ART CHRONICLE
THE ROLE OF NATURE IN MODERN PAINTING
"And where there is no concern for reality how can you limit
and unite plastic liberties."-Juan Gris
in
a letter to Daniel–
Henry Kahnweiler, quoted in the latter's
Juan Gris: His Lite
and Wark
(translated by Douglas Cooper).
"The difference between Expressionism and Cubism is that
of the painter's object."-Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler,
Ibid.
One of the important problems of contemporary art criticism
is to ascertain how Cubism-that purest and most unified of all art
styles since Tiepolo and Watteau-arrived at its characteristic form of
purity and unity. We know how much French painting of the forty-five
years previous to Cubism had contributed by its effort towards a more
immediate and franker realization of painting as a physical medium, with
the new recognition this entailed of the two-dimensionality of the picture
plane and of painting's right to be independent of illusion. But this
recognition was shared in the twentieth century by the Nabis, the Fauves,
and the French and German Expressionists as well as the Cubists. The
latter, however, established a larger and much more viable style than
did the other schools, a style within which at least four artists have
produced masterpieces that reach any of the summits of past art, and
a style, moreover, to which contemporary visual sensibility refers for
its most authoritative standard. And so we ask what it was that enabled
Cubism to win this supremacy. We remember that Matisse painted
his
strongest pictures, between 1910 and 1920, while under its influence.
And it was Cubism's influence that made the difference between promise
and realization in Klee's case. Whereas Kandinsky, an artist of genius,
never achieved anything even at his best that can stand up to the pro–
ductions of Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Leger in their prime, precisely
because of his failure to make a real contact with Cubism.
The decisive difference between Cubism and the other movements
appears to lie in its relation to nature. The paradox of French painting
between Courbet and Cezanne is that, while in effect departing further
and further from illusionism, it was driven in its most important mani–
festations by the conscious desire to give an account of nature that would
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