THE HISTORY AND CHRONOLOGY OF CUBISM Page: 10
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History and Chronology of Cubism:
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The relations between the Cubists and the German painters with whom they came into contact were less stormy, although the internal situation in Germany was complex from an art-historical point of view owing to the fact that during the pre-war years Germany seemed to become the melting-pot for westernEuropean painting. By 1912, however, the influence of Matisse and the Fauves, which the Brücke had grafted on to a more purely native form of Expressionism, was definitely on the wane, and German painters were feeling the influence of both Cubism and Futurism. Picasso's work was the first seen in Germany in 1909 at the Thannhauser Gallery in Munich, and paintings by many of the other painters subsequently known as Cubist were shown at the second exhibition of the Neue Künstlervereinigung in Munich in 1910. Throughout 1912 and 1913 the works of Picasso and Braque were to be seen at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin and in the avant-garde exhibitions in Cologne and Munich.
The most significant and direct connection with Germany, however, was that between Delaunay and the artists of the Blaue Reiter. In 1911 the German painter Elizabeth Epstein, a friend of the Delaunays, drew the attention of Kandinsky to the works of Delaunay at the Salon des Indépendants, and later in the year Kandinsky wrote inviting Delaunay to join in the first exhibition of the reconstituted Neue Kiinstlervereinigung, now known as the Blaue Reiter, which was held in December at the Thannhauser Gallery in Munich. Delaunay was represented by three paintings, all of which were sold, and his reputation and influence in Germany increased steadily. In the spring of the following year ( 1912) Delaunay was visited in his studio in Paris by Paul Klee, and later on by Marc and Macke. While in Paris Klee saw and admired Cubist works at Uhde's, and he may have known the rapidly growing Rupf collection in Berne, but he remained most impressed by Delaunay's scientific approach to the handling of colour, which fitted in with his own ideas; in the autumn of 1912 he translated some of Delaunay's notes on light for the review Der Sturm. The climax of Delaunay's success in Germany came when he was given a large one-man show at the Walden Gallery in Berlin early in 1913; both Delaunay and Apollinaire travelled to Germany for the opening. Orphism appealed particularly to the Germans, since like so much of their own painting it was brightly coloured and was simultaneously a more theoretical and a more popular type of art than Cubism.
Although the influence of Cubism on the German painters was less direct than it had been in the development of Futurism (the work of Delaunay which the Germans most admired, for instance, was no longer really Cubist at all), unlike the Italians the Germans made no attempt to disguise their interest in the movement, and several of the artists of the Blaue Reiter actually thought of themselves as Cubist painters. This was in a sense strange, since not only was their art as far removed from true Cubism from a purely visual point of view, but their aims, though not as aggressively stated as those of the Futurists, were equally at variance with those of the French painters. The work of both Klee and Marc was tinged by a strong literary flavour, and, particularly in the case of Marc, by a strong underlying current of Germanic mysticism. In fact Marc's painting after 1911, with its intense, vibrant colour, and its sense of drama and dynamic tension, was in many ways closer to Futurism than to Cubism. In the work of Macke, even at its most controlled and classical, a jagged expressionistic feeling keeps breaking through, while his subject-matter at its most typical invites, once again, Futurist analogies. However, what all three painters learnt from Cubism, largely through Delaunay, was the means of organizing a canvas in terms of interacting and transparent facets or planes, which could be made to suggest movement and depth, while preserving the unity of the picture-plane; Chagall, another painter whose work was known and admired in Germany, and who had also flirted briefly with both Cubism and Orphism, acknowledged a similar debt to Cubist painting. But whereas Futurism had been to a large extent aimed at and against Paris and Parisian painting, the Germans were content to remain on the receiving end of things and their work, in the prewar years at least, had little or no influence back on French art.
With the declaration of war the Cubist painters, many of whom had begun to grow apart artistically, were physically separated, and the movement rapidly broke up. Cubism, however, had already won its most important battles. Though not appreciated by the public it certainly was accepted or at least recognized by all the significant critics and by several important dealers. It had temporarily reasserted the ascendancy of painting over other art forms by overshadowing any advances in literature or music. The style was constantly attracting new figures and had influenced, directly or indirectly, almost every significant young painter in Europe; even Matisse, whose art had always seemed at the opposite pole to Cubism, was introducing a hitherto unknown severity into his painting in preparation for Cubistic experiments in 1915. Whatever directions artists were to take after the war, it was already clear that painting could never be quite the same again.
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