Art
The Picasso Exhibition in Paris
THE Galeries Georges Petit, following up their successful display of Matisse last year, have just presented Paris with what will be for many years the authoritative exhibition of Picasso. Their magnificent rooms contained some three hundred works—paintings, sculptures, drawings and etchings of all the periods of his development. Almost every style was adequately represented, with the exception of a par- ticular kind of cubist composition dating from 1924 and the " colossal " figures of 1921, of which there were only a few not very good examples. The emphasis, however, MRS strongly on the non-representational paintings, and the exhibition provided a unique opportunity for studying the early stages of that puzzling movement, Cubism.
The remoter origins, of this 'movement were not repre- sented, since its pioneers were Matisse, Derain and Braque rather than Picasso, whose contribution to Cubism dates from 1907 at the earliest. Before that date the Fauve reaction to Impressionism had been based on three tendencies : a return to an interest in the relatively unchanging qualities of an object, form and essential colour, represented by the early work of Derain, who had turned away from the Impressionist interest in momentary effects of light ; a renewed application to the problems of orderly and coherent design which Matisse was exploiting under the influence of Gauguin and the late Baigneuses of Cezanne ; and a direct attack on the importance of the subject in painting, led also by Matisse, who was gradually familiarizing the principle, fundamental in all Cubist theories, that a painting need have no relation to the outer world, that it is self-sufficient, a creation and not an imitation.
In 1907 Matisse and Derain cease to contribute directly to the development of Cubism, and their discoveries are taken over by two younger artists, Braque and Picasso. Braque had previously been working in a more or less Impressionist tradition, and Picasso's earlier paintings give even less indication that he was destined to be the leader of Cubism, though they already show him having those difficulties with his sense of colour which seem to haunt him all through his career. Typical of the very early works in the exhibition was a small canvas of a bull-fight, brilliantly sun-lit and gaudy in colour, purely Spanish and remotely Impressionist. In about 1901 he entered on the Blue Period, in which he suddenly puts a check on his colour and paints almost entirely in dim greyish-blues. The most remarkable feature, however, of the paintings of this period is their romantic sentimentality. Beggars, funerals, young women in the depths of gloom drinking absinthe, are the subjects which he prefers, and they are treated with a full apprehension of their literary content. About 1905 the subjects change to circus groups, harlequins and those ravishing nudes, like the Chester-Dale composition. The palette is rather freer but the sentimentality remains undiminished.
At the end of 1908 Picasso seems to have come in contact with Negro sculpture, which had an. immediate effect on his painting. The nudes of that period become heavier ; the faces approach the stylized forms of African masks and the limbs beconie coarser and thicker. In the next year the heaviness remains and its effect is intensified by the reduction of curved surfaces to a single carefully chosen plane, every- thing being still treated in a Negroid convention. At the same time Picasso's lust for colour gets the upper hand and he flies to the extreme of garishness.
This, however, did not last, for at about this time Picasso came under the influence of Braque, the Praise-God-Bare- bones of Painting. Braque had just been developing the principles implicit in Cezanne's later landscapes and still-lifes, with the result that he was analysing complex, curved forms into an equivalent series of small planes, the varying obliquity of these planes being emphasized by subtle gradations of colour from plane to plane. This method leads to a peculiarly full realization of the solidity of bodies, a quality lacking in Picasso's work of the same date.
In 1908 Picasso gradually absorbed these discoveries of Braque. He began to modulate his simple planes in greater detail, and to reduce his colour almost to the simplicity of Braque's. The finest products of this combination are Picasso's paintings of factories at Horta de Ebro, where he stayed in 1909. In these, buildings and trees are reduced to their simplest terms of cubical volume, and the sky to a geometrical pattern. The solidity and regularity of the forms in these paintings called forth the term Cubism for the first time, and it is a justifiable description. There is still a warmth of colour about these canvases, and it is not till the next year that the Puritanism of Braque led to the abandoning of all but greys and browns. In the same year Braque and Picasso, working together, made the decisive step towards abstraction. Throwing over mathematical perspective, they merged objects and background into a homogeneous geo- metrical pattern, treated like a bas-relief with the third dimension suggested by the small prismatic forms of the relief. Here Cubism in its full austerity is properly launched, and its later developments are superficial variations, with an occasional return, in the case of Picasso, to his fondness
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