When Cubism Fractured Art's Delicate World

BOSTON - 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 régime 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. 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 Cézanne 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.

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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
Cézanne. 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 Léger 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.

"Facets of Cubism" remains through April 16 at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465
Huntington Avenue, Boston; (617) 267-9300.