On the other hand there was the widespread assertion that Cubist paintings were themselves totalities, autonomous things in their own right, “real,” if you will, because no longer tied to illusionistic description of the natural world. Whether this was interpreted as indicating the painter’s movement toward and around the object or as the result of that object’s conceptual (rather than merely perceptual) apprehension, the implication was that Cubism had overcome painting’s earlier limitations, and so could now provide a more complete grasp of things in their totality. According to this account, in a work like Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe, the “glass” in question-that conglomeration of black-outlined forms situated about two-thirds of the way between the leftmost edge of the canvas and the right-was to be understood as given both in “plan” (the circles and semi-circles suggesting the round base and the stem seen in cross-section) and in “elevation” (the vertical lines between and above the circular forms indicating the upright orientation of the glass). 3 On the one hand were claims for Cubism’s heightened “realism,” principally through its purported ability to offer multiple views of objects, rather than remaining confined to the singular vantage point normally considered endemic to painting. The first serious attempts at explanation tended to fall into two opposing camps-or frequently, as Christine Poggi has pointed out, into both at once. Picasso, Glass of Absinthe (autumn 1911), Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College (In that regard, they were virtually unique among early twentieth-century artists, whose paintings were almost invariably accompanied by some written explanation-instructions, as it were, for the uninitiated.) In the case of Analytic Cubism, interpretation was left to others: other artists, or critics, who felt the need for an account of this work that looked so radically different from everything preceding it. ![]() Presumably they talked to one another, even daily, and at considerable length but neither ever penned a manifesto of the movement, say, or offered interviews elaborating their intentions, at least not until long after the fact. Picasso himself offered relatively little explanation of his project, and Braque was no better. Despite having had that century for reflection, however, there exists little consensus today regarding either Cubism’s underlying intentions or its successes and failures. We have now had over 100 years to come to terms with Analytic Cubism, to make sense of its fragmented forms and shallow, intermittent spatiality, its dense value gradations and heavily worked surfaces. The present iteration of the essay has been slightly modified to better accommodate its new, nonsite-specific context. 1 The talk was designed to provide a frame of reference for both the exhibition and the symposium’s subsequent papers through its brief review of the most compelling interpretations of Analytic Cubism of the past 50 or so years. The following essay was originally written as the opening address for a symposium at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art held in conjunction with the exhibition Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912.
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