Early Cubism, Tactility, and Existential Spatiality

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to draw important parallels between the way in which configured pictorial practices of early Cubism interpreted the idea of tactile space and the phenomenological concept of existential spatiality. It is argued that in dispensing with the “illusion of perspectival space” and deconstructing geometrical perspective, several Cubist artists developed a position of multi-perspectival realism with respect to what remains ungraspable in the three-dimensional visual rendering of space. Tactile space is the main theme of early Cubist painting. Tactility remains concealed by linear perspective and three-dimensional space, and existentially primordial tactile space turns out to be the ungraspable which Cubist experiments has to disclose. At the same time, these artists succeeded in avoiding any kind of a reification of space as something that statically embraces what is situated in it. The paper is also preoccupied with Cubist “geometrical experimentation”. The claim is defended that it is precisely this experimentation that most essentially anticipates Heidegger’s analyses of the spatiality of the ready-to-hand and the spatiality of being-in-the-world. Parallels are also drawn with Merleau-Ponty’s spatiality of the perceiving-tactile body which was chiefly focused on the presupposition that the visibility attained through visual perception is imbued with invisibility stemming from the immediate tactility relating the perceiving body and the perceived entities – a presupposition shared by the early Cubists and the French phenomenologist.

KEYWORDS:

• Configuration of pictorial practices
• tactile space
• deconstruction of geometric perspective
• existential spatiality

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the anonymous referee for her/his valuable proposals and critical comments.

Notes

1. In Being and Time Heidegger attributes the „ecstatic unity” of existence predominantly to existential temporality: Dasein as temporality is “ecstatico-horizonal in its being”. Yet even in this work, which is still characterized by a stronger dominance of the issues of temporality over the problematics of spatiality, there is an interesting section that addresses “the temporality of the spatiality”. Though positing that Dasein’s specific spatiality must be grounded in temporality, he admits that there is a primordial unity of temporality (as a horizon) and that kind of existential spatiality (as directionality and de-severance) which generates metric space, but itself has no metric structure.

2. The disordered order of tubular, conical, and cubed forms in Léger’s paintings creates both an additional dynamism and a greater plasticity in the relations between the “touchable” space and the objects within it. A nice description of Léger’s branch of Cubism is provided by Edward Fry (1973, xxii-xxiii): “Léger’s cubism shared with that of Picasso and Braque the common grounds of ultimate indebtedness to Cézanne, avoidance of traditional illusionism and chiaroscuro modeling, the use of flat color planes and planar overlay, the priority of conception over perception, and in general the depiction of motifs that are potentially observable from a single point in time and space. To these shared cubist elements Léger added his own concerns with visual dynamics.”

3. Any one pictorial practice is a discrete unit distinguished by (1) an intrinsic technique and (2) a scheme of repetitive performance. The Other as a potential recipient of the performance’s outcome – and in this sense, as a unavoidable partner of the artist – is always implied by the way of designing such a practice, irrespectively of whether the artist reflexively takes into consideration the contexts of possible reception. Any pictorial practice is an inter-subjective entity, because its organization and performance assume an implied/implicit recipient.

4. See also Biemel (1968), Slettene (1997), Pinotti (2010), and Vydrowa (2016). These studies are, more or less, engaged with drawing parallels between Cubist pictorial techniques and Husserl’s Wesensschau. Yet there is also another trend – typically represented by Sepp (1995) – that seeks for parallels between Cubist ways of suppressing the reference to objects by means of faceting techniques and Husserl’s concept of epochē.

5. Kahnweiler’s division between analytic and synthetic phase in Cubist movement is entirely inspired by Kant’s concepts of analytic and synthetic.

6. In taking issue with Gehlen’s interpretation of Cubism, Gadamer (1993, 307) also opposes “the explanation of Cubist program in terms of Neo-Kantian philosophy.” For him, Cubist imagery has nothing to do with the conceptual constitution of objects in accordance with aprioristic categorical moments and the synthesis of apperception. Such an approach is not able to explain any one of the principal features of Cubist painting. An “absurd idea” is for him also the use of Husserl’s theory of shadowing (Abschattung) of the objects of perception as a means for understanding this painting.

7. Characterizing Cubism as a characteristic cultural lifeform means that it is a form of artistic life that through the recurrence of its configured practices creates its specific cultural patterns of producing artworks. Observing the primacy of the formation of an everydayness of such practices is a sine qua non for identifying a characteristic cultural form of life.

8. See in this regard Rosenblum (1973) as well as Steinberg’s (1988) classical paper. Arthur Miller (2001, 104-5) makes the interesting point with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon begins (under the influence of Maurice Princet) an important tendency towards geometrization in early Cubist painting.

9. Metzinger (1910) describes the initial configuration in terms of techniques enabling a “mobile perspective” that rejects the existence of preferred reference frame. Metzinger’s superb painting La Femme au Cheval is the best illustration of what this expression means. The painter is moving around an object whereby combining various views of it into a synthetic image. The “mobile perspective” actually involves the geometric experimentation with faceting, and creating new edges and faces in rendering three-dimensional figures. In bringing into play abstractness in the pictorial space of concrete things, “mobile perspective” proves to be a core feature of the Cubist kind of “abstract realism”.

10. To be sure, the talk of various proto-Cubist configurations of practices in the period 1907-1909 is completely justified. A case in point is the configuration that becomes apparent in the already mentioned work Dance of the Veils (1907). It is this configuration that anticipates the uncertainty of shapes which upcoming configurations of properly Cubist practices would deal with.

11. Doubtless, this deconstruction also had important semiotic consequences. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh (2004, 34) argue that “in attacking the epistemology of representation, Cubism underscored the gap separating reference and meaning and called for a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of signs.”

12. On Braque’s use of the concept of “tactile space” see Vallier (1954). In carefully examining Braque’s reception of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Arthur Miller (2001, 131) concludes that “Braque’s research into space aimed at the ‘materialisation of that new space that I sensed,’ a transformation of the space between and behind objects into a ‘tactile space’.”

13. One can find in the critical-historical literature the interpretation that the initial form of Cubism contained the impetus to Akademisierung and the tendency to a transformation of the style into a conventional enterprise. (Daniels 2012, 78-82) Without commenting on the political background of this interpretation, I will stress again that the critical potential of the initial configuration consists in the disclosure of a style (and a cultural lifeform) that was resistant enough to be reintegrated with the traditional culture (including the existing academic culture).

14. David Cottington (2004, 4) nicely summarizes the major difference in the socio-institutional existence between the bande à Picasso and the group centered on the studio of Le Fauconnier by arguing that if “the gallery Cubism of Picasso and Braque, with Kahnweiler’s astute assistance, furnished the movement with a reputation for an obscurantism and hermeticism that were soon seen to be among its chief characteristics, it was the salon Cubism of Le Fauconnier, Gleizes, Metzinger, Léger, and Robert Delaunay that secured its public profile.”

15. This practice is typically represented by such works as Braque’s Violin and Newspaper (1912), Gris’s Still Life and Cigars (1912), and Picasso’s Guitar, Glass and Bottle of Vieux Marc (1912). Gertrude Stein documented properly the meaning of practice of using printed letters which has gained momentum in the advent of synthetic cubism: “Picasso in his early Cubist pictures used printed letters as did Juan Gris to force the painted surface to measure up to something rigid and the rigid thing was the printed letter.” (Quoted in Golding 1988, 92.)

16. In Du Cubisme, Gleizes and Metzinger (1964, 47) argue that if one were to relate the space of Cubist painters to geometry, one would have to refer to “certain of Riemann’s theorems”. But the appeal to this kind of non-Euclidean geometry is only one aspect of the Cubist preoccupation with science. The history of Cubism is largely marked by the search for a “fourth dimension”, but not in the sense in which Hermann Minkowski mathematically codifies special relativity. In the Cubist perspective, the “fourth dimension” is a spatial, and not a temporal one. Are there indeed parallels between Riemann’s geometry (and/or Poincaré conjecture) and Cubism? This question must be carefully addressed, without any attempt at a “scientification of Cubism”. No doubt, the “geometrical experimentation” involved in the practices of faceting the forms was much more than a play of “ignorant geometricians” (Louis Vauxcelles). Tony Robbin reminds us that projective geometry, which is essentially important for all scientific theories invoking geometrical complexities, began as artists’ attempts to create the illusion of space and three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface. In scrutinizing Picasso’s Portrait of Henry Kahnweiler (1910), Robbin (2006, 30) draws attention to how “multiple cube make up the head rather than a single cube defining it, and even taken all together, the head seems incomplete.” Like Linda Henderson before him, Robbin admits that Picasso’s “new idea of space” has much to do with Esprit Jouffret’s descriptive geometry of four-dimensional figures. (Notoriously, Jouffret’s illustrations of a hypercube visualizing the fourth dimension have had a great impact on Picasso.) The “geometry of Cubism” (and the role played by Maurice Princet’s ideas) is a widely discussed subject. Actually, each Cubist practice follows its own “geometrical pattern”. By implication, a configuration of such practices cannot be reconstructed by means of a (metric or nonmetric) geometry that is able to preserve certain structures under certain transformations.

17. For Norman Mailer (1995, 340), Picasso’s move to Synthetic Cubism in 1912 reduces Cubism to nothing more than décor. See also Krauss (2000, 213-18).