ART CHRONICLE
93
Either way, the Cubists ended up by doing with form what the Impres–
sionists, when they precipitated their objects out of a mist of paint flecks,
had only begun to do with color-they erased the old distinction
between object-in-front-of-background and background-behind-and–
around-object, erased it at
l~ast
as something felt rather than merely
read....
Picasso and Braque started Cubism; Leger joined it. He, too, was
influenced by Cezanne after 1906, but he had used him at first for
ends closer to those of Futurism, analyzing the object to show how it
could move rather than how it managed to present a closed surface
to eye or finger. But by 1912 the main thing for him, as for Picasso
and Braque, became to assert the difference between pictorial and
three-dimensional space. Though Leger's vocabulary remained different
and its units larger in scale, his grammar became a similar one of
straight lines and faired curves. The curves predominated with him,
but the sketchy black lines that traced them left his forms just as open
in effect; and the way he modeled his roundnesses-with primary blues,
reds, or greens swatched around highlighted axes of crusty white pig–
ment laid on so dry and summarily that the canvas showed through
here and there-caused these roundnesses to be felt simultaneously as
both curved and flattened planes. The different directions in which
the cylindrical or conical forms slanted, the interspersed cubes and rec–
tangles, the equivalence of the different colors none of which advanced
or receded more than any other, the sense of volumes compressed in
ambiguous space and always presenting their broadest surfaces-all this
likewise erased the distinction between object and background, object
and ambiance. The objects, or their parts, seemed to well into visibility
out of a background of similar, interchangea:ble elements; or it was as
if the surface were repeating itself in endless depth. The first and de–
cisive effect was of a welter of overlapping planes. To sort these into
cones, cylinders, and cubes was easy enough, but to assemble them into
recognizable objects required almost as deliberate an effort on the part
of the spectator as to read Picasso's and Braque's "analytical" Cubism.
-':And need I say that the deliberate effort contributes least in the
experience of art?
The logic of Leger's analysis is nevertheless simpler than Picasso's
or Braque's. H e dissects broadly, articulating objects into their anatomical
units of volume, which remain larger, and more obvious in their refer–
ences, than the little planes into which the other two artists chip the
surfaces of volumes. Perhaps this simplicity is what induced him, in
1913, to abandon recognizable objects altogether and paint several defin-
