Art
When Picasso and Braque Went to the Movies
* _RANDY KENNEDY_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/randy_kennedy/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: April 15, 2007
IT was _Picasso_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/pablo_picasso/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
doing the noninterview interview,
decades before Warhol came along to elevate it to an art form. In 1911 a
writer for Paris-Journal was asking Picasso about the radically new kind of
painting people were calling Cubism, the lightning bolt that had shot forth
from
his studio and that of his friend Georges Braque. Picasso claimed never to
have heard of such a thing. “Il n’y a pas de Cubisme,” he said blithely, and
then excused himself to go feed his pet monkey.
In part because its creators said so little about it during their lifetime,
guarding it like a kind of state secret, Cubism has generated a library’s
worth of scholarship, probably more than any other artistic innovation in the
last century. The general picture that has emerged is one of Cubism bubbling
up
out of a thick Parisian stew of symbolist poetry, Cézanne, cafe society,
African masks, absinthe and a fascination with all things mechanical and
modern,
mostly airplanes and automatons.
But while almost every aspect of these two artists’ live has been scrutinized
— their friends, lovers, favorite drugs, hangouts, hat sizes and nicknames
(Picasso called Braque Wilbourg, after Wilbur Wright) — one mutual fascination
has been largely overlooked: Both men were crazy about the movies.
They were also coming of age artistically in the city of the Lumière
brothers, where the modern moviegoing experience had just been born, starting
in
cafes and cabarets and then moving into theaters, packed with people still in
disbelief as they watched a two-dimensional picture plane leap to life. “The
cinema was not simply in its earliest infancy,” wrote the critic André Salmon,
one of Picasso’s friends and fellow moviegoers. “It was wailing.”
For more than 20 years the New York art dealer Arne Glimcher had carried
around a theory, more gut feeling than scholarly conjecture, that Picasso and
Braque had been seduced by that siren song of the early cinema, and that
Cubism,
with its fractured surfaces and multiple perspectives, owed much more to the
movies than anyone had noticed.
Five years ago Mr. Glimcher finally decided to do something about his hunch.
He enlisted Bernice Rose, a longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art and
now director of Mr. Glimcher’s gallery, PaceWildenstein, to undertake the
daunting academic work of trying to find traces of the silver screen hiding
among the endless histories, archives, criticism and art of the early Cubist
years. The result of that work, which opens Friday at the gallery’s East 57th
Street location, is “Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism,” an exhibition
that Mr. Glimcher calls one of the most ambitious in the gallery’s 47-year
history.
The gallery has gathered more than 40 paintings, collages and other works —
none for sale, Mr. Glimcher said — from private collections and from museums
around the world, including the Georges Pompidou Center, the Museum of Modern
Art, the _Art Institute of Chicago_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/art_institute_of_chicago/index.html?inline=nyt-org)
and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. (To get one Picasso he wanted from a
museum in Prague, Mr. Glimcher even parted temporarily with a 1951 _Jackson
Pollock_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/jackson_pollock/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
he owns, swapping the paintings for the
length of the show.)
Besides paintings, the exhibition has rounded up rare examples of early
cinema’s deus ex machina, the cinematograph: a whirring hand-cranked camera and
projector of the kind that Picasso and Braque would have seen, not yet
ensconced in a booth but out among the seats, acting as a powerful mechanized
metaphor for the artist, absorbing the world through its eye and beaming it
back out
again. A part of the exhibition space will also be transformed into a
simulacrum of an old Belle Époque movie house, where dozens of short movies
from
the medium’s first years will flicker again, this time through the magic of
digital projection.
For Mr. Glimcher the show is about personal obsessions in more ways than one.
Beginning in the early 1980s — after he had a small film role in his friend
_Robert Benton_
(http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=212225&inline=nyt-per)
’s “Still of the Night” as an auction bidder (bidding
on paintings he himself had lent for the scene) — Mr. Glimcher became, as he
said in a recent interview, “completely bitten by the movie thing.”
He began producing movies, including “Legal Eagles” and “Gorillas in the
Mist,” and the ratio of his time spent selling art to that of thinking about,
talking about and working on movies shifted drastically. In 1992, at the age of
53, he made his directorial debut with “The Mambo Kings,” from the novel by
Oscar Hijuelos, and he is now at work on three new movie projects.
So he sees the exhibition as an ideal union of his two worlds, a match made
in creative heaven somewhere between Paris and Hollywood. “I think I have an
unusual inside track on this,” he said, sitting in his Midtown office
surrounded by paintings and movie posters.
But instinct is one thing and facts are another, and determining the degree
to which Picasso and Braque may have united the worlds of the movies and
Cubism was not an easy job. Over the course of more than two and a half years
of
concentrated work, it became a kind of international detective assignment for
Ms. Rose, a case in which she knew from the beginning that most of the
evidence would be circumstantial.
For one thing, reports of Picasso’s and Braque’s early moviegoing come from
secondhand accounts. Their correspondence, what survives of it, does not
mention the cinema and is maddeningly elliptical about their years of intense
collaboration. “They reveal nothing of the painters’ intimate dialogue on art,
none of those words that Braque said ‘no one will ever be able to understand,’
” wrote William Rubin, the historian and curator who mounted the monumental
show “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism” at the Museum of Modern Art in
1989.
But John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, recounts that Picasso saw his
first film in Barcelona before he had seen his first Cézanne, probably in 1896,
when he was 15. The first painting Picasso made in a studio, “The Bayonet
Charge,” now lost, was probably inspired in part by a scene in one of the
shorts
he saw, “The Cavalry Charge.”
Friends like Salmon and the early film writer and critic Maurice Raynal also
wrote of their frequent trips with “la bande à Picasso,” which included the
poet Guillaume Apollinaire, to the movie screens scattered through Montmartre
and other neighborhoods beginning around 1908, when Picasso and Braque
became close, and cinema was exploding. Everyone seemed to be bitten by the
bug;
in 1909 Dublin’s first movie house was established by a little-known writer
named _James Joyce_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/james_joyce/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
.
The things Picasso’s gang watched were much less like what we think of as
movies than like an early, sprocketed vision of the Internet: wildly diverse,
usually short scenes of pratfalls, magic tricks, bawdy dancers, cowboys,
menageries, exotic locales, airplane stunts and hallucinatory special-effects
experiments.
Video
_More Video »_ (http://video.on.nytimes.com/)
Trying to figure how these things might have influenced, or been transformed
by, Picasso and Braque, Ms. Rose first began searching in Cubist writings.
Early critics tended to ignore or dismiss any connection, largely because they
saw cinema as a straightforwardly mimetic medium, far removed from the
revolutionary break in painting — in seeing, really — that Picasso and Braque
had
created.
In a recent interview in her Chelsea office, which she transformed into what
she calls her “war room,” its walls plastered with hundreds of images for
the show, Ms. Rose described how she followed scant threads of information
from
footnote to footnote, “tracking it back bit by bit to really try to get at
the references.”
Josep Palau i Fabre, a Catalan scholar of Picasso, mentioned the influence of
cinema, citing the French critic Jean Cassou. The historian Rudi Blesh and
the collector Harriet Janis also speculated briefly on connections in their
1962 book about collage. They wondered specifically whether Picasso’s pasting
of a scrap of paper bearing the commercially printed words “au _Louvre_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/l/louvre/index.htm
l?inline=nyt-org) ” upside down on a 1908 drawing might have been a kind of
movie joke, referring to the stationary word-slides that were used in
theaters between films, to lead audiences in singing — and in laughing when the
slides were accidentally projected upside down.
The most extensive consideration of movies and Cubism was made by Natasha
Staller in 2001, in her book “A Sum of Destructions: Picasso’s Cultures and the
Creation of Cubism,” in which she found specific correspondences between
some of Picasso’s work and the images and techniques in the films of Georges
Méliès, the French moviemaker and special-effects pioneer.
“Picasso appropriated Méliès’s techniques of jarring multiple perspectives,
fragmented bodies and body parts, a comic self-conscious dialogue between
apparent art and apparent reality,” Ms. Staller wrote.
>From the beginning of her research, Ms. Rose said, she found herself turning
more often to film experts than to art scholars. She sought them out in Ann
Arbor, Mich., and in Rochester, where the George Eastman House has a
world-class early film collection. She went to Bologna and to Pordenone, a
small city
north of Venice, to spend time with early film aficionados and watch movies.
She enlisted a film scholar in Paris, Jennifer Wild, to map out the now
long-gone movie houses and cafe cinemas that Picasso and Braque would have
visited; and Tom Gunning, a film expert and professor at the _University of
Chicago_
(http://to
pics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_chicago/index.html?inline=nyt-org)
, to write for the catalog.
The links they found between Cubism and cinema were rarely voilà moments, the
kind that popped out of paintings unbidden. “It’s not about iconography,”
Ms. Rose often repeats, but more about yet another layer of ideas imbedded in
the busy, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink (and sometimes the kitchen sink
too) ethos of Cubism.
But there were also those times when it felt as if veils had fallen
miraculously from the paintings, and Ms. Rose said she believes she has found
distinct visual clues never before noticed by scholars. Especially in Picasso’s
work, she began to see elements of the cinematograph itself buried in portraits
and still life: a crank handle doubling as a woman’s nose in a 1910 painting
from the _Museum of Fine Arts_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/museum_of_fine_arts/index.html?inline=nyt-org)
, Boston,
her head and body echoing elements of the machine’s lens and film-collecting
box and legs, among many other things.
“He seems to have decided that she could be not just the operator but the
camera projector as well,” she said of Picasso. And she recalled taking this
discovery excitedly to Mr. Glimcher. “I said: ‘Look at this. I’m seeing
cameras.’ ” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Of course you’re seeing cameras.’ ”
Sometimes, she admitted, she worried that she might just be willing herself to
see things, both in the paintings and in the films that she had stared at for
so long. “I woke up at 3 o’clock one morning last week, thinking ‘I’m crazy,’
” she said.
But she is reasonably sure that when people begin to look at the paintings as
closely as she has, they will see what she sees too and understand that
Picasso and Braque were not simply absorbing the movies but competing with
them,
creating modernity even as they were valiantly defending painting from its
threat.
“Painting always wanted to suggest movement, and suddenly here was movement,”
Ms. Rose said. “This was totally amazing for everybody. And for them
painting was the most important thing in the world. So they had to capture
this
movement for painting.”
freeman fisher
8601 west knoll drive #7
west hollywood, ca
90069
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