Cubism at the Met review – stupefying, heart-quickening and overpowering

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/16/cubism-met-review-lauder-picasso-braque

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Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty’s magnum opus on inequality, ends with a rousing call to save democracy by confiscating the wealth of the very rich. I’m inclined to agree – but I would offer a one-time exemption for cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder, whose numerous billions have been put to rare good use.

Lauder has spent much of his life assembling an unparalleled collection of works of cubism, the difficult and revolutionary art movement that set the stage for modern and contemporary art. Last year, he gave all 79 paintings – 34 by Pablo Picasso, 17 by Georges Braque, the remainder by Juan Gris and Fernand Léger – to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, instantly elevating the museum’s early modern collection to the level of MoMA or the Pompidou. Goodness knows there are other rich folks who collect art as a social sport and then flog it as a tax write-off, but Lauder’s collection, which goes on display next week, was always intended to land at a museum. The donation is a milestone in the history of the Met, and a supreme act of philanthropy that is all too uncommon in this second Gilded Age, when a stingy new class of toxic mortgage vendors and smartphone app merchants have proven far less generous than last century’s more civic moguls.

One of the best features of Lauder’s gift, which I wish all plutocrats would take as a model, is that it comes without restrictions. It’s up to the curators, not the billionaire, to determine what should be displayed and how. Even better, Lauder’s paintings will be integrated into the Met’s larger collection rather than exiled to a dedicated wing. This inaugural presentation – organised by Emily Braun, a professor at Hunter College who also served as Lauder’s private curator, and Rebecca Rabinow, the Met’s star of early modern art – presents the Lauder works in isolation, but even this way the magnitude of the collection is overpowering. All on their own, they add up to the single most important exhibition of cubism since MoMA’s renowned Picasso/Braque two-hander of 1989.

Among this show’s many virtues, it offers a reminder that Braque was the equal of Picasso, maybe even the better painter, in the years before the first world war. Once you get past the wall-sized images of Lauder’s living room (I could have done without those), the exhibition opens with two Braques from the very first cubist exhibition, in Paris in 1908. One is a slightly traditional landscape of a village near Marseille, with trees and a building in the distance behind an ornamental balustrade. The other, painted just a few months later, is of the same village – but now Braque has broken the landscape into sharp, rectangular, brown and tan facets, overlapping in a shallow picture plane rather than receding into the distance. The illusion of three-dimensional space is giving way. Two-dimensional frankness is almost here. Abstraction beckons in the distance.

Neither Braque nor Picasso invented cubism on his own, and the movement has no single breakthrough painting. Cubism cohered over time, with trial and error, as Picasso and Braque played off of each other’s insights and drew on two sources that, at first, make an unlikely pair. The first was the art of Paul Cézanne, with its fractured perspectives and analytical style of observation. His example infuses those early Braques and most of the other paintings here, such as Picasso’s Oil Mill of 1909, which depicts a suite of industrial buildings as a jumble of flat planes.

The second, somewhat more strangely, was African sculpture. Lauder’s collection includes two studies for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso’s grand fetishistic blast of 1907, whose nude prostitutes are disfigured with threatening, pseudo-barbaric faces deriving from West African masks the artist saw in a Paris museum, booty from one bloody colonial enterprise or another. (An earlier generation of art historians used to call this “primitivism”, grossly shortchanging the sophistication and complexity of African sculpture that appealed to “western” artists in the first place.) When Braque saw the Spanish painter’s masterpiece, he compared his shock to “having to swallow rope or drink kerosene”. But the stylised figuration of African art – even if they understood it only partially – offered first Picasso, then Braque the means to break out of the confines of western representation and shake the foundations of western painting.

Looking at the two painters side by side here, it’s clear that Braque was ahead of the game in applying Cézanne’s lessons about perspective and flatness – but that Picasso’s study of African forebears was necessary for both artists to go for broke and invent a new pictorial language. By 1909 their art had become a forest of overlapping, only partially legible signs. The curators have staged the development of analytical cubism in a stupefying, heart-quickening room of seven Braques and Picassos (so close in style you can barely tell who painted which), all of which feature musical instruments and all of which offer a radically new approach to seeing the world. In Braque’s Still Life with a Clarinet, for example, the instrument is depicted as just an outline amid a panoply of interlocking panels. The table it sits on appears as a large diamond spanning the canvas, with no attempt to simulate three-dimensionality via one-point perspective. A wine glass and a desk drawer are simply overlaid on the composition, with no spatial relationship between them. Representation has not gone away, but simulation is over. Now painting is an end in itself, and it speaks a language of its own.

Yet just as Picasso and Braque seemed to be headed for total abstraction – a development that Kandinsky was experimenting with at the same time, and that Malevich would finalise a few years later in Moscow – they pulled back. The hermetic puzzles of analytic cubism gave way in 1910, as the artists introduced what Braque called “certainties”: painted words, collaged papers, musical notations or labels from branded products. Chief among their obsessions were newspapers. Picasso and Braque were the media junkies of their day, thrilling to the speedy circulation of information and the cacophony of advertising. One masterful Picasso head is drawn on a page of stock prices. A Braque still life of a glass and bottle from 1914 features printed wallpaper, then cracks the composition with a jarring newspaper clipping about a patricide.

Cubism was an art of collisions, and so one of its ideal mediums was collage – which rammed together multiple pictorial planes on to a flat surface, and also allowed newspaper, sheet music and other offcuts from real life to infect the supposedly pure act of picture-making. Picasso and Braque were masters of collage, but it’s a pleasure to see here that Juan Gris, Picasso’s fellow expat Spaniard and a later member of the cubist fraternity, was just as extraordinary. Most of his compositions retain a bit more spatial realism than the other cubists, but their wealth of materials, such as wallpapers pasted one of top of the other, fractures any pictorial unity.

Fernand Léger, whose rhythmic and colorful syncopations stand at a slight distance from the other three artists here, learned from the other cubists how to break space open, building his paintings out of repeated and recombined forms. This show concludes with several of Léger’s splintered compositions; in The Smoker, from 1914, a person’s head is just barely intelligible in the clash of striped circular elements floating in a flat picture plane. But that summer war came, and Léger was conscripted. Braque was too. By the late teens the artists were moving in different directions: Picasso to swooping figuration, Léger to mechanistic scenes of city-dwellers, Braque to Matisse-like interiors. Reassembled here, in a collection that now belongs to all of us, they offer a lesson too frequently forgotten a hundred years since their creation: things may look stable, but in a flash they can explode.