The Success and Failure of Picasso

I said that the Cubists were feeling their way to a new synthesis, which, in terms of painting, was the philosophical equivalent of the new synthesis taking place in scientific thinking. They were not, of course, directly influenced by this thinking. Although Planck published his Quantum Theory in 1901, its implications were not understood until the 1920s at the earliest, and by that time all the Cubist innovations had been made. Nor is it likely that the Cubists read Einstein in 1905. But this is not the point. The Cubists reached their conclusions independently. In their own subjects they too felt the challenge of the new mode of thought originating in the nineteenth century and now stimulated by the new technological inventions; they too were concerned with what was interjacent.

In order to appreciate the parallel more easily, let me repeat what I wrote when describing the Cubist method of painting:

The Cubists created a system by which they could reveal visually the interlocking of phenomena. And thus they created in art the possibility of revealing processes instead of static states of being. Cubism is an art entirely concerned with interaction: the interaction between different aspects: the interaction between structure and movement: the interaction between solids and the space around them: the interaction between the unambiguous signs made on the surface of the picture and the changing reality which they stand in for.

What the Cubists mean by structure, space, signs, process, is quite different from what nuclear physicists mean. But the difference between the Cubist vision of reality and that of a great seventeenth-century Dutch painter like Vermeer is very similar to the difference between the modern physicists’ view and Newton’s: similar not only in degree but in emphasis.

Such parallelism between different branches of culture and research is rare in history. It is probably confined to those periods which immediately precede a revolution. The previous one in Europe was the Enlightenment. To emphasize once more the remarkable convergence of new factors which produced this parallelism in the period between 1900 and 1914, let us, for one moment, consider the film.

The film is the art-form of the first half of our century. It started in the late nineties as primitive fairground entertainment. By 1908 it had become the medium we would recognize today. By 1912 it had produced its first great master — D. W. Griffith in America. Technically, the film depends upon electricity, precision engineering, and the chemical industries. Commercially, it depends upon an international market: up to 1909 Pathé and Gaumont in France had a virtual monopoly; in 1912 the United States took over. Socially, it depends upon large urban audiences who, in imagination, can go anywhere in the world: a film audience is basically far more expectant than a theatre audience. It is no coincidence that one of the very first narrative films was based on Jules Verne. Artistically, the film is the medium which, by its nature, can accommodate most easily a simultaneity of viewpoints, and demonstrate most clearly the indivisibility of events.

I have taken so long to discuss Cubism without once mentioning Picasso because its full historic significance is seldom understood. Usually it is explained purely in terms of art history. By so-called marxist critics in Moscow it is condemned, together with Expressionism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, as modernist and decadent. To do this is ludicrously unhistorical. Dadaism and Surrealism were the result of the 1914 war. Cubism was only possible because such a war had not yet been imagined. As a group the Cubists were the last optimists in Western art, and by the same token their work still represents the most developed way of seeing yet achieved. It is to Cubism that the next serious innovators are bound to return.

Today the magnitude of the Cubists’ achievement is unappreciated in the West because of our overpowering sense of insecurity and Angst. (Their paintings fetch high prices — but as treasures from another world.) It is un-appreciated in the Soviet Union because there the official view of the visual arts is still that of the nineteenth century. When eventually the full Cubist achievement is appreciated, it will not be possible to explain it in terms of personal genius alone. The comparison with the early Renaissance will again apply.