PARTISAN REVIEW
Pewter Plate" of 1927 (both to
be
seen at the Philadelphia Museum of
Art's recent large retrospective show of Matisse's paintings, drawings,
and sculpture) are painted in a style whose elements were formed by
1907; yet who with a real sensitivity to painting could say they are
intrinsically inferior as art to the much more historically important
pictures Mondrian and Picasso were turning out around the same time?
"It would have been rewarding if Greenberg had indicated
in what
ways
the works of [Picasso, Braque, Arp] ... have declined since the
thirties." Let me be brief. Picasso: insensitive and disruptive color,
arbi~
trary space-handling, literary distortions that lack plastic justification,
forced emotion, bombast, attempts (which seem motivated only by a
kind of despair) to demonstrate his prowess in all departments of paint–
ing (the nerviness shown here is histrionic and old-fashioned). Braque:
a growing aimlessness (at least until 1939), repetitiousness and flaccidity
of design, virtuosic color, lack of real matter. Arp: chronic poverty of
means and ideas (see his monotonous and empty sculpture of the thir–
ties). The trouble with all three artists is that they no longer keep on
re-creating the styles they work in: they simply work inside them–
something that Matisse even at his most perfunctory does not do, though
he does, I will admit, tend to relax his ambition dangerously. All this is
not to say that Picasso and Braque still do not produce very good pic–
tures from time to time;
it
is to say, however, that the general level of
their performances has declined below that of Matisse's.
But aesthetic judgments cannot be probatively demonstrated
in
words, and I beg to be excused from the rest of this futile chore.
The difference between Cubism and Abstract art is another matter,
one of description rather than judgment, and I find Mr. Morris' descrip–
tion superficial in its failure to make distinctions within Cubism itself.
"Even
in
the flattest Cubist paintings, the image . . . is 'behind the
frame'." It was of the essence of Cubism after its initial stage to situate
the image or rather the pictorial complex,
ambiguously,
leaving the eye
to doubt whether it came forward or receded. But the ambiguity itself
was weighted, and its inherent, irrevocable (and historical) tendency
was to drive the picture plane forward so that it became identical with
the physical surface of the canvas itself. This tendency makes itself very
evident in Picasso's and Braque's first collages in 1911. By 1913, when
Picasso painted his "Card Player" (in the Museum of Modern Art),
the "image" had come flush with the frame, where it remained, with a
few exceptions, during the rest of classical Cubism's life. As a matter of
fact, in such a collage as Picasso's oval "Still Life" of 1912
(in
the
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