences of particular places contribute to even their most abstract ideas.
