ART CHRONICLE
95
The realization, original with Cezanne, that the eye, by following
the direction of surfaces closely, could resolve all visual substance into
a tight continuum of frontal planes had given the painter a new incen–
tive in the exploration of both nature and his medium-and a rule, at
the same time, to guarantee the aesthetic coherence of what was dis–
covered. Picasso, Braque, and Leger, it could be said, were the only
ones intrepid enough to carry the exploration to its end, and able by
genius to apply the rule fully and yet in terms of their own temperaments.
(This is to subordinate, but not to dismiss, the work of the other Cubists,
who were all their followers to some extent.) Thus these three could for
three or four years execute a well-nigh unbroken series of works that
were flawless in unity and abundant in matter, works achieving that
optimum which consists in a fusion of elegance and power that abates
neither. Then the matter, for them, was exhausted, and the rule lapsed.
Henceforth neither they nor any other artist could expand taste by these
means, and to cling to them any longer would mean to depend on
taste instead of creating it.
By 1912 or 1913 "synthesis," as I have indicated, began to replace
"analysis" in Picasso's and Braque's collages. At those points where the
picture was nailed to its physical surface by pieces of pasted newspaper
or
trompe-roeil
textures, the facet planes fused into larger shapes, and
gradually the object or its part re-emerged in flat, distorted profile, to
be locked into the equally flat profile of background, or "negative,"
space. The result was a tight picture-object in which the illusion of
depth was given by overlapping and up-and-down placing but never by
shading (which had played an important part in analytical Cubism) or
anything else. Bright color came back, but it was almost absolutely flat
color. Now the priority of the picture plane was asserted in a different
and more radical way: the object was not disintegrated by the pres–
sure of shallow space, but rolled flat in flat space--or at least space
that was felt, if not read, as flat. Here Picasso found a new rule of
coherence almost,
if
not quite, as efficacious as the previous one, and
it took him ten years to exhaust its application.
Leger entered upon his own variety of synthetic Cubism as soon
as he got out of the army, in 1917. In the large "City," finished in
1919, foreground and background, object and ambiance, are alike cut
up into vertical strips and discs and squares that are recombined on
the surface as well as in shallow depth in a grandiose montage. He had
not had to practice collage in order to learn from it. He still shades, in
dark and light now, not in primary colors, but it is more for decorative
and architectural effect than to produce the illusion of volume as such,
