Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [95]
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One of those who had seen the painting and been awed by it was Georges Braque, a former housepainter from Normandy who had come to Paris and studied art in night classes. His first paintings were in the fauve style, of which Matisse was the master. Matisse, who may have been having second thoughts about Les demoiselles, brought him to Picasso’s studio to see it. Timidly, Braque pointed out that the noses were wrong. Picasso insisted, “Noses are like that.” Braque protested that Picasso was asking the viewer to accept something too difficult: “It’s as if you wanted us to… drink kerosene in order to spit fire.” 42
However, Braque turned out to be the first to imbibe. That winter he painted a large nude that had the striated features characteristic of the two African-inspired figures in Les demoiselles. He spent the following summer, 1908, at L’Estaque, a fishing village in Provence, where Cézanne had worked in his later years. The landscapes and village scenes Braque painted took another step toward simple geometric forms. At the same time, Picasso was working at La Rue des Bois, near Paris. Les demoiselles had exhausted him, and now — having actually discovered the body of another painter in the Bateau-Lavoir hanging from a beam, the victim of drugs and despair — he fled the city, searching for inspiration as he had once done in Gosol. He too began to turn everything he saw into geometric forms — not as spectacularly as the nudes of Avignon, but more severely and rigorously. Taking the most radical of the five nudes, the one on the far right, he further developed the ideas that had led him to paint it as if trying to see all sides at once.
When Picasso and Braque next met, they compared their summer work and discovered that they were going in the same direction. They decided to work together, in what became a unique artistic partnership that Braque described as two mountain climbers roped together. They stripped their palettes of all but a few colors — brown, white, gray, black — for what was important now was form alone. This new style was still (often just barely) representational: if the viewer looks hard enough, he can discern the subject of the painting. But perspective and three-dimensionality were gone completely. What Picasso and Braque did was to break down their subjects into plane surfaces that reflected all angles of view and then rearranged them on the canvas, where they fought for the viewer’s attention. If they were to be put together, it was the viewer who would do it.
Supposedly, when Braque submitted his work for an exhibition, Matisse, one of the jury members, scornfully said the canvases were full of “petits cubes.” 43 A reviewer, Louis Vauxcelles, is credited with coining the term cubism to describe the work. He didn’t expect cubism to last, but it proved to be one of the most influential artistic movements of the century.
Later critics pronounced cubism to be another reflection of the scientific currents of the time. William R. Everdell, in his book The First Moderns, says, “In effect, Picasso had done for art in 1907 almost exactly what Einstein had done for physics in his ‘Electrodynamics’ paper of 1905.” 44 Einstein had said that it was impossible for any single observer, standing at a fixed spot, to observe reality. Now Picasso and Braque were trying to capture reality by depicting an object from many points of view at the same time.
Though it is doubtful that Picasso or Braque ever read Einstein’s work, ideas like his were part of the intellectual atmosphere that made Paris such a stimulating place. Anybody could attend, for free, Henri Poincaré’s lectures at the University of Paris or Bergson’s at the Collège de France. Anarchists, socialists, and other groups sponsored free educational programs for their adherents. And of course, anyone dropping into a café in Montmartre