The unlovable brilliance of cubism
‘Anew kind of beauty”: that is how Georges Braque, the French artist, speaking in the spring of 1908, described Le Grand Nu, his painting of a twisting, musclebound woman with a mask-like face.
At the time it was castigated as “horrendous”, but today Braque’s nude is considered a milestone in the history of cubism, the avant-garde art movement that is the subject of a new exhibition crammed with more than 300 artworks, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris – the most comprehensive show on the subject since 1953. What is “beautiful” about Grand
Nu? In 1908 Braque’s words must have sounded provocative, even perverse. In his quest to render reality from fluctuating viewpoints, Braque, along with cubist comrade-in-arms Picasso, had taken a hammer to illusionism.
Even today, Large Nude looks no more “beautiful” than it did a century ago. Radical and strange, yes. But “beautiful”? It has all the beauty of a rhinoceros.
This is the thing about cubism. While, to paraphrase one eminent art historian, cubism altered Western painting to a degree unparalleled since the Renaissance, it remains – as the Pompidou’s exhibition attests – a cerebral, sometimes monotonous movement, overly reliant on conceptual puzzles and games.
With their half-hidden symbols, snippets of text, and trompe-l’oeil collage elements, they offer the pleasures of a cryptic crossword. They are not easy to love. The Pompidou’s show – which concentrates on cubist art produced in Paris between 1907 and 1917 – opts for safety rather than risk-taking revisionism, with a chronological approach.
We begin with the impact of Cézanne, who notoriously advocated treating nature “by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone” – thus paving the way for cubism’s obsession with geometric simplification. Picasso famously described him as “the father of us all”.
Another important influence was the modish new interest in “primitivism”: the exhibition also opens with an arresting display of African masks and statuettes. Their appeal to the Young Turks of modern art is immediately apparent: the resemblance to Picasso’s preparatory drawings for Les Demoiselles d’avignon (1907), for instance, the painting often cited as cubism’s Ground Zero, is clear.
Swiftly, though, Braque and Picasso moved away from primitivism to their sober cubist canvases of 1910-12, which collapse foreground and background, and look like cracked windscreens. Here, we find unusual portraits and figures playing various musical instruments, as well as still lifes. These rooms, however, feel like a sea of grey, prompting thoughts that a little cubism can go a long way.
One of the chief aims of the exhibition is to widen the focus beyond Braque and Picasso.
Thus, we are introduced to the so-called “Salon cubists”, such as Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, whose submissions to the annual salons in Paris sparked a firestorm of mockery in the press.
But many of their supposedly grand compositions are abominable. Metzinger’s Woman with Horse (1912), for instance, with its silly blue flowers, feels try-hard and inauthentic. Worst-in-class, though, is Léopold Survage, the French-finnish painter whose fatuous, poster-like canvases shamelessly rip off avant-garde tropes.
Throughout, there is a sense that cubism – in the vaguest, loosest sense – became, by the second decade of the 20th century, a fashionable style, synonymous with modernity, a kind of go-to, stock décor, to zhuzh up otherwise conventional scenes.
One standout success is the exhibition’s zinging coda, which argues that cubism’s greatest legacy was abstract art. This room is effective because it is concise – delightfully so, given the rest of this show, which charts the complex genesis and achievements of cubism with a thoroughness that sometimes tips over from the meticulous to the pedantic.
Until Feb 25; info: centrepompidou.fr