Chapter 21 I The Anarchists on Montmartre (2) Cubism

From our perspective, nature has both breadth and depth. paul cezanne Marie Laurence was gone, Fernand was gone.Max Jacobs, after a taste of another life in Cecil's bedroom with another woman, has no passion for a cousin. On the day of the Assumption in 1912, when Max was watching the procession of the guard of honor in Quimper, someone called him.When he looked back, it turned out to be a cousin and two cousins, one of whom was named Aiwa.Max led them towards the Bishop's Palace.In the courtyard of the bishop's mansion, they saw a mulberry tree.The cousins ​​encouraged Max to climb up the trunk.He did go up, and Eva was overwhelmed by the poet-athletic man.His act of bravery earned him Eva's lips, which he kissed.He is very proud of himself "to be able to make Eva happy".In the midst of his successive successes, he felt himself more fond of the mulberry tree, and he rejected the whims of the girls and returned to his usual favorites.

He's still in the Picasso gang, but on a smaller scale, for a number of reasons. First, he was greedy for ether.After the suicide of the German painter Vigels, Picasso stopped touching any drugs. He could not tolerate his friend Max Jacob being so indecisive and decisive in this regard.His antipathy grew wilder and longer, and chilled their friendship.Max found all sorts of excuses to justify his hobby.He said that he had a toothache and that taking ether could relieve the pain.He sometimes went to his parents' house, and when his parents saw him treating his toothache in this way, they worried that he was getting deeper and deeper on the road of drug abuse.They forced him to see the dentist they had chosen for him.Since Max's teeth don't hurt at all, he hates dentists.For a while, he also contemplated ending his drug use.Maybe he stopped in Brittany, but he never stopped in Montmartre.

The second reason: he is morbidly sensitive, and often sees some insignificant little things as devastating earthquakes.The same is true for Picasso and Apollinaire.Apollinaire sometimes treated him coldly, and the two of them sometimes argued in front of the painter Picasso.Max Jacobs often complained about his two friends: he would only laugh at him and never take his literary work seriously; Picasso created money, Apollinaire won honors, and Max was still an unknown little man.This deepened his natural extreme emotions.The letter written by Max Jacobs is as childish as that of Rousseau, the customs officer.In his letter, he accused Apollinaire of saying that there was an eternal friendship between them, but he often avoided him, did not say hello to him when he arrived in Montmartre, and never invited him to participate in the activities they organized, and he invited him to come to his house as a guest He is also often absent from...

Finally, the poet (Max Jacobs) weeps and denounces the upstart Picasso: ungrateful, forgetting old friends who have been with him in difficult times since Vollard purchased his paintings .Unfortunately, it was he himself who put the relationship on ice: he sold several of Picasso's paintings shortly after the "laundry boats" organized a celebration for Rousseau.The reason was that he was poor (which was true), while others had escaped poverty altogether. Picasso was disgusted whenever he heard his old friends in difficult times bring up their starving, poorly clothed lives, and their mutual support and friendship.

Max Jacob was at odds with everyone else. In 1911 he published his Unpublished Celtic Songbook at his own expense.Years later, he confessed frankly to Tristan Chara that he had written the work as a satire on Paul Fore, Francis Jam, and what he considered "grotesque" popular literature.This seems to further confirm André Salmon's judgment that Max Jacob pretended to like this literature in order to please Apollinaire.He sells himself to make ends meet.Salmon believes that this act of creating for the mouth of NFDA4 is "begging for a makeover", and Picasso may have the same view as him.

After everyone else moved to larger and more luxurious houses, Max Jacob remained in his humble room on Rue Lavignon.Indeed, Picasso sometimes invited him to Celette, but he could not afford the travel expenses.The painter wrote to Carnville, asking him to give his poet friend some money to buy train tickets and flowers. Fortunately, in the Pyrenees, the relationship between the two of them is very good.While in Montmartre, while fully supporting Fernand, Max also forged a deep friendship with Emma, ​​the maid of the Picasso family.He admired her innocence and vivacity and dedication to her master Picasso and his household chores.

They went to Spain to watch a bullfight together.In a letter to Apollinaire on May 2, 1913, Max Jacob said that "Spain is a quadrangular country with edges and corners".Later Gertrude Stein developed his idea, saying that Spain is a three-dimensional country. In Celette, the poet Max Jacob also painted, mostly landscapes.In the hills of Celette there is thyme, lavender, but they prefer coffee, which pleases ether addicts.When they were indoors, they each worked hard.Max painted and wrote poems, and Picasso learned to make paper stickers from Apollinaire. This is not the first time the two painters have painted together in Celette.They had already worked together once before in a lonely house in the mountains.Their close collaboration dates back to 1908 with the exhibition of the Independents (where Braque exhibited his first landscapes in L'Estaque). (Fig. 32, Fig. 33) Although their research directions are different and they are all carried out separately, they are inevitably linked together by their research on the form of painting and how to express three-dimensional.

The starting point of Picasso's works are black African art and ancient Iberian art.The painter's enigmatic "The Maiden of Avignon," which was kept covered or rolled up in his studio, was influenced by both arts.A limited number of people were lucky enough to see the painting, and despite its repulsion, its reputation grew over time. The starting point of Braque's works is Cézanne's style. With Fauvism in the past and Cubism later or with Berlioz before Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), French composer, conductor and music critic.And later James Joyce James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish writer.In the creation, a large number of inner monologues are used to express the protagonist's "subconscious mind", depict abnormal psychology and corrupt life, and pursue cumbersome details and strange language.Similarly, in his time, Master Aix was also reviled by people, because they were all pioneers of creation.Cézanne, who greatly admired Delacroix and was admired by Gauguin, refused to participate in the exhibition for twenty years after being rejected by the official exhibition.The well-known art expert Camille Maucleur congratulated him and said: In his opinion, Cézanne's paintings are "the most memorable art jokes in the past fifteen years".

During the fifteen years before his death, under the advocacy of Vollard, Cézanne was widely recognized.Not only his past works with Picasso and impressionist works were recognized, but also his research on the form of painting, how to express three-dimensional, drawing order, fracture and deformation.Kandinsky made a high-level generalization. He said that Cézanne "enhanced the method of expressing 'dead nature' to the point where it can express the vivid connotation of objects under the 'dead' surface." Cézanne wanted to discover the "geological layers" of the Victory, and while respecting man's existing understanding of space, he has worked tirelessly to achieve his goal.According to him, nature should best be expressed in "the terms of sphere, cylinder, and cone."People understand why Apollinaire said that Cézanne's last works embody the essence of Cubism.Picasso also paid special attention to his creation.

Braque is even worse. After Cézanne's death, Braque followed Othon Friesz (1879-1949), a French painter who was a fauvist from 1903 to 1907. Later, the vividness of colors tended to be milder, and he paid more attention to the three-dimensional view.Accompanied by him, he went south to Estac near Marseille, and created a number of tightly structured, simple and bright monochrome paintings, which were exhibited at the 1907 Independent Painting Exhibition.When the 1908 Autumn Art Fair was held, Braque submitted eight paintings, but the organizing committee only accepted two of them. Braque refused to participate in the exhibition in protest of such an insult to him.Therefore, Carnville exhibited these works of Brac in his gallery on Vignon Street, and asked Apollinaire to write a preface for his gallery's brochure.Among the paintings hanging in the gallery, there is "The House in L'Estaque" (Fig. 34), which was rejected by the gentlemen of the Autumn Art Fair: some ocher red three-dimensional blocks piled up in disorder and some without doors window houses.These paintings are no longer objective depictions of natural objects, but re-creations out of traditional ways of expression.They are simpler and clearer, with changes and rearrangements made to the components of the original object.All this is very similar to Picasso's expression techniques that people already know.For Braque, this is a hobby, a talent.According to Jean Paulhan (1884-1968), French writer.It is said that when he first came to Paris, the painter from the port city of Le Havre immediately rushed to the Louvre to copy the works of the Italian painter Raphael.At first he copied it very much like the original, but the longer he copied it, the more he changed it.

Carnville also exhibited Braque's "Big Nude" (Fig. 35). The Large Nude is a reaction to Picasso's brutality and excess in The Maiden of Avignon and Three Ladies.Carnville, whose views are already extreme enough, also criticized the barbarism and primitivism of Picasso's works.Braque's "Large Nude" is a close relative of Matisse's "Standing Nude" created in 1907, both of which were influenced by Cézanne's works: angular, without chiaroscuro.Compared with the "hot" works of the Spaniards (Picasso), they are less primitive and more "easy to understand".Braque's first large-scale oil painting can be regarded as an important work of Cubism in its birth. Matisse disliked Cubist works.Matisse was a member of the organizing committee for the autumn art fair that rejected Cézanne's paintings.He ridiculed these Cubist works and rejected them.Louis Vauxel publicly criticizes Cubism in the press of November 14, 1908.Almost at the same time, Charles Morris also came out to criticize the works of Cubism.The name of this genre may have been given by Matisse.Cubist works here refer to the works of Braque, not Picasso.Matisse later admitted that the first Cubist work he saw was a painting by Braque that Picasso came to his own studio and introduced to him.Matisse left the studio shortly after he was very angry at the Spanish painter Picasso who insisted on pinching himself with Derain and Braque.Perhaps he felt guilty about keeping Braque out of the fall art fair... Why did the works of these two painters cause such outrage?The most fundamental reason is that they deny tradition.They believe that skillful use of the light and shade of color can express advanced painting techniques, and without further pursuit, the appearance of Cubism makes traditional painting techniques lose their way forward.Cubism departed from the principles of painting since the Renaissance.The gaze point of the audience is not unique when appreciating the paintings created according to the principle of cubism. When they appreciate a landscape painting, they always close their right eyes and look with their left eyes, and then close their left eyes and look with their right eyes. What they see is different. .If you change the starting point of your gaze arbitrarily, the result is still the same.This distinction is very important. John Berger credits Cubism with the origins of two men—Cézanne and Courbet: Cézanne placed great emphasis on visual relativity, while Courbet added materiality beyond light and shade to the classical painting tradition. Before Cézanne, any painting was like a scene seen through a window.Courbet tried to open the window and went outside, Cézanne lowered the glass.The room also becomes part of the scene, and the viewer becomes part of the scene. [From The Successes and Failures of Picasso by John Berger, published in 1968] One insists on materialism, the other on dialectics.The combination of the two forms dialectical materialism.Cubism was a revolution. Impressionism caused righteous indignation among the public when it emerged.They are not used to painters adding personal intentions to their works—even personal intentions expressed in accordance with the principles of optics.However, the Cubists went further than the Impressionists: they used chiaroscuro everywhere."People tell me that just using shadows is enough," Braque said. "No, the most important thing is to see what you want to express." The essence of the opposition between Impressionist and Cubist art is the opposition between Conceptual and Imaginative art.Cubism mocked the principle of following the sensation of the eye that the Impressionists preached.They wished to represent the essence of the object, and they conceptualized the object, not the object itself.In this respect, they are close to Gauguin's point of view.Gauguin believed that one tool of Impressionism was the eyes, but no thoughts.Picasso said: "The Cubist painter thought: 'I'm going to draw a goblet', and he started to paint it. The goblet in his painting is completely different from the goblet in real life." [From Franc "Living with Picasso" by Sauvage Guillot] Using geometric figures to show all sides of an object through its surface, not just "similar", should go further.Color itself should not be equated with temporary phenomena, such as light, angle, space and all components that represent the external world.It should actually document permanent objects.Braque said: "I don't need sunlight, I have my own light." The Impressionists were inspired by their lives, that is to say, because most of them lived in humid places like watersides, where the light varied, so their paintings were often influenced by the changing light.The Cubists lived in the cities, and when they left the cities, it was for the countryside in the South.The undulating terrain there is much harder than that of the Seine River, showing edges and corners everywhere, which has a profound impact on their use of angular three-dimensional representation of the overall picture of objects. How can we better understand the difference between modern art and ancient art? Cubists incorporated simple objects of everyday life into their compositions.These objects such as trees, houses, musical instruments, store signs, billboards, newspapers, all objects of everyday life play a role in the artist's perception of the objects they paint.Paper stickers can make people better compare materials, textures and colors.By collaging different things side by side, objects that are frequently used in daily life will look different.For example Picasso's "Guitar and Violin".In particular, the "Violin" he created in 1912 was made by pasting paper on the outside of a cardboard box. In the era of Cubist painters, science already had a certain place.Human beings have discovered radiation, neon and einsteinium, and invented resin and film technology.But they use very simple, rough materials that are opposed to the fine-grained gaze of art.There is no jewellery, no lavish clothing in their paintings, just sand, paper and wood.The Cubists were definitely modernists who completely departed from Romanticism. The Fauvists went too far in the study of color. They were completely out of touch with the visible reality and blindly obeyed their thoughts and emotions.Fernand Loche converted to Cubism at the end of his artistic career.He said that from now on, we should pay more attention to the problems of picture composition and space in painting techniques.Picasso thought: "At that time we were seeking the architectural foundation in the composition of the picture, and re-establishing an unpretentious style in terms of layout."