Thank you Freeman. I wish I could get to NYC to see this showing. How
wonderful.
Toochis
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Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2007 7:34:05 AM
Subject: Re: [MOPO] OFF TOPIC AND UTTERLY FASCINATING PICASSO, BRAQUE AND THE
MOVIES
Thank you Freeman. What a deliciously fantastic
story. Truly amazing stuff!!
Zeev
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Subject: [MOPO] OFF TOPIC AND UTTERLY
FASCINATING PICASSO, BRAQUE AND THE MOVIES
Art
When Picasso and Braque Went to the
Movies
RANDY
KENNEDY
Published: April 15, 2007
IT was Picasso 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 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 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’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.
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.
VideoMore Video
»
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” 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, 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, 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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