94
PARTISAN REVIEW
itely abstract pictures with planes defining cylinders and cones that sig–
nify nothing else, and flat rectangles that define not even volume. (These
works, of which there is no example in the Chicago-Museum of Modern
Art show, all have the same title, "Contrast of Forms.") Only a short
while previously, Picasso and Braque had invented the collage, which,
for them, turned out to be a way of saving the recognizable object from
dissolution in abstract art. The object may have become for a moment
even less recognizable than before, but a searching eye could still de–
cipher it. It was Leger alone of the three master Cubists who drove
analytical Cubism to its conclusion. Not that he arrived at the flat
picture, as Mondrian, drawing the very ultimate consequences of Cubism,
was to do, or that he even approached the flatness of Picasso's and
Braque's collages: the priority analytical Cubism gave the picture plane
was never absolute, and Leger always held on to some sort of illusion
of depth. But he did accept, as Picasso and Braque did not, the full
implication of the method of analytical Cubism: namely, that once
objects are broken up into more or less interchangeable units they them–
selves are no longer necessary as entities- no longer necessalY to the
decisive effect-and the artist
is
free to work
with
the
units
alone, since
these alone retain aesthetic pertinence. As it happened, the units into
which Cubism resolved the object were planear units, but they could
conceivably have been the chromatic units of the Impressionists and
Neo-Impressionists.
However, Leger's evolution toward abstract art should also be seen
in terms more personal to himself: his predilection for weight and dec–
orative balance, and a
horror vacui
greater even than Picasso's, led
him, again in 1913, to begin packing the
picture
toward margins formerly
left vague, and he found himself mustering his planear units toward
a density and compactness for which there were not enough hints in
nature. What nature could not supply, the planear units did by multi–
plying themselves in complete independence of the laws under which
surfaces and their planes materialize in non-pictorial reality. Leger did
not create abstract art for more than a brief period; later on, after
the war, he would do a few more abstract pictures, but only intermit–
tently, not as settled practice. In the final reckoning he was no more
willing than Picasso or Braque to abandon nature altogether. The reason
for this reluctance on the part of all three, and of Matisse too, is one
of the most interesting of topics in contemporary art criticism, but not
one to be broached here. Suffice it to say that the personal rejection
of abstract art by the artists who did the most to clear the way for it
calls for no value judgments.
