On Cubism: Painting under the knife art

What was so wild about Cubism? Here's what: It took the soulful Chardin still life and cut it to bits as if with a buzz saw.

It turned the classical Poussin nude into a column of open razors. It transformed the Ingres portrait, that last stand of ancien regime realism, into a stack of clattering planes in empty space.

Cubism, at least at first, did other things, too, all hinted at in the smallish exhibition titled "Facets of Cubism" at the Museum of Fine Arts here through April 16. It challenged Western ideas about time and perception by complicating the pace of looking at art. The day of pure optical pleasure was over; art had to be approached with caution, and figured out. It wasn't organic, beneficent, transporting. It was a thing of cracks and sutures, odors and stings, like life. It wasn't a balm; it was an eruption. It didn't ease your path; it tripped you up.

And there was more. By taking its models from "primitive" cultures, Cubism redefined beauty for the West. By redefining beauty, it redefined what qualified as art: not only African sculptures, but also a universe of Western crafts and folk forms, collage among them.

And in prying open the closed-off realm of art, Cubism helped to scramble cultural values: good, bad; high, low; worthy, unworthy; quality, genius, the lot.

Cubism's audacity and terribleness are easy to forget now that the movement, almost a century old, has entered the protective custody of history. So it's nice to have "Facets of Cubism" remind us of it.

Still, it's too bad the show, composed largely of loans from private collections, isn't more focused. With a fair amount of unfamiliar work, this might have been an occasion to pursue a line of research, or to shape an exhibition to a specific argument, and nudge art history in new directions. Instead, we have a scrappy Cubist miscellany, though one with its share of top-shelf art.

The sources of Cubism, Modernism's most influential style, are duly noted with a Cezanne self-portrait set next to three non- Western sculptures, two African, one Oceanic. Surrounding them are Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, each with significant work.

Braque's "House at La Roche-Guyon" (1908), a vertiginous image of a blocklike building impaled on a tubular tree, is precisely the sort of pioneering painting that earned Cubism its name. (When one of Braque's critics scoffed that the artist had reduced everything to cubes, "cubism" was born.) It is also a picture that radiates, in color and form, Braque's passion for Cezanne. It was a new passion, but deep and complete, and made him do crazy things. In this painting and others from the same time, he took a kind of suicide leap for love, and ended up flying high.

The show has two more major but cooler Braque pieces, "Fruit Dish and Glass" (1912), the first Cubist drawing on record to incorporate collage elements, and the painting "Pipe and Basket" from 1919. Both are glorious in the way that Braque is glorious. They are at once workmanlike and balletic, formally very hands-on, emotionally hands- off.

For Picasso, there was no "off." By the time "The House at La Roche-Guyon" was painted, he had already had his brain-shaking encounter with African art, an experience documented in two extraordinary pieces here, one a stunning color study of a woman's head for "Demoiselles d'Avignon," the other a graphite drawing of a masklike man's head, with unfathomably black, gouged-out eyes.

The show belongs to Picasso: 27 of its 40 works are his. Even in a minor mode, as he mostly is here, he is huge and implacable, a conquistador. Yet he's an odd sort of revolutionary: a surfer of radicalism, not a deep diver, mostly because he was tied by bonds of love to the past; enslaved to it, I would say.

I would also say that Cubism was, by far, his finest hour, the closest he ever came to an all-or-nothing leap, to risking the loss of all he was for something he could not know. For Braque, less driven, this was easier, even if, after Cubism, he made little of it. Still, he brought his art right to the edge of abstraction as Picasso never did. Picasso could rip reality to shreds, skin it, rearrange it and pick its bones. But he could never bury it. In his art, it is always there.

Somewhere around 1913, Picasso and Braque had begun to tire of Cubism; it had become a formula. They moved on, leaving the field to a generation of followers, a few of whom round out the show. The young Fernand Leger is one; he's a spark. Best by far is the tense, meticulous Juan Gris, with collages as tight and springy as sonnets.

But with the well-groomed likes of Henri Laurens and Jacques Villon, Cubism becomes just a suave period look, a new classicism in the tradition of Chardin, Poussin and Ingres. For the wild style, you have to go back to Picasso's "Standing Woman" (1911-12), who wears her innards like a coat, or Braque's ethereal "Fruit Dish and Glass," where background and foreground, shadow and form, are one.

Seeing them, really seeing them, for the first time, back then, must have been like experiencing the world on hallucinogens, or under anesthesia, just before consciousness shifts or shuts down. You're caught between joy and panic. Then you're gone.

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