The Adam and Eve of Modernism

By ROBERT HUGHES

Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism," which goes on view this week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, is by far the most demanding show MOMA has ever done. Whatever one's stamina for comparing nuances of pictorial meaning, it will be taxed by this long sequence of more than 350 mostly small, mostly brown works of art that fill two floors of the museum through Jan. 16. This will be the array of Cubist evidence at which future scholars will look back. Curator William Rubin, director emeritus of MOMA's department of painting and sculpture, has called in all his markers. "Picasso and Braque" is his retirement aria, the climax of a great career in modernist scholarship.

Cubism is the archetype of 20th century cultural movements. Indeed, it is the reason so many people have come to think of modern art as a sequence of movements, group activities. Neither Pablo Picasso nor Georges Braque could have created it on his own: it was a truly cooperative process in which Picasso (for a short time) was relieved of the psychic burden of egoistic creation -- the loneliness of the virtuoso -- and the more cautious and measured Braque was spurred into radical experiment. It marks, more clearly than any other, the point at which modern art broke away from commonsense vision and split its audience into a tiny coterie who "got it" and a large majority who did not. By making the process of creation part of its subject, it ushered in the self-reflexiveness of modernism: art thinking about art.

The American museum industry has long argued that practically all later styles of 20th century painting and sculpture can be defined through either their origins in Cubism or their opposition to it. Abstract art comes out of the virtual disappearance of the recognizable nude or still life from Braque's and Picasso's work in the autumn of 1911. Pop art is born in the letters, headlines and brand names they stenciled and glued onto their surfaces. Constructivist sculpture descends from Braque's paper constructions and Picasso's tin guitar. Abstract Expressionism gets its originality from its struggle to "escape the Cubist grid" -- which was never a grid anyway. Cubism, from this simplified and patristic standpoint, becomes the tree in the primal garden of modernism, and Picasso and Braque its Adam and Eve.

Hence whole pyramids and stupas of doctoral paper have been raised over its site. No short period in the lives of two artists -- about seven years from Picasso's completion of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 to Braque's enlistment in the French army in 1914 -- has been more analyzed by more hands. Rather than try to boil down all this material for the general public (a hopeless task), Rubin has taken a biographical approach, focusing entirely on the give-and-take between the two men, their bonds and differences, their mutual way of working through what he rightly calls "the most passionate adventure in our century's art."

Cubism has never gone soft; it remains, after 80 years, mysterious, challenging and resistant. Neither Picasso nor Braque said much to explain what they believed they were doing. Their Cubist work contains no ideological positions, dramatic subject matter or easy anecdotes. It disdains narrative and sentiment -- a severe test for Picasso, whose Blue and Rose periods had been full of both. (On the other hand, both men's paintings and collages were seeded with puns, sly allusions and In jokes: when the fragmentary writing on one of Picasso's paintings from 1912 declares that "Notre Avenir est dans l'air ((Our Future is in the air))," one remembers that the two men liked to wear mechanics' clothes and compare themselves to the Wright brothers, who had given flying shows in Paris in 1908, and that Picasso's nickname for Braque was "Wilbourg" -- Wilbur.) It is difficult, subtle, cerebral and on the whole quite unspectacular art, brimming with an inventiveness that, simply because it has become so embedded in our very conception of modernity, can sometimes be quite difficult to see in its true quality.

For Cubism was a response to a changed world -- a France that was no longer describable in the semirural idyll of Impressionism, a place whose emergent reality had more to do with inventive technology, mass media and the density of the great capital, Paris. Cubism is the urban art par excellence. It celebrates the rapid stream of half-completed impressions, the overlay and stutter of images and ideas, enforced by the tempo of city life: it is the art of cultural compression and flux. With its materials, subjects and techniques, it lighted up the commonness of the modern world.

Nowhere is its delight in the ironic life of overlaid signs made clearer than in the use of collage, which Picasso invented and Braque rapturously extended. The caning in Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912, is mechanically printed oilcloth, and its presence in the tiny painting -- worked over with that fierce slanting clutter of painted images, newspaper, glass, cut lemon and so forth -- is a double play with signs, not the insertion of something real into a fiction.

It gets us nowhere to think that Cubism was meant as a form of realism. That * is what art historians like Douglas Cooper thought -- Cubism aimed for "the solid tangible reality of things" by representing them from several angles. But "solid tangible reality" is hardly detectable in this show. You get an overwhelming sense of plastic energy from Picasso's drawing of volume, but that is a different matter. Neither he nor Braque was out to propose a systematic alternative to one-point perspective as the key to making things look real. There was no system to Cubist shuttling and lapping. Which does not mean it was anarchic, but rather that Picasso and Braque made up their coherences from passage to passage, from inch to inch of the canvas, rejecting the "timelessness" of traditional painting as they went.

To follow Braque as he patiently constructs his first real masterpiece, Violin and Pitcher, 1910, is to watch a classical sensibility throwing itself into the flux of uncertainty and coming through intact. Chardin still lives beneath the silvery buckling planes of the pitcher, and every one of the hundreds of angles at which the shallow facets of the picture impinge on one another seems both provisional and immutable. But this -- let alone the far more abstracted paintings of late 1911, in which the thinnest of clues to the identity of objects (a pipestem, a playing card) swims in a vaporous gray- brown flux inflected by lines that break before they can become architectural -- is a kind of visual cohesion that has very little to do with how we actually deal with objects in space.

It has, on the other hand, everything to do with proposing infinite relationships between things and seeing how many of them at a time can make visual sense. You still cannot walk into the Cubist room. But that is partly -- or so the paintings quietly argue -- because you are already in it. It is the space of relativity, the benign and long-lost mental space of the early 20th century, when newness still seemed paradisiacal.