“Amurath and Amurazzle”, for Mr. Balfour and Mr. Bonar Law, is perhaps the wittiest where all are witty. But wherever there is a tone to be caught, Mr. Beerbohm catches it and fixes it in a sentence; as in the words from a Nobleman's Memoirs, which the Industrious Anonyma, a gaunt bespectacled spinster, is dictating, in the most purely and deliciously ludicrous of the drawings, to a slightly bewildered typist: “I saw a good lot of the Prince of Wales — afterwards Edward VII — in those days, and I must say that a better sportsman — and, I may add, a better pal — never stepped in shoe-leather. I remember once after I had been having rather a rotten day at Newmarket he came up to me and, slapping me on the back, said, etc., etc.”
Indépendants and the Cubist Muddle
By O. RAYMOND DREY
THIS year's Salon des Indépendants, in so far as it counts at all, is a “Cubist” Salon. In an exhibition which stretches nearly to the horizon, where anyone may send his pictures without fear of rejection, for there is no jury, and where apparently everyone does, the critic may reasonably hope to meet with adventures. Somewhere amid the jostle of fashionable, glossy efficiency and crude or glossy incompetence he may light haphazard on a lure beckoning to unknown delights. Somewhere in the ruck may be the choice encounter of a lifetime.
For lack of such rare stimulus (perhaps my persistence in the teeming rooms was not equal to my opportunity) I am forced to the consideration of the word “Cubism”. It is a slushy term enough as it is used today. Probably it was never very finely intentioned. The public clamours for a name, and painters or writers think they have to find one. This labelling is always the price that artists have to pay for recognition, whether they seek it or not. The public likes a school because it finds certainty in numbers; there is no comfort in the lonely man who paints without a name.
It is all very well to call certain painters “Cubists” if you are content not to think any more about them after you have agreed on the title. Of course the majority of cultivated people who walk out of picture galleries to talk about art are quite content. Simpler people, on the other hand, who walk into picture galleries to enjoy the sight of pictures are either driven away abashed by the name they know they cannot understand, worried into hostility to the artists, or set humbly to the solving of insoluble riddles. When a number of painters were labelled “Impressionists” less harm was done. “Impressionism” is an abstract term: it is tolerably elastic. The “Glasgow School” had some connection with Glasgow. “Pre-Raphaelitism”, silly term though it was, certainly implied reaction. And “Post-Impressionism”, with a little licence, is a matter of dates; whoever chooses may think so, at any rate.
But what does this title “Cubism” mean, which we hear applied so indiscriminately alike to Picasso or Braque and Le Fauconnier; to Metzinger or Gleizes and to Delaunay (“Orphist” will not stick to him long); to Marchand or de la Fresnaye and to L'Hote; to Picart-LeDoux and to Herbin? I might add more contrasting names to my list, but there is no need.
Are we to say that a “Cubist” is a man who paints in cubes? A technical similarity in the means used by all these men at one time or another to express the volume of objects by outlining their planes is a poor excuse for a frivolously superficial definition. When the question is asked what these painters are expressing or trying to express it will be found that no general designation will fit them all; that if definitions or titles are wanted the painters will have to be taken separately or in groups of twos and threes, with a title for each individual or little group. Such refinement of definition would only make confusion worse confounded.
But rigid definition apart, some sort of philosophic division is necessary if “Cubist” work is to be understood at all. I would consider all the “Cubist” exhibitors in the Indépendants in
relation to Picasso, who has no pictures in the Salon, but who is, to my mind, the one man who, sacrificing all thought of representation, of actuality, has achieved a real intensity of expression and found a new way to our emotions, to our capacity for response. One's personal relation to a picture is, after all, the only standard of criticism that has any value. In other words, there are as many standards of criticism as there are critics.
Picasso, then, has come from contemplation of form and substance to an abstract rhythmic statement that is new in paint but old in music. Rhythmic statement is not new in paint. Rhythmic statement independent of concrete representation, abstract rhythmic statement, is. The difficulty that most people find with Picasso is due to this: that never before has painting appealed directly to the emotions without enlisting the aid of the intellect. People complain when music becomes representative, realistic. It is no longer music, we are told. Yet who can say what music is, or what is painting? It is a poor game to try to confine the human spirit, to temper creation, to put our own blinkers on the visionary.
The “Cubists” in the Salon des Indépendants are all, by various means, concerned with seizing and interpreting actuality: space, the play of light on surfaces, the interplay of colour, significant movement. Their failure or success depends both on the measure of intensity with which they are able to invest the new and arbitrary life on their canvasses, and on the quality of that intensity. In the work of M. Gleizes and M. Metzinger, well patterned though it is, I cannot perceive that life has become a fuller thing through paint. M. Delaunay's big picture “L'Equipe de Cardiff F. C”. embodies everything which I have credited these “Cubists” with seeking. It is intense, but the intensity is that of Severini's “Café Monico”. It is perfectly realistic, flooded with light and air and dancing with movement. The photograph is the lowest denominator of human vision. M. Delaunay seems to have perfected the camera. Well, it takes a clever man to do that!
