Autour du Cubisme
'A NUMBER of paintings connected With Cubism which happened to be available.' Mr' Philip James's description of this small shoo' at the Tate Gallery of pictures on loan frail the Musee d'Art Moderne indicates its sea!' tered and informal character, including as 0 does many works by minor artists, a Braque landscape of his F'auve period, a Picasso 01 , 1935 in which the cubist element is not and and a non-figurative work by Kupka entitled Plans Verticaux. The Kupka is almost more out of place than the Fauve picture because. for all its emphasis upon 'plans,' cubism was a new system for figuring the visible world and it led none of its founders—Picasso, Braque' Gris, Leger—into the way of complete abstraction. The exhibition includes only one work, a fine still life by Braque (No. 11), frog) the central and, I believe, the most exciting phase, the analytical cubism of 1909 to 1911, one which belongs to Braque and Picasso and which produced some of the most tenderlY, sophisticated, the most refined, elegant anu perfectly successful pictures of this centurY. They occupy in this period perhaps the satn6 position that the few works of Vermeer coollY and lucidly maintain in the similarly compla and often anguished art of the seventeenth century. Their creation demanded not onlY exceptional gifts of intelligence and sensibilitf but that imaginative courage to make a leaP into the dark; and they have proved inimitable as the later or synthetic cubism which dominates this show has not. They were founded on principles as rational as the laws of central perspective, but so much also was, this a discovery unlike the principles perspective of the imagination that the methods never became codified into 0 theoretical system.
An analytical cubist picture can only be produced by following the masters' methods and vision from the inside. The subseques,t,
indeed the consequent, devices of synthetic, cubism were by comparison elementary ano
could only too easily be appropriated by JOY
ambitious follower or student. The extent to which this phase of the movement has
influenced the appearance of every kind of thing in the past forty years is obvious enough. I was recently surprised to find its dead trace,s on the President of the Royal AcademY astronomical clock at York Minster, where some angels are figured in a sort of Lyon s
Corner House cubist manner. And some of the pictures in this show, works by Gleizes, Metzinger, Lhote in particular, painted soon after the main events, look now unbearably mannered and second-hand. But there are excellent pictures by the masters and a very beautiful still life (No. 19) by Marcoussis, which is successful because the devices are used with intelligence, taste and individuality. And all the pictures, in fact, look better in a rather shabby little room at the Tate than in thachilly white hangar where they normally reside; but let no one think that this is the proper cubist exhibition for which London
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