Cubism and the Early American Modernist
Author(s): Abraham A. Davidson
Source: Art Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2, (Winter, 1966-1967), pp. 122-165
Published by: College Art Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/775035
Accessed: 29/05/2008 12:20
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We enable the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
http://www.jstor.org
1
movement, and with Benton in particular, with so little
qualification. His most popular paintings reflect an attitude of mind quite remote from that of Benton's, and
though both were from the mid-west, they did not always
respond to it with the same spirit. This is particularly
the case during the early 1930's when, in a handful of
canvases, Wood was one of our most probing critics.
MATTHEW BAIGELL, who received the Ph.D. degree
from the University of Pennsylvania, is an assistant professor of art history at The Ohio State University. He
co-authored "Happening in the Classroom: A New Way
of Teaching Art" which appeared in last summer's issue.
Abraham A. Davidson
Cubism and the Early American Modernist
I
In an article entitled "Toward a Re-interpretation
of Cubism," Winthrop Judkins singled out a number of
formal characteristics common to the still lifes of Picasso,
Braque and Gris done between 1912 and 1916: planes
which are at once transparent and opaque; tones of objects which "bleed" out and become background tones so
that the object is part of, and at the same time in front
of, the background; outlines which coincide with other
outlines so that the continuity may be read around either
or across both; surfaces which recede behind other surfaces and project over them simultaneously; shadows,
mutually excluded by each other's light sources, standing
side by side; etc. He concluded that "clearly that which
all these things have in common, that of which they are
an unending variety of manifestations, is this: A deliberate oscillation of appearances, a studied multiplicity of
readings, a conscious compounding of identities, an iridescence of form."1
Robert Rosenblum, in his recent Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art,2 interprets the Cubist movement in a
broader scope which includes, in part at least, the work
of such painters as Chagall, Miro, Klee, Marin, Demuth,
and many others. Basically, though, Rosenblum treats
Picasso, Braque and Gris as the main figures. It is to
them that the other Cubists are compared, and to some
extent judged.
In the first third of this century, several American
Modernists produced paintings which seem to stem from
the work of the classical Cubists. Charles Demuth,
Marsden Hartley, Alfred Maurer, John Marin, and Max
Winthrop O. Judkins, "Toward a Reinterpretation of
Cubism," Art Bulletin, 30 (December 1948), 270-278.
2Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art
(New York, 1961).
Weber were surely acquainted with the canvases of the
Cubists. All of them had been in Paris at one time or
another between 1908 and 1912, and presumably saw the
early exhibitions of Cubism.3 Subsequently, they could
3
The years these painters spent in Europe are recorded
in the principal monographs. Maurer was the first to
reach Paris: he arrived in 1897 and, except for some
very brief visits to New York, remained in France until
1914. Marin was in Paris in the summer of 1905, and
participated in the Salons d'Automne of 1908 and 1910
and in the Salon des Independants of 1909. He returned
to America permanently in May, 1911. Demuth spent a
year in Paris in 1907, and returned for a two-year stay
in 1912. Weber arrived in Paris in 1905 and stayed until
December, 1908; he participated in the Salon d'Automne
of 1908. Hartley did not reach Paris until late spring,
1912; and saw his first samples of Cubism at Stieglitz's
291 in 1911. (See especially the following: Elizabeth McCausland, A. H. Maurer (New York, 1951); MacKinley
Helm, John Marin (Boston, 1948); Andrew C. Ritchie,
Charles Demuth (New York, 1950); Whitney Museum of
American Art, Max Weber Retrospective Exhibition,
New York, 1949; and Elizabeth McCausland, Marsden
Hartley (Minneapolis, 1952).
In Europe, the proto-Cubist work of Braque could
have been seen at Kahnweiler's Gallery from November 9
through 20, 1908, and that of Picasso at the Ambrose Vollard Gallery in 1909. Braque exhibited his early Cubist
paintings at the Salon des Independants of 1908 and 1909
and at the Salon d'Automne of 1908. The main Cubist
painters exhibited as a group at the Salon des Independants of 1910. For the early Cubist exhibitions, see
John Golding, Cubism: A History and Analysis (London,
1959), pp. 19-46.
ART JOURNALXXVI 2
122
have seen examples in New York at Stieglitz's Gallery 291
and at the Armory Show.4 Illustrations of Cubist paintings were to be found on the pages of Camera Work5
and Arthur J. Eddy's Cubists and Post Impressionism.6
Yet the American so-called Cubists merely made overtures to this new manner; they adopted some of its devices, but missed the underlying logic of the European
movement. Andrew Dasburg remarked in 1923: "Almost everyone [in America] that can be called 'modern'
[and among his 'moderns' Dasburg included Demuth,
Hartley, Marin, and Weber] has at some time or other
shown the influence of Cubism in his work [yet] . .. one
cannot write of 'actual Cubism' in America, but only of
the effort."7
What was the basis of Dasburg's deprecation? From
the standpoint of Judkins' criterion of a purposeful ambiguity, the American painters may be judged as lacking
in courage or perhaps as incompetent in their attempt to
achieve "actual Cubism." If we analyze the Cubist paintings of the Americans, we see that the corruscating web
of planes marking the classical Cubist aesthetic is, in fact,
not to be found. The closely cohering surfaces which in
Paris made for a diaphanous interrelationship of zones
and a curious interchangeability between mass and void
are absent; instead we find in most of the American Cubists a clearer demarcation between forms and a less
ambiguous proliferation of spatial areas.
Hence in Hartley's Landscape No. 32 of 1911 (Fig.
which
was inspired by Picasso's charcoal drawing of a
1),
woman shown at Stieglitz's 291,8 the subtle Cubist network has been transformed into a clear definition of hill
formations and tubular roads. Hartley's Portrait of a
German Officer, painted in 1914 or early 1915 (Fig. 2),
can be called Cubist only with a good deal of reservation,
as each object is rendered with a meticulous clarity. Yet
Hartley seems to have considered his portraits a new
form of Cubism, distinct from the work not only of Picasso but also of Kandinsky, whose colorful abstractions
4In 1911, Stieglitz gave Picasso his first one-man show
anywhere. Lists of Stieglitz's Exhibitions can be found in
TValdoFrank, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Norman, Paul
Rosenfeld, and Harold Rugg, America and Alfred Stieglitz, (New York, 1934), pp. 313-316. For a list of the works
shown in the Armory Show, see Milton W. Brown, The
Story of the Armory Show (Greenwich, Conn., 1963).
'An account of Picasso's Show at 291 can be found in
Camera Work, 36 (October 1911).
6Arthur J. Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionism (Chicago, 1914), Chs. 5 and 6.
7Andrew Dasburg, "Cubism-Its Rise and Influence,"
279.
Arts, 4 (November
s This is illustrated1923),
in Camera Work, 36 (October 1911),
71.
123
Davidson: Cubism and the Early American Modernist
Fig. 1. Marsden Hartley, LANDSCAPENo. 32, 1911, Coll. of lone and Hudson Walker.
had influenced him when he saw them in Munich. Hartley claimed that his painting was the result of "spiritual
illumination." In December 1912, he wrote a long letter
to Stieglitz in which he dwelt enthusiastically on his
projected German series:
I am rapidly gaining ground in this variety of expression and I find it to be closest to my own temperament and ideals. It is not like anything here. It is
not like Picasso-it is not like Kandinsky, not like
any "cubism." It is what I call for want of a better
name subliminal or cosmic cubism. It will suprise
you. I did these things before I went to London as a
result of spiritual illumination and I am convinced
that it is my real and true utterance. It combines a
varied sense of form with my own sense of color
which I believe has never needed stimulation.9
Hartley's style was changing rapidly in the second decade
of the century, but the juxtaposition of flattened areas
9Letter from Marsden Hartley to Alfred Stieglitz, December 20, 1912. Stieglitz Collection, Collection of American
Literature, Yale University Library.
Fig. 2. Marsden Hartley, PORTRAIT OF A GERMAN OFFICER, 1914, Coll. of lone
and Hudson Walker.
Fig. 3. Marsden Hartley, MOVEMENTNO. 9, 1916, Coll. of lone and Hudson Walker.
remained. In 1916, he painted Movement No. 9 (Fig. 3),
which again shows no attempt at an intersection of spatial zones. This is a totally non-objective work, featuring
simply broad, unmodulated, flattened planes, a painting
which might be taken today as a somewhat unsuccessful
effort of Poliakoff.
Maurer's efforts in the Cubist manner are later in
date. In his still lifes of the thirties, transparent areas are
juxtaposed with objects whose shapes have been simplified, but which nonetheless seem to function normally.
The Cubist areas in Still Life with Pears of c. 1931-32
(Fig. 4), center around a solid cardboard container, against
which two pears lean on the right-hand side of the canvas
and upon which, on a flattened portion, pears are placed
at the left. A portion of the container, located a little to
the left of center in the upper half of the canvas, functions, however, in a curious way. It seems to have taken
on the properties of frozen jello, into which half of a
bowl of pears has been imbedded. Maurer seems to hesitate in his ventures with Cubism: the intricate intersection of planes marking the classical Cubist canvas in its
totality is avoided for a more timid use of an occasional
diaphanous zone. In one place the property of cardboard
is violated as it intersects the fruit; while in another
place, the cardboard container, treated realistically, retains the properties of a solid.
Novel and highly imaginative is the enclosure device
in the water colors of John Marin, traceable perhaps to
Whistler in some of the Venetian etchings, but never
found in any of the works of classical Cubism. The enclosure assumes the shape of the visual image and can act
to resolve the conflict when the shape of the image is not
in accord with the shape of the canvas. Moreover, it helps
to resolve the picture plane, not by juxtaposing areas of
two-dimensional objects as in Synthetic Cubism, but
through blunting the force of geometric perspective
through the removal of the foreground plane. This device, functioning as a window through which the observer may view a scene, as in certain Cubist paintings by
Braque, represents a plane superimposed upon another
plane. Maine Islands of 1922 (Fig. 5), night have led to a
total intersection of diaphanous zones, but significantly it
ART JOURNALXXVI 2
124
Fig. 4. Alfred Maurer, STILL LIFE WITH PEARS, 1931-32, Addison Gallery of American
Art.
did not. Through the Cubist-like enclosure Marin rendered the islands sketchily but conventionally. He used
the enclosure not as a means to achieve an "oscillation of
images," but as a device to bind and contain, as he explains in the following:
To get to my picture or to come back I must for myself insist that when finished that is when all the
parts are in place and are working that now it has
become an object and will therefore have its
boundaries as definite as-that the prow the stern the
sides and bottom bound a boat.10
Occasionally, Marin's expressionistic paintings contain small unexpected Cubist areas, which provide subtle
variations beside the looser calligraphy of the rest of the
canvas. The term "areas" is not completely appropriate,
for Marin's Cubist passages are not segregated from other
parts of the work, but either seem to be superimposed
upon them, as in Phippsburg, Maine,11 or are scattered
about among the more irregular forms. Here they sometimes serve as decorative adjuncts functioning as "fill in"
for the empty spaces, as in Sunset of 1922,12where they
occupy the space between the large elements of the painting, the sun and the fields. Still more astonishing is
Marin's Impression of 1930,13a work which reveals the
use of the Cubist passage as an autonomous, apparently
mobile spatial structure, something like a transparent
container, by means of which the bathers shown have
been conveyed to a hitherto uninhabited seashore. Or
perhaps the Cubist structure here functions something like
0
John Marin, "John Marin by Himself," Creative Art,
31 (October 1928), xxxvii.
Illustrated in Art News, 45 (November 1946), 16.
'Illustrated in Art in America, 47, No. 2 (1959), 26.
3 Illustrated in Formes, 21
(January 1932), 196.
125
Davidson: Cubism and the Early American Modernist
Fig. 5. John Marin, MAINE ISLANDS, 1922, Duncan Phillips Coll. Washington, D.C.
the medieval mandorla, appearing inseparable from the
figure it surrounds. The rectangular outlines about
Marin's figures convey the anomalous impression of picture postcards cemented upon a painting of a rather conventional seascape, thereby simulating in paint the technique of collage.
Often these American "Cubists" introduce non-Cubist elements such as futurist repetition of forms or expressionist emphasis. In Hartley's Landscape No. 32,
wedge-shaped elements have been used to suggest a
stifling force pitted against a lonely cottage. One thinks
of Hartley's romanticism, his love of Maine, where he has
broodingly recalled "factories that were once gigantic in
the vision of a child, monstrous, terrifying, prison-like.
.. ."14
In Maurer's George Washington of 1932 (Fig. 6), the
clear definition and simplification of the features, the
precise geometry of the head and the nearly ninety-degree angles that describe its corners, and the rectangular
overlapping strips that comprise the background may be
called Cubist. And yet this interplay of overlapping shapes
is secondary to the expression of a powerful starkness.
The face of Washington is as rigidly and fearsomely
inflexible as that of a primitive idol. The great rectangular, almost square head with firm jaw and staring, unseeing
eyes that occupies about a third of the picture area and
rests upon an equally powerful rectangular neck present
a terrifyingly hieratic image of the Father of our Country.
Demuth's End of the Parade (Fig. 7), with its geometrized factory blocks and billows of smoke, is composed
14Quoted in Gorham Munson, "Homage to Marsden
Hartley: the Painter from Maine," Arts, 35 (February
1961),33
Fig. 7. Charles Demuth, END OF THE PARADE, 1920, Coll. of the late Dr. William
Carlos Williams.
Fig. 6. Alfred Maurer, GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1932, Coll. of Mr. and Mrs. Jan
de Graaf.
with converging lines describing triangular wedges which
resemble morphologically the lines of force in many of
the Futurist paintings. But Demuth's converging lines
function as transparent and semi-transparent planes
which leave intact the geometrical format within the industrial landscape. Russolo used similar triangular
wedges in The Revolt to convey the advance of a seething mob. But with Demuth these lines are merely decorative overtones without a sense of dynamic action.15 Futurist devices were for Demuth another form of
Cubism.16
Futurist borrowing occurs also in Weber's wellknown Chinese Restaurant (Fig. 8). Near the center of
the canvas is the fragmented image of a diner, resembling
in its successive positionings the forms in Balla's Dog on
a Leash. The cacophonous presence of this figure makes
for a jarring effect rarely encountered in the quieter canvases of the classical Cubists. The forms move precipi-
tously toward the center of Weber's composition, where
fragmented parts of heads with repeated contours and
bits of pictures, architectural moldings, and table tops
are discernible, perhaps as one would perceive them
through the window of a speeding automobile. Weber
was well aware of the new ideas of time and dynamic action in art, for in 1910, five years before the Chinese Restaurant, in an essay entitled "The Fourth Dimension
from a Plastic Point of View," he observed:
In plastic art there is a fourth dimension which may
be described as the consciousness of a great and overwhelming sense of space-magnitude in all directions
at one time, and is brought into existence through
the three known measurements.'
"Milton Brown has cleverly suggested the analogy between Demuth's triangular wedges and beams of light.
See Milton W. Brown, "Cubist Realism: An American
Style," Marsyas, 3 (1943-1945) 139-160.
6 For a vivid
summary of the type of political iconoclasm
urged by the Futurists, see Rosa T. Clough's Futurism:
The Story of a Modern Art Movement (New York, 1961),
pp. 11-37.
" Max Weber, "The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic
Point of View," Camera Work, 31 (July 1910), 25.
ART JOURNALXXVI 2
126
Fig. 8. Max Weber, CHINESE RESTAURANT, 1915, Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York, N.Y.
Fig. 9. Pablo Picasso, GLASS, WITH STRAW-BOUND BOTTLEOF RUM, 1914, Private
Coll., Paris.
But the differences between the American Cubist
work and the European is not to be explained simply
through the presence or absence of Futurist intrusions. If
we look more closely at the Chinese Restaurant and compare it with, say, Picasso's Glass, with Straw-Bound Bottle of Rum of 1914 (Fig. 9), we see basic differences in the
choice of colors and in the handling of forms. In the Parisian work, the colors are those of the earth-bistre
brown, ocher, sienna, and shades of green. In spite of
modifications of tone, Picasso has varied his colors for the
most part in value and in intensity, and seldom along the
scale of hue. Weber has kept most of his colors at full intensity; and has introduced a mottled array of hues,
which more than simply enriching the surface, make for
127
Davidson: Cubism and the Early American Modernist
a strident effect. An alizarin crimson patch is found in
the upper left corner; a dull yellow checkerboard pattern
in the lower left and right corners. Brilliant crimsons,
gaudy pinks, deep blues, yellows, blacks, tans, and dull
blues occupy the other areas of the canvas and contribute
together to the dissonance.
The jarring effect of the harsh contrast of colors is
brought into still sharper relief by a disparity in the sizes
and shapes of the various forms. The two checkerboard
patterns in the lower left- and right-hand corners of the
Chinese Restaurant occupy about one-fifth of the total
area of the painting, while toward the center occur smaller shapes, which are but one-tenth the size of each of the
checkerboard shapes. To be sure, in the Picasso are to be
found occasional curvilinear elements modifying the austere gridwork of verticals and horizontals: the nearly circular fruit to the right, for example, and the ovoid tray
to the left upon which the decanter of wine is placed.
But these are but decorative adjuncts within the whole
and do not achieve the prominence of the zigzag strip of
red at the center of Weber's canvas, or the looping coils
of pink near the upper right-hand corner.
Picasso's palette, far more limited than Weber's
along the scale of hue, makes for closely cohering surfaces
which create a diaphanous interrelationship of zones. In
the Chinese Restaurant, because greatly varying hues are
contrasted one with the other and because these hues, except toward the center of the canvas, do not vary in intensity and in value within each color area, shape is clearly
delineated from shape, and the ambiguous proliferation
of areas characterizing classical Cubism is thereby avoided. These formal oppositions underlie a totally different
mode of perception between Weber and Picasso. For
Weber, the fundamental distinction is between the clarity and "un-clarity" of each object. Weber's original conception cannot be recreated, yet analogies with the psychology of vision are suggested. The blurred details in
the center of the canvas are captured, as it were, by the
periphery of the vision. Picasso, however, casts doubt
upon the very reality of the objects he pictures. His is a
purposeful ambiguity. He does not progressively blur objects, as does Weber, but affords us now and then, amidst
his proliferating shapes, the sudden glimpse of a recognizable detail. For the handling of space and the arrangement of detail are referable, now, not to the workings of
the human visual apparatus, but to the resorts of a master
manipulator, whose structuring of reality depends upon
his unique mode of apperception. The distinction is no
longer between the clear and the unclear, but between
the object and the non-object. We question not whether
we discern, but what it is that we do discern, and in so
doing, we the observers, have ceased to become the frame
of reference. And it is in this enforced detachment of the
observer that the classical essence in Picasso's Cubist
structure may be said to reside.l8
II
But why need Dasburg's unenthusiastic evaluation
be seen as a condemnation? The Cubist efforts of the
early American Modernist ought also to be examined in
the light of the history of American painting. It really
makes more sense than setting Picasso, Braque, and Gris
up as their point of departure. The American painter between 1910 and 1930 had no tradition of revolution to
fall back upon; he had no Cezanne or Seurat in his immediate background to pave the way for his experiments.
It is no wonder, then, that in America there was no polemical approach to Cubism as there was in Europe,19or,
to put it still more accurately, no one in America so
much as dreamed that there was such a thing as a Cubist
style. Dasburg's observation that some Americans show
the influence of Cubism in their work was quite unusual;
in fact, as far as I have been able to learn, this is the only
reference at that time to any kind of Cubist departure in
early American Modernism. Picasso is noted for changing styles in rapid succession, and yet he and Braque
worked mainly in a Cubist style for about a decade. In
America, on the other hand, the Modernists adopted a
Cubist idiom sporadically, returning to it only in an occasional canvas. For them Cubism meant not a systematic
revolution, not a movement, certainly not an ongoing
evolution, but an extended process of discovery and experimentation.
And yet, in spite of its lack of continuity, in spite of
the variety of its individual expressions, the American
Cubist idiom retains something of a quality consistently
discernible in earlier American painting. The meticulous
clarity of forms in the paintings of the limners was continued in the work of John Singleton Copley. Unlike the
limners, Copley rendered the sheen of textures and modeled his figures, but the sitter again seemed to be sharply
etched out from the surrounding space. Copley's precisely
"I feel that a recent observation of Otto Brendel concerning the implications of classicism is applicable here.
Brendel argued that classicism "is recognized as a concept of the mind which art must define, not illustrate,
Even when these images deal with facts of natural experience, it remains clear that their native habitat is in
art, not nature." Otto J. Brendel, "The Classical Style
in Modern Art," in From Sophocles to Picasso, ed. Whitney J. Oates (Bloomington, Ind., 1962), p. 97.
9 Gleizes and
Metzinger in their book Cubism, first published in 1913, claimed that Cubism was a "movement
which tends toward the integral realization of painting."
They argued that "for the partial liberties conquered
by Courbet, Manet, Ckzanne, and the Impressionists,
Cubism substitutes an indefinite liberty." Albert Gleizes
and Jean Metzinger, Cubism (London, 1913), p. 62.
carved forms paved the way or at least prognosticated the
poetically crystal silences of many of the landscapes of
the American Luminists. If a harbor scene of FitzHugh
Lane is compared with one of Monet, it will be seen that
though the American took care to observe precisely in his
painting the prevailing atmospheric conditions, unlike
the French Impressionist (and the French Cubist after
him), he maintained the integrity of the object, defining
precisely the boundaries between land and water and between sand and rock. These clear definitions in the
paintings of the Luminists bring to mind the immaculately rendered military paraphernalia in Hartley's Portrait and the highly enameled surfaces of the checkered
floors in Weber's Restaurant.
The strident contrasts between hues in American
Cubist painting, as in Chinese Restaurant, make for a
clear definition between adjacent color areas. The color
areas in this and in other American Cubist paintings
were allowed to maintain their full brilliance; for atmospheric perspective was not rendered, a device which
would have produced blurring effects through a diminution of color contrasts as objects receded into space and
through a progressive lowering of color intensities. In
Demuth's End of the Parade, the distant chimneys are
smaller than those of the foreground, according to the
law of geometric perspective, but are as firmly drawn and
as intensely colored. As opposed to the American Cubist
who retained approximately the correct local colors of
each object, Picasso and Braque often used throughout
their compositions, regardless of the object depicted, the
prevailing tonalities of earth colors, thereby enhancing
the creation of diaphanous zones and intermerging
planes. The American Cubist, moreover, usually applied
his paint in thin layers, avoiding the more painterly
styles often used by Picasso and Braque to produce textures which in themselves helped obliterate the boundaries between objects.
However, Rosenblum's argument that "the very idea
of painting a Chinese restaurant in New York speaks for
the close commitment to reality that characterized not
only most American painting in general but American
Cubism in particular"20should not be applied indiscriminately. Can we say that Hartley's Portrait is more realistic than the Cubist portraits of Picasso, where something
of the personality of the sitter is usually indicated? Hartley, though calling his painting a "portrait," has shown
nothing of the man himself, but has abstracted those objects of military regalia which served to identify his rank
as a German officer. Or the architectural landscapes of
Demuth may serve as a less strained example. Lane Faison has shown these to be suprisingly accurate, having
proved through photographs of the depicted site that Demuth arrived at his art by subtle shifts rather than by
20
Rosenblum, op. cit., p. 222.
ART JOURNALXXVI 2
128
wholesale alterations.21Yet should we use the word "realism" for a cityscape in which all life seems to have been
suspended? The key to the appreciation of these American Cubist works lies, I think, in what Baur has said of
the paintings of FitzHugh Lane:
It is difficult to define the almost magical quality
which radiates. ...
It does not reside in the tech-
nique, which is dry, meticulous, sometimes stiffly naive, nor is it in the design, which is only occasionally
of more than passing interest. It seems to exist rather
in an impersonal quality, as if conscious thought had
been suspended to permit the scene to impress itself
on the senses and feelings in the purity of immediate
perception.22
Demuth's factories appear to be brand new, almost
like metallic toys made with an erector set; smoke will
never singe their windows, nor will men picket their
walls. Each object painted by these artists, whether organic or inorganic, appears incapable of aging, decay, or
destruction of any kind. Each of the sixteen fruits in
Maurer's Still Life with Pears is firm and ripe-but distant and untouched. The medals in Hartley's Portrait are
bright and metallic, the epaulets stiff. The checkered
floor in Weber's restaurant is spotless, the architectural
moldings immaculate.
If Demuth's End of the Parade of 1920 is placed beside L_ger's The City of 1919, the crystalline character of
the American Cubist work may be observed in its deeper
iconographic implications. Charles Demuth stripped the
industrial landscape of its rough edges, of its people, of
all signs of activity, in order to evoke an airless world of
pristine purity. The smoke of chimneys, filtered of its
grime and soot, has become as white as the fleeciest of
clouds, and, appearing as iridescent orbs, it is made to
contrast with the more massive rectangular rhythms of
the factory blocks. Signs and advertisements are as absent
as the workers. Perforating Demuth's factories are large
windows, yet though these would potentially offer to the
observer access to the activities within, here are the darkest areas of the canvas. Hence, on the formal level Demuth did not paint the shimmering play of light which
would have dissolved the clarity of his forms and have
indicated evanescent atmospheric conditions, and on the
iconographical level we are presented with a silent airless
industrialism, whose processes are held frozen and motionless. In Leger's canvas, on the other hand, derricks
rise and smoke is darkened with soot. Letters of advertisement appear, and robot workers move industriously
Samuel Lane Faison, "Fact and Art in Charles Demuth," Magazine of Art, 43 (April 1950), 122-128.
21
22M.
C. Karolik, M. and M. Karolik Collection of Ameri-
can Paintings, 1815 to 1865 (Cambridge,
Foreword by John Baur, p. xli.
129
Mass., 1949),
Davidson: Cubism and the Early American Modernist
about to a mechanized rhythm.
To say that in America one could not write of "actual Cubism" is hardly meaningful, for the American
painters never grappled with that purposeful ambiguity
of which Judkins wrote. They never really emulated the
Europeans, who served only as a distant point of departure. They worked from their own premises, and what
was done in Europe cannot rightfully be made to serve as
a criterion to judge their canvases.
At the turn of the century, Maurer used to insist
that a Cezanne portrait owned by Gertrude Stein must
have been a finished picture. "Of course you can tell it is
a finished picture, he used to explain to the other american [sic] painters who came and looked dubiously," recalled Gertrude Stein. "You can tell because it has a
frame, now whoever heard of anybody framing a canvas
if the picture isn't finished."23 Unfortunately we do not
know Maurer's view toward Cubism itself. Nonetheless,
there is revealed here something of the early American
Modernists' inability, before the advent of abstract expressionism, to comprehend the validity of a composition
still in the state of flux, something of his perplexity before the very process of creation. Gertrude Stein's recollections are not always to be trusted as a reliable source,
yet Maurer's alleged inclination to think in terms of the
bounded picture is closely paralleled by Weber's preference for the coherent, palpable form. In 1910 Weber ventured that
there can be no color without there being a form, in
space and in light, with substance and weight to
hold the color. I prefer a form, even if it is in black
and white, rather than a tache of formless color.24
As late as 1943 Hartley commented that
Picasso's later period of the two-eyed profiles gives me
the creeps and I don't care for the kind of painting
in them-but heaven knows he has done a lot of the
very best painting in the Twentieth Century.25
Hartley's charge may well have been directed, not at the
horrors of the facial expressions, but at the uneasiness
connoted through the possibility of multiple readings.
For when he was first confronted by Cubism, Hartley did
(Continued on page 165)
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
(New York, 1933), p. 9.
24
Max Weber, "Chinese Dolls and Modern Colorists,"
Camera Work, 31 (July 1910), 51.
2
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lyonel
Feininger-Marsden Hartley, Dorothy C. Miller, ed.
(New York, 1944), p. 64. Hartley's opinion of Picasso is
taken from a letter of August 16, 1943, to Richard B.
Sisson of Corea, Maine.
23
In another letter of June 7, 1913, he confided to Stieglitz:
I think that there must be a consuming preference in
me for single meanings. They are comfortable and
comforting and one knows where one stands with a
single purpose thing.27
Fig. 8. St. Mark, Ebo Gospels, School of Reims, before 835. Epernay, Bibliotheque
Municipale, Ms. 1.
first of the medieval artists rather than the last of the Romans. As such, it was the Carolingians who set the course
which European art was to follow for the next five
hundred years.
RUTH BERENSON, a Harvard Ph.D. and free lance art
critic, now lives in New York and is the wife of Norbert
I
Muhlen.
CUBISM
AND THE EARLY AMERICAN
MODERNIST
(Continuedfrom page 129)
not realize that the lettering and numbers in Picasso's
paintings of 1910 to 1912 had been integrated within the
network of intersecting planes. Rather, he saw these as
independent structures that had been placed across the
network and that had been meant literally as words or as
numbers. In a letter to Stieglitz of July 1912, he wrote
that
just now Picasso is doing things that have [two illegible words follow] and across these network designs
names of people and words like "jolie" or "bien"
and numbers like "75."26
165
Berenson: The Exhibition of Carolingian Art at Aachen
Similarly, the critics and writers around the time of
the Armory Show had remarkably little understanding of
the Cubist style that was then sweeping through Europe.
Like the Modernists themselves, whom they usually ridiculed, they saw nothing of shifting patterns or spatial
ambiguities. In reviewing the Armory Show, President
Theodore Roosevelt seemed to fear that the cube, like
the trust, threatened to become a monopoly. He suggested that there was no real reason for choosing the cube as
a symbol, that the Cubists might "just as well have chosen the octagon or have called themselves the Knights of
the Isosceles Triangle."28 Frank Jewett Mather insisted
glibly that "the single ascertainable notion behind Cubism is that finer effects, particularly of mass, may be obtained by choosing a single and uniform unit of expression, preferably the cube."29 What characterizes Roosevelt's and Mather's insistence that Cubism can be reduced to a single discernible shape is not an antipathy as
much as a rigidity of outlook, an optical aberration, as it
were, which prevented them from seeing what most of us
could see thirty-five years later (after two World Wars
and a depression), that the cubes, in fact, could hardly be
read.
But Mather's aberration is just the point here. If the
early American Modernist and his critic never really.
knew what "orthodox" European Cubism was about, it
hardly makes sense to regard the American Cubist paintas
ings as being one-half Cubist or one-third Cubist, or,
there
Cubist.
Rather,
Dasburg did, as not being actually
is need for more intelligible and meaningful classifications within the Cubist camp.
2Letter from Marsden Hartley to Alfred Stieglitz, July
1912. Stieglitz Collection, Collection of American Literature, Yale University Library.
27Letter from Marsden Hartley to Alfred Stieglitz, June
7, 1913. Stieglitz Collection, Collection of American Literature, Yale University Library.
23
Theodore Roosevelt, "A Layman's View of an Art Exhibition," Outlook, 103 (March 29, 1913), 718-720.
29Frank J. Mather, Jr., "Newest Tendencies in Art,"
Independent, 74 (March 6, 1913), 504-512.
MR. DAVIDSON teaches history of art at Oakland Unitalk
versity, Rochester, Michigan. This article based on a
at
held
Art
Midwest
Conference
delivered at the
College
a
1964.
Lawrence, Kansas, Fall,