THE HISTORY AND CHRONOLOGY OF CUBISM Page: 6
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History and Chronology of Cubism:
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As in previous exhibitions, artists like Alcide le Beau, Segonzac and Luc Albert Moreau, whose paintings were related to Cubism only in a most general way, were invited to show, and the title may have been chosen partly to allow for this. But as opposed to the exhibition of the Société Normande de Peinture Moderne of the previous year, the majority of the artists showing at the Section d'Or were Cubists or painters directly influenced by the movement, and the effect made must have been concentrated. Furthermore, the fact that the exhibition was organized to show the successive stages through which Cubism had passed indicates that the painters were attempting to make their work as comprehensible as possible to the public, and their purpose must have been further served by the demonstration of the affinities between Cubism and the more readily understandable paintings of other artists who shared only a few of their pictorial concerns. The exhibition was undoubtedly a great success, and it put Cubism on the map more than any other exhibition that preceded it.
This same desire to render Cubism more intelligible to the general public, and to define and clarify the movement generally, led Gleizes and Metzinger in the autumn of 1911 to collaborate in writing the book Du Cubisme, which appeared in August 1912. Salmon La Jeune Peinture Contemporaine, which contained an Histoire anécdotique du Cubisme, was published in the following month. Earlier in 1912 Apollinaire had written a series of articles for Les Soirées de Paris and these were gathered together with some additional material to form the bulk of his Les Peintres Cubistes which was issued in March of the following year. In February and June 1912 Hourcade published articles entitled respectively La Tendance de la Peinture Contemporaine and Le Mouvement Pictural vers une école française de peinture, in which he attempted to reassess the achievements of the preceding year. Raynal's first significant essay Qu'est-ce que le Cubisme? did not appear until late in 1913. All these writings had certain points in common. All emphasized that Cubism was an art of realism, although natural appearances were playing an ever-diminishing part. Painting was to become intellectual, and the painters would depict the world not as they saw it, but as they knew it to be. Apollinaire and Hourcade added that this conceptual or intellectual approach led naturally to a selection of simple geometric forms. The right of the painter to move around an object and combine various views of it into a single image, first stated in writing by Metzinger in 1910 and elaborated a few months later by Allard, was quickly adopted by most critics as a central feature of the style, and became related to the conceptual or intellectual aspect. Thus Hourcade felt that an artist could convey more clearly the real nature of an object by showing as many aspects of it as possible, and guided by intelligence rather than by his eye, would resort to geometric forms. Knowing that the opening of a cup is round, it is false to depict it simply as an ellipse; ideally the object is shown as a combination of plan, section and elevation.
following year. In February and June 1912 Hourcade published articles entitled respectively La Tendance de la Peinture Contemporaine and Le Mouvement Pictural vers une école française de peinture, in which he attempted to reassess the achievements of the preceding year. Raynal's first significant essay Qu'est-ce que le Cubisme? did not appear until late in 1913. All these writings had certain points in common. All emphasized that Cubism was an art of realism, although natural appearances were playing an ever-diminishing part. Painting was to become intellectual, and the painters would depict the world not as they saw it, but as they knew it to be. Apollinaire and Hourcade added that this conceptual or intellectual approach led naturally to a selection of simple geometric forms. The right of the painter to move around an object and combine various views of it into a single image, first stated in writing by Metzinger in 1910 and elaborated a few months later by Allard, was quickly adopted by most critics as a central feature of the style, and became related to the conceptual or intellectual aspect. Thus Hourcade felt that an artist could convey more clearly the real nature of an object by showing as many aspects of it as possible, and guided by intelligence rather than by his eye, would resort to geometric forms. Knowing that the opening of a cup is round, it is false to depict it simply as an ellipse; ideally the object is shown as a combination of plan, section and elevation. Emphasizing the intellectual approach, Hourcade was the first of the many writers to relate Cubist painting to Kantian aesthetics, and in one of his articles includes a quotation from Schopenhauer.
On the subject of the abstract tendencies inherent in Cubist painting, however, the writers differed sharply. Apollinaire appeared to see complete abstraction as the goal. In the second section of Les Peintres Cubistes he stated: 'Le sujet ne compte plus, ou s'il compte c'est à peine. . . Les jeunes artistespeintres des écoles extrémes ont pour but secret de faire de la peinture pure. C'est un art plastique entiérement nouveau. Il n'est qu'é son commencement et n'est pas aussi abstrait qu'il voudrait l'étre'. Gleizes and Metzinger, themselves painters, and fascinated by purely formal pictorial problems, also began by seeing abstraction as the logical end, although they rapidly retreated and admitted the need, for the moment at least, of a certain coefficient of realism: '. . . le tableau n'imite rien et . . . il présente nûment sa raison d'être. . . . Néanmoins avouons que la réminiscence des formes naturelles ne saurait être absolument bannie, du moins actuellement. On ne hausse pas d'emblée un art jusqu'à l'effusion pure.' Allard and Hourcade rigorously opposed any suggestion of abstraction in Cubist painting. Hourcade condemned it as un-French: 'notre tradition profonde veut un sujet, et l'originalité de l'école cubiste ne peut être qu'en rejetant l'anecdote pour retrouver le sujet'; and he repudiated the idea that all the painters of the Section d'Or had renounced natural appearances: '. . . il est absolument faux de dire que tous ces peintres ont pour but unique de faire de la peinture pure et qu'ils tournent le dos à la nature.' None of the writers realized that the Cubism of this date relied on a balance between abstraction and representation to achieve its effects, and that it was this balance that gave each work a significance on more levels than one. It was only natural that the two artist-writers, Gleizes and Metzinger, should have been the ones who were forced into a position of compromise between the two poles of abstraction and representation. But while the Section d'Or represented the high point of the Cubist movement as it was presented to the public, and while the influence of Cubism daily became more powerful and widespread, many painters who had been Cubist, or had moved in Cubist circles, were already abandoning the style or using certain aspects of it as points of departure for developing completely new art forms. Delaunay, who earlier in the year had held an important exhibition together with Marie Laurencin at the Galerie Barbazanges, did not show at the Section d'Or, and wrote an open letter to Vauxcelles: 'je tiens à vous dire que je ne rallie pas à l'opinion qui est injustement basée de Monsieur Hourcade qui me proclame créateur du cubisme avec quatre de mes confrères et amis. C'est à mon insu que quelques jeunes peintres se sont servis de mes anciennes études. Ils ont exposé dernièrement des toiles qu'ils appellent toiles cubistes. Je n'expose pas.' And in the reviews of the Section d'Or and the progressive Salons of 1912, there are indications that the works of Kupka, Picabia and Marcel Duchamp were generally recognized as having gone in some way beyond those of the original Cubists in daring and novelty. One critic of the Salon d'Automne wrote: 'Le record de la haute folie est détenu cette anneé par M. Picabia . . . M. Kupka a tourné, lui, au sphéricisme,' while Hourcade felt that Picabia had 'poussé jusqu'au bout une théorie mauvaise.' Allard had referred to the work of Kupka at the Salon des Indépendants as 'fantaisies post-cubistes', while at the Section d'Or Vauxcelles singled out as representative of the worst and most outrageous tendencies Duchamp Le Roi et la Reine entoures de nus vites. Both Delaunay and Le Fauconnier, who did not exhibit at the Galerie de la Boétie either, were at this point on less friendly terms with the other members of the movement, and for this reason their works were not illustrated in Du Cubisme. The differences between the painters appear to have been purely personal, but Delaunay had also moved away from the other Cubists in his works of 1912, and, using his Cubist researches as a point of departure, was developing a much more purely abstract kind of painting with colour as its principal element.
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