Visions of the Human

Art, World War I and the Modernist Subject

Tom Slevin

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857738912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In what ways do the artistic avant-garde's representations of the human body reflect the catastrophe of World War I? The European modernists were inspired by developments in the nineteenth-century, yielding new forms of knowledge about the nature of reality and repositioning the human body as the new 'object' of knowledge. New 'visions' of the human subject were created within this transformation. However, modernity's reactionary political climate - for which World War I provided a catalyst - transformed a once liberal ideal between humanity, environment, and technology, into a tool of disciplinary rationalisation. Visions of the Human considers the consequences of this historical moment for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It explores the ways in which the 'technologies of the self' that inspired the avant-garde were increasingly instrumentalised by conservative politics, urbanism, consumer capitalism and the society of 'the spectacle'. This is an engaging and powerful study which challenges prior ideas and explores new ways of thinking about modern visual culture.

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New Visions of the Human

Introduction

This chapter will establish how, in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, a radically different, ‘modern’, vision of humanity emerged in Western culture. This emergent figure gave rise to a new imagination and representation of the human subject within the European avant-garde. This chapter will consider Cubism in particular by considering the context for its emergence and the significance of the challenge it issued for overturning existing models of representation such as perspective. Cubism, however, certainly did not exist in a cultural vacuum. In response to reactionary claims in the early 1920s that writers no longer engaged in traditional mimetic conventions, Virginia Woolf suggested that ‘on or about December, 1910, human character changed’.¹ Regarding architectural concepts of space Siegfried Giedion later wrote: ‘Around 1910 an event of decisive importance occurred: the discovery of a new space conception in the arts.’² Reflecting upon modernism, Henri Lefebvre claimed: ‘The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered’,³ whilst Michael Baxandall contends: ‘The extraordinary thing that happened in 1906–12 was an abrupt internalisation of a represented narrative matter into the representational medium of forms and colours visually perceived.’⁴ We have already noted Charles Péguy’s suggestion that the world had transformed more in the 30 years prior to 1913 – even without the knowledge that World War I was fast approaching. Although Hubert Damisch offers a wry ‘smile’ at the supposed sudden ‘fall of the reigning paradigm’,⁵ he nevertheless admits that a profound change occurred. Damisch identifies a shift from nineteenth-century pictorial structure, reflecting a transformation in the ordering of human knowledge. All these writers, whether within Modernism or considering it retrospectively, contribute to a sense of a profound shift in ‘human character’ and a concept of subjectivity imagined through how it constructs, and is constructed by, the environment in which it exists. Indeed, this ‘new’ figure emerged from instability in the nineteenth-century culture, whereby Foucault writes that ‘man’ became a new object of knowledge.⁶ A simultaneous and massive change affected both the human subject and its environment through technological, socio-political, philosophical and scientific shifts. It is through representation that a shift in cultural thinking – specifically here the interrelation between subject and world – can be identified at an historical moment. This chapter will proceed to consider a number of cubist works to illustrate this modern reconfiguration of the subject.

In modernity, the imagination of ‘time’ is increasingly important to representation and the urgent concern of artists. Embedding time within the canvas’s space to represent modernity’s new conditions had ideological implications. For example, the dynamic relation of a person to time was crucial for a philosopher such as Henri Bergson. However, this consideration of time had been consistently omitted from Western thought. Space and time are two concepts that have been forcibly cleaved from their experiential ontological relation within representation, just as human subjectivity has been imagined independent of its environment. Accordingly, Lefebvre argues that the Western production of a particular ‘classical’ space – both conceptual, abstract, philosophical and representational – was ‘shattered’ by the arrival of dynamic temporality within spatial representation. This section observes a transformation that allowed the formation of a radical concept of the self as simultaneous with the environment.

For Woolf and Lefebvre, ‘time’ intersects the traditional relationship between subject and space. Neil Cox sees Bergson’s philosophy of Being and temporality as having ‘a profound effect on modernist literature and the creation of the “stream of consciousness” novel developed by Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf’.⁷ Literature placed a new emphasis on narrative temporality and simultaneity, whilst in the plastic arts, representation underwent a shattering, or rather a ‘reimagination’, of traditional perspectival and geometric space. Such a static pictorial regime occluded the modern condition of temporal dynamism and simultaneity. Lefebvre explains that ‘[t]he pictorial avant-garde … were busily detaching the meaningful from the expressive’, and therefore developing ‘the beginnings of the “crisis of the subject” in the modern world’.⁸ Representing the subject in crisis meant a confrontation with classical representation and its perpetuation of an inherent pictorial regime. The modernist challenge to existing forms of knowledge through representation was nowhere more fervently articulated than in France, where Cubism emerged as a coherent force.

Cubism’s challenge to established visual conventions engaged it in the cultural storm that surrounded the ‘crisis of the subject’. The canvases of the salon modernists, including those of Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger, Léger and Gleizes, became caught up in streams of political turbulence, as art participated in cultural transformation through the re-imagination of the subject. However, whilst Lefebvre’s characterisation of the shattering of space specifically referred to Picasso, neither he nor indeed Braque had any significant relationship to the wider public. Their work, under the patronage of Daniel Kahnweiler, was largely confined to a hermetic, studio-based, painter-dealer-collector relationship. Cubism, as the French public knew it, largely belonged to those salon artists emerging out of Impressionism, post-Impressionism and Fauvism, influenced by the work of Gauguin, Courbet, Matisse and Cézanne.⁹ It emerged from literary influences, in particular Symbolism, and engaged, if tangentially and inaccurately at times, with Bergson’s thought.

Cubism’s unfolding from public Salon exhibition became a cultural phenomenon. As such, it was subjected to political debate regarding ‘social order’. It represented figuration after an epistemic transformation regarding the relations of experiential perception and representation that profoundly offended reactionary politicians. Even though the cubists submitted for exhibition through a process of gallery submission in which, as Baxandall argues, the ‘Black’ galleries ‘had much the same structural and institutional character as the official Salon [and] were concerned to point to their long pedigree’,¹⁰ they had provoked outrage in previous exhibitions in 1911. In 1912 the Salon d’Automne exhibition caused debate in the Chambre des Députés regarding the appropriateness of the public exhibition of cubist work:

I hope that you will leave the place as disgusted as many people whom I know … do I really have the right to give the use of a public monument to a band of crooks [malfaiteurs] who behave in the world of arts in the way that gangsters [apaches] behave in ordinary life.¹¹

M. Lampué, a Parisian municipal councillor and ‘elder statesman’,¹² addressed the issue of allowing public exhibition of such works to Léon Bérard, the Under-Secretary of State responsible for the arts: ‘It is absolutely inadmissible that our national palaces should be used for manifestations of such an obviously anti-artistic and anti-national kind.’¹³ However, it was not only conservative factions that objected to the apparent threat to national integrity. The socialist Jules-Louis Breton remarked that cubist paintings consisted of ‘jokes in very bad taste’, painted by a large proportion of foreign artists. He subsequently requested the political censorship of work that evinced the ‘anti-artistic’ and ‘anti-nationalistic’.

Following Marcel Sembat’s defence of Cubism, believing that it was not the Chambre’s place to dictate over artistic freedom, Bérard agreed to the principle of non-intervention, though he later attempted to exert his influence on Frantz Jourdain, President of the Salon d’Automne, to eliminate foreign, and especially cubist, painting. Gleizes later recalled that

It was against these painters – and against them exclusively – that the attacks of the public authorities, provoked by the Parisian press and by pressure from the academies, were aimed. The Conseil Municipal de Paris threatened the Salon des Indépendants, where Cubism had begun, with its thunderbolts.¹⁴

Gleizes notes that, in defence of Cubism,

Marcel Sembat spoke: ‘The Salon d’Automne this year [1912] has had the glory of becoming an object of scandal, and this glory it owes to the Cubist painters!!!’ That was how Sembat’s speech began, and this speech is an important event in modern history. For the first time in a parliament a question concerning the moral order, free of any material interest, a question of concern to the needs of the spirit, was raised. For the first time, the legitimacy and superiority of the appearances of unofficial art were openly proclaimed.¹⁵

By placing cubist paintings ‘in a dingy room and a cluttered display’,¹⁶ the Salon sought to control any controversy. Despite Francis Picabia’s election as an associate member to the Salon, the committee limited the visibility of the work. Nevertheless, it was the little side room, rather than grandiose public display, that produced the furore. Gleizes commented that Frantz Jourdain had tried to quell the rising debate by including more traditional portraiture from the Société des Artistes Français in the adjacent room. However, this gallery effectively became a waiting room for visitors queuing to see cubist canvases. A matter of representation erupted into political argument, public spectacle and media sensation. In response to the attacks upon them, the initially rather diffuse group of painters associated themselves under the initially derisory, and conceptually otiose, term ‘Cubism’.

Gleizes’s paintings, however, were already embroiled in controversy. 1911 had been the year Cubism first attained international notoriety, and the public storm of 1912 had continued this first response. In the Salon d’Automne of 1911, Gleizes remembered:

The opening-day crowds quickly condenses into this square room and becomes a mob … they interrupt one another, protest, lose their tempers, provoke contradictions; unbridled abuse comes up against equally intemperate expressions of admiration; it is a tumult of cries, shouts, bursts of laughter, protests.¹⁷

John Golding observes: ‘for the general public, who did not know the achievements of Picasso and Braque, the work of Delaunay, Léger, Gleizes and Le Fauconnier represented cubism in its most advanced and developed form.’¹⁸ Indeed, Cox comments that they were the ‘only Cubists’.¹⁹ That the painters occupied room eight in 1911 was partly due to the organised presentation of their canvases. Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s and Roger La Fresnaye’s influence on the hanging committee furthered their position. The exhibition in Room 8 exceeded the sensation of the cubist presence in Room 41 at the Salon des Indépendants, as it ‘generated more scandal and ribald mockery’.²⁰ The critic Armand Fourreau complained of the ‘unquenchable thirst for noise and publicity: basically that is the true evil which rages violently at this moment above all amongst young painters’.²¹ In some ways, the art market had facilitated this ‘outrage’, for these painters were without institutional or dealer security, and their ‘evil’ was in part self-promotion. With the decline in direct state influence, the rise of the private art market, the dealer-critic system and Salon exhibitions,²² avant-garde painters had courted publicity since the mid-nineteenth-century, and Cubism’s shock was a consequence of those conditions. Gleizes reflected that Cubism’s notoriety perhaps spread even more rapidly as a consequence of the ‘violence’ of its enemies’ preventative efforts: ‘Public opinion throughout the world was occupied with Cubism … excited by the new appearances that were being assumed by painting.’²³

Vision and Knowledge

Cubism’s challenge, and its contribution to modernity’s ‘crisis of the subject’, lay in its radicalisation of visual form. Although its subject matter was often unremarkable, even banal, this only highlighted the profound effects of its form. Like Realism, the ‘everyday’ became the object of attention. Cubist experiments extended to even the most mundane cultural object through its re-presentation. It investigated the embedded, spatial visual codes and conventions upon which systems of Western knowledge were based. To undermine these was to undermine culture itself with the proposal of a new, modern visuality based on time, simultaneity and instability of perception. Cubism’s critique of cherished, stable systems of visual knowledge makes the inflamed outrage of its critics a more understandable response.

We might argue that Cubism made an earlier mode of radical thought accessible to an increasingly democratic age. For example, in many ways, its challenge was inherited, indirectly, from John Locke’s work on the relationship between seeing and knowing, the limits of visual language, and the notion that human vision is not ontologically veridical. Indeed, as Baxandall writes, ‘the issue of what a picture represents did not originate in 1906’.²⁴ Baxandall cites Newton’s idea that colour exists as ‘sensations in the mind’ alongside Locke’s thought that visual perception is not inherent or axiomatic, but must be learnt according to rules. For Baxandall, Locke and Ne...