PARTISAN REVIEW
and Braque had come-almost abruptly, it would seem-to a new real–
ization of, and new respect for, the nature of the picture plane itself
as a material object; and they came to the further realization that only
by transposing the internal logic by which objects are organized in
nature could aesthetic form be given to the irreducible flatness which
defined the picture plane in its inviolable quality as a material object.
This flatness became the final, all-powerful premise of the art of painting,
and the experience of nature could be transposed into it only by analogy,
not by imitative reproduction.
-Y,.
Thus the painter abandoned his interest
in the concrete appearance, for example, of a glass and tried instead to
approximate by analogy the way in which nature had married the
straight contours that defined the glass vertically to the curved ones
that defined it laterally. Nature no longer offered appearances to imitate,
but principles to parallel.
The Renaissance painter, too, had learned to organize his picture
from nature. But for him it was the logic of appearance that mattered
rather than the logic of somatic structure. He ordered his illusions by
analogy with the Renaissance view of the world as a free space in which
separate forms move. The Cubists, viewing the world as a continuum, a
dense somatic entity (as was dictated by their age), had to strive to
organize the picture-itself an object-by analogy with the single object
abstracted from surrounding space and by analogy with the space re–
lations between the different parts of one and the same object. Pictorial
space became more cohesive and cramped, not only in depth, but also
in relation to the edges of the canvas. (One can, for that matter, already
notice in Manet how much more crowded the picture begins to be toward
its edges. Think, by contrast, of the immense space in which Rem–
brandt's figures swim.)
The positivist aesthetic of the twentieth century, which refuses the
individual art the right to refer explicitly to anything beyond its own
realm of sensations, was driving the Cubist painter toward the flat, non–
illusionist picture in any case, but it is doubtful whether he would have
been able to make such superlative art of it as he did without the
guidance of nature. Forced to invent an aesthetic logic
ex nihilo
(which
never happens in art anyway), without reference to the logic by which
bodies are organized in actual space, the Cubists would never have ar–
rived at that sense of the totality, integrity, economy and indivisibility
*
The process by which Cubism, in pushing naturalism to its ultimate limits
and over-emphasizing modeling-which is perhaps the most important means of
naturalism in painting-arrived at the antithesis of naturalism, flat abstract art,
might be considered a case of "dialectical conversion."
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