Deborah Solomon
PICASSO, BRAQUE, AND RUBIN
William Rubin's "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism," held at
the Museum of Modern Art last winter, was organized to be the greatest
show on earth. And to many people, it was. While other exhibitions at the
museum have attracted larger crowds (the Warhol and Vienna shows were
more popular than this one), none have garnered higher critical praise. The
exhibition was elephantine, with nearly four hundred works spread over two
floors of the museum, yet it wasn't a blockbuster; a show that spans just
seven years (1907-14), consists largely of brown paintings, and is devoted
to the theme of how Picasso and Braque flattened out the space of a picture
is not going to have lines of people wrapped around the block. Yet the show's
narrowness - the way it honed in on the one, climactic moment when Picasso
and Braque invented Cubism - is what reviewers seemed to admire, and
they wrote about it with predictable hyperbole. One prominent critic said the
show left him "speechless" - and then went on to produce a few prolix pages
about it.
It isn't my intention here to criticize the critics, or to say that
"Pioneering Cubism" doesn't deserve a good deal of praise.
It
was, by any
standards, a terrific exhibition - one which managed to get us away from
textbook notions about flat planes, fragmented forms, and so on, and allow us
to witness the drama ofCubism's beginnings firsthand. The show had a you–
were-there vividness. At one point, as I was standing before a Picasso col–
lage from 1912, my gaze rested on a small rectangle the artist had dipped
from a newspaper. Originally the rectangle must have been whitish, but now
it was brown with age.
It
was strange to be reminded of the years that had
passed since Picasso sat down and created this collage. For elsewhere in the
show, in paintings and drawings, where there were no snippets of discolored
newspaper to betray the passage of time, the works seemed not to have
aged at all. They spoke to us with a directness and urgency that made it
easy to forget that Cubism is now far away from us, a point on the historical
time line, an epic from another epoch.
As much as I enjoyed the show, now that I sit down to write about it I
find myself a bit uninspired. Perhaps that's because so much has already been
written. Or perhaps it's because the show didn't significantly alter our sense
ofwhat Cubism is or how it began. Granted, it established unequivocally that
Cubism was a joint venture. But is that a revelation? As early as 1928,
Wilhelm Uhde, a Parisian art dealer who was friendly with both Picasso and
Braque, described the relationship between the two artists as a "spiritual
marriage" in which "one brought a great sensitivity, the other a great plastic
gift." And many others in the years since have recognized the cardinal part
