ART CHRONICLE
be
more accurate or faithful
in context
than any before. The context was
the medium, whose claims-the limitations imposed by the flat sur–
face, the canvas's shape, and the nature of the pigments-had to be
accommodated to those of nature. The previous century of painting had
erred in not granting the claims of the medium sufficiently and Cezanne,
in particular, proposed to remedy this while at the same time giving an
even more essentially accurate transcription of nature's appearance. As
it turned out, the movement that began with Cezanne eventually cul–
minated in abstract art, which permitted the claims of the medium to
over-ride those of nature almost entirely. Yet before that happened,
nature did succeed in stamping itself so indelibly on modern painting that
its stamp has remained even in an art as abstract as Mondrian's. What
was stamped was not the appearance of nature, however, but its logic.
Cubism, which effected the break with the appearance of nature,
set itself originally to the task of establishing on a flat surface the com–
pletest possible conceptual image of the structure of objects or volumes.
While the Impressionists had been interested in the purely visual sensa–
tions with which nature presented them at the given moment, the Cubists
were mainly occupied with the generalized forms and relations of the
surfaces of volumes, describing and analyzing them in a simplified way
that omitted the color and the "accidental" attributes of the objects
that served them as models. Taking their cue from Cezanne, they sought
for the decisive structure of things that lay permanently under the ac–
cidents of momentary appearance, and to do this they were willing to
violate the norms of appearance by showing an object from more than
one point of view on the same picture plane. But in the end they did
not find a completer way of describing the structure of objects on a flat
surface-blueprints and engineer's drawings could do that more ade–
quately and had already withdrawn the task from the province of art.
Instead, the Cubists found the structure of the picture. They had never
forgotten that; in fact, it was their main purpose, and their quest for a
better way of transcribing the relations of volumes had been conceived
of not as a scientific project but as a quest, ultimately, for a means of
creating more firmly organized pictures; this, they had thought, re–
quired a truer, completer imitation of nature.
But Picasso and Braque discovered that it was not the essential
description of the visible relations of volumes in nature or the more
emphatic rendition of their three-dimensionality that could guarantee
the organization of a pictorial work of art. On the contrary, to do these
things actually disrupted that organization. By dint of their efforts to
discover pictorially the structure of objects, of bodies, in nature, Picasso
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