The dead end of the facets

By the start of 1912, Picasso and Georges Braque (a young French painter who had become his almost-daily collaborator) had spent three years doing one thing with ferocious concentration: taking the visible world apart. Their method was Analytic Cubism — breaking an object into small flat facets, the little angled planes you see on a cut gem, and laying them out from several viewpoints at once, all in a drab fog of browns and grays. They worked so closely they stopped signing the fronts of their canvases; you had to turn a picture over to learn whose it was.

It was a triumph, and it was a trap. Each picture took the subject a little further apart than the last, and by 1911 the canvases had been faceted almost past reading — a shimmering gray scaffold in which you had to hunt for a mustache or the neck of a bottle to prove there was anything there at all. Set a Braque still life from these years in front of you and you can feel the problem: it is beautiful, and it is nearly illegible.

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RightsPublic domain in the United States (first published before 1931).

The danger was abstraction — and, oddly, neither man wanted it. A few more facets and the subject would vanish entirely, leaving only a handsome arrangement of grayish shapes: decoration, pattern, wallpaper. Picasso and Braque were not trying to leave the world behind; they were trying to show it more truthfully, from more sides at once. They had climbed out onto a ledge and could feel that one more step in the same direction was a drop.

To see why the next move mattered so much, you have to know what these two were rebelling against. Since the Renaissance had worked out the geometry of perspective around 1420, a Western painting had been understood as a window: a flat surface you look through, faked so skilfully with paint and shadow that you seem to see a real room, a real face, real fruit. The whole game was illusion — make paint pretend to be something it isn’t.

Cubism had already smashed that window: no single viewpoint, no convincing depth. But Analytic Cubism had replaced the illusion with something close to abstraction, and that was a dead end too. The question hanging over Picasso’s studio in the spring of 1912 was simple and enormous: how do you let the real world back into a picture without going back to faking it? The answer, when it came, was not something he painted. It was something he glued.