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84TH ACSA ANNUAL MEETING DESIGNIDESIGN STUDIO 1996 1 8 1
Collage Reading: Braque I Picasso
JEFFREY HILDNER
University of Virginia
... behind every twentieth - century grid there lies ... a symbolist window parading in the guise of a treatise on optics.
Fig. 1
My theme is the difference between the respective first acts of Synthetic Cubism by Picasso and Braque, Still Life with Chair - caning and Fruit Dish and Glass (figs. 1 and 2). The purpose is two - fold: first, to suggest that Braque's project, overshadowed by Picasso's, contains evidence of an archi - tectural consciousness of a different nature and is, in certain fhdamental ways, more instructive; and second, to describe how the competing, dialectical issues contribute to an under- standingheading of one of my own projects. It is well known that the invention of collage in 1912 was the anomalous creative act that marked the break from Analytical Cubism to Synthetic Cubism - an act more disruptive to the philosophical structure of the Western pictorial tradition than even Picasso's Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon five years earlier. And, if it is less well known that Le Corbusier and Ozenfant were the first, in La Peinture Moderne, 1925, to identify the phenomenon of collage as evidence of a violent break in the evolution of Cubism, it is
Fig. 2
certainly well known that their own rigorous Purist paintings were a direct reaction to what they regarded as the degenerate excesses initiated by this phase of Braque and Picasso's work
(Golding 118). Indeed, Le Corbusier's architecture may be
seen to be evidence of an ironic double - phenomenon: on the one hand, his architecture, which unfolds from his Purist paintings, incorporates a sensibility of classical detachment
84THACSA ANNUAL MEETING DESIGNIDESICN STUDIO 1996
and scrupulous rule of the picture plane that he learned from Post - Impressionist French painters such as Cezanne and Seurat, as well as from the Italian Renaissance mathemati - cian and painter that inspired their researches, Piero della Francesca - this rigorous geometric tradition enabled Le Corbusier to reject the loss of restraint and discipline, the excessive self - assertion, that he saw in collage; on the other hand, he employed the abstracted device of collage as the basis for the plastic expression of the exact and equilibrated relations that govern his paintings and of the "correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light" that determine his architecture (29). Le Corbusier looked back to the purity of Cezanne's formal vision on this matter in order to resurrect a pre-Cubist regard for invariants, and for the discipline and restraint that attends them. In Towards a New Architecture, he employed, without attribution, Cezanne's very words. Cezanne wrote in the famous letter to Emile Bernard, 1904: "treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone" (Harrison 37). Le Corbusier later declared that the " essentials of architecture lie in spheres, cones, and cylinders" (40), as well as in "cubes" and "pyramids" (29). The Assembly Building at Chandigarh and La Tourette, if not also Villa Savoye, are perhaps the best examples of Le Corbusier's dialectical debt to Synthetic Cubism as seen through his Cezannesque, French lens. Moreover, aspects of Le Corbusier's work may also be seen as a paradigmatic architectural manifestation of a specific phenomenon within the evolution of'collage, one in which a more emphatic architectural act of three-dimension- ality asserted its dominance over concern with the flatness of the Cubist picture - surface as the origin and sum of the artistic act. And, as is well known, for this we look to the break from the two-dimensional collages of Picasso to his three- dimen - sional constructions, by which we are able to understand that his Guitar, 1912, initiated an even more literal connection between paintinglsculpture and architecture. As Clement Greenberg writes:
Sometime in 1912, Picasso cut out and folded a piece of paper in the shape of a guitar; to this he glued and fitted other pieces of paper and four taut strings, thus creating a sequence of flat surfaces in real and sculp - tural space to which there clung only the vestige of a picture plane. The fixed elements of collage were extruded, as it were, and cut off from the literal pictorial surface to form a bas - relief. By this act he founded a new tradition and genre of sculpture, the one that came to be called 'construction' (79- 80). It is generally held that this transformation from the abstractions of painting to the facticity of construction pro- pelled Picasso ahead of Braque in his researches in an unmistakable way and initiated a revolution in the plastic arts during the nineteen-teens and nineteen-twenties whose pre - mises obviously still underlie much advanced architecture today. But what about Braque? His Fruit Dish and Glass is
generally considered a lesser work, at least in terms of the hierarchy ofmedia. Picasso's collage is classified as a painting whereas Braque's is considered to be a drawing. And, to add insult to injury, Braque produced his papier collb (pasted paper), which is considered a particular kind of collage versus collage in general (Golding 108),some months after Picasso's project. On the other hand, it is generally understood that if collage is fundamentally an act whereby " extraneous objects or materials are applied to the picture surface," as Golding writes (104), then Braque committed the frst act ofcollage - the first Synthetic Cubist act - through the anomalous introduction of type at the high - point of Analytical Cubism in his Le Portugais, 19 1 1. Significant though this point may be, it is lost in the shuffle ofarchitectural consciousness. Picasso's project enjoys privileged status, which its employment by Rowe and Koetter as the frontispiece of their book Collage City perhaps best reveals. I believe that the significance of Braque's first collage
deserves more attention. I would like to make a case for the
difference between his project and Picasso's with respect to two fundamental precepts of the Western pictorial tradition; namely, the dialectical phenomena of figurelfield (or, as RoweIKoetter describe it, "object/texture") and symboV structure. Something of this difference and of the relative importance of Picasso's and Braque's discoveries is recog- nized by Golding: It is characteristic that Picasso should have invented collage, which was subsequently to be used by the Dadaists as a weapon to destroy all art, and by the Surrealists to achieve the most disconcerting and disturbing ofpsychological effects, while Braque should have been the author of the first papier colle, an equally original pictorial technique at the service of more purely formalistic ends" (108). I
PICASSO: FIGURE AND SYMBOL
Picasso's collage is an oval. In his painting he glued a piece of oil cloth, overprinted to imitate chair- caning. By one reading, the oval represents a table, perhaps the very table upon which the objects of the still life are organized and with which the chair is presumably associated. By a second, coexistent reading, the oval, as a contemporary photographic collage by Harry Callahan suggests, symbolizes the eye. Picasso's oval is thus a self - referential device that signifies, perhaps, a dialogue between the subjective eye and the reconstituted objects of the tabletop that provide the field of vision for that eye. In terms of formal structure, the collage is organized biaxially. The dominance of the cyclopean eye at the center of the painting and its attachment to the slightly cranked vertical assemblage that ascends to the top of the oval frame compare directly to the guitar. The central hub performs the function of optical bull's - eye and rotational pin about which the objects implicitly spin. The vertical assem - bly as a whole recalls the device of the diptych, in which the column, as in Renaissance Annunciation paintings, func-
1 8 4 84'H ACSA ANNUAL MEETING DESlGNiDESlGN STUDIO 1996
their consideration of the formal conditions outside the picture frame. The dominant organizational force of the Braque, on the other hand, is centrifugal. Whereas Picasso's oval boundary is a closed, autonomous condition, which implies that alteration of the visual field must necessarily be elliptical, Braque's rectilinear frame is a contingent condi - tion, and the conditions for its expansion or contraction are less egalitarian. The visual field might be coherently altered at any one of the four edges independently of the other three. By employing a conventional rectangular frame, Braque establishes an insideloutside dialectic in terms that relate to the cropped, asymmetrical compositions of 19th - century artists such as Degas and Toulouse - Lautrec. His collage foreshadows the peripheric, edge - conscious, centrifugal grid- paintings of Mondrian (Krauss 18- 19) and the equivocally balanced figurelfield paintings of Fritz Glarner. In a significant act, one that posits the fundamental tension between the two readings of insideloutside and also underscores the oblique, centrifugal forces of the composi - tion, which operate as counterpoint to the prevailing or- thogonal grain, the word " BAR" in the upper right corner and the word "ALE" in the lower left comer combine to establish the double assertion of surface and depth. The word "BAR," on its own for example, operates as a device of spatial collapse. It obstructs the reading of illusionistic recession that draws the eye along the oblique axis of the picture plane and "out" to the literal landscape of the upper right ~ o r n e r. ~ Rosalind Krauss's writes that "behind every twentieth-
century grid there lies...a symbolist window parading in the
guise of a treatise on optics" (17). Braque's project is, ultimately, about window, an idea that is central to the interdependent consciousness of painting and architecture on innumerable levels. His collage - window is an architectural act. It is an optical treatise that achieves an equivocal balance between abstraction and representation, between the reality of surface and the phenomenon of depth, and between structure and symbol. Moreover, it provides instruction on a variety of specific, formal archltectusal devices, including orthogonal gndding of the plane, oblique counter - tension, plan/elevation reciprocity, decentering of the optical axis, continuation, slippage and displacement of line and plane, dynamic struc- ture (e.g., the four against three rhythm of the solidvoid horizontal intervals that comprise the picture's primary ver- tical stratification), and several types ofphenomenal transpar- ency, including: (1) the continuity of line and plane in the xy- plane, whlch is based on the devices of interruption, align - ment, and figural interlock; (2) equivocal advance and reces - sion of the plane along the z-axis, which is based on the ambiguity of foreground and background. Many of these devices are evident in the collage - based architecture of Rietveld, Le Corbusier, and Terragni, for example. Matisse's collage-likepainting, Piano Lesson, 19 1 6 , raises these Braquean themes to a consummate level, wherein figure and field, and symbol and structure, approximate an ideal equilibrium. Other works, ranging from the phenomenal transparency studies of Leger and Rawlston Crawford to the field paintings
of Richard Diebenkorn, provide instruction on various inter - related problems of visual literacy, such as: co - dependency of figure and field within the plastic structure of volume and plane; multiple frarningsand the grid; edge contingencies and decenterings; and window as iconic formal device and sym - bol. I refer to these paintings in my own teaching and work for inspiration on matters that relate to the designing and drawing of plan, elevation, and section. Le Corbusier writes that "in a complete and successful work there are hidden masses of implications, a veritable world which reveals itself to those whom it may concern" (Schumacher 42). This is true of both Braque's and Picasso's
projects4 But it is Braque's work, I believe, that relates more
tothe abstract, architecturalintelligence behind Le Corbusier's iconic photographic tableau of the terrace at his mother's house in Vevey, for example. It also perhaps more nearly illustrates Meyer Schapiro's equation of modernism with a "conception of the world as law- bound in the relation of simple elementary components, yet open, unbounded, and contingent as a whole" (32). Moreover, it may well be the ultimate irony that Braque's collage, when read in plan, more
nearly illustrates the exemplary condition in Collage City of
the figural void, which Rowe equates with the Uffizi, and that Picasso's more nearly illustrates the opposing, undesirable condition ofthe autonomous object, which Rowe equates with the Marseille Block. It is the difference between architecture as space- definer and architecture as space-occupier.
In the end, the fundamental difference between the two works may rest on Ferdinand de Saussure's differentiation between the two basic rhetorical figures, metaphor and metonymy. Terence Hawkes describes the " universal 'com - petition "' (79) between these two fundamental modes of meaning, as follows: Metaphor...is generally 'associative' in character and exploits language's 'vertical' relations, where me - tonymy is generally 'syntagmatic' in character, and exploits languages 'horizontal' relations ....The combinative (or syntagrnatic) process manifests itself in contiguity (one word being placed next to another) and its mode is metonymic. The selective (or associa - tive) process manifests itself in similarity (one word or concept being 'like' another) and its mode is meta - phoric (77 - 78). Hawkes asserts that " both are figures of 'equivalence" ' (77) and gives the following example: Thus, in the metaphor 'the car beetled along', the movement of a beetle is proposed as equivalent to that of the car, and in the metonymic phrase 'The White House considers a new policy', a specific building is proposed as 'equivalent' to the president of the United States (77).
Equivalence in the metaphoric mode is more distant. In the
84TH ACSA ANNUAL MEETING DESIGNIDESIGN STUDIO 1996 185
metonymic mode it is more contiguous. I would argue that
Picasso's collage is primarily metaphoric and that Braque's is primarily metonymic. Picasso's hinges on vertical, asso- ciative relationships: the oval frame is like an eye, or it is like a rope (which it physically is) that ties the disparate jumble of still life objects together. Braque's depends on the less distant, horizontal, contiguous equivalence between picture frame and window frame, and between foreground and background. The difference is underscored by Hawkes ob - servation that "it is possible to distinguish between Cubism as metonymic and Surrealism as metaphoric in mode" (go), which recalls Golding's description of the basic difference between Picasso's and Braque's intentions and impact.
DANTElTELESCOPE HOUSE
I now turn briefly to a current project in order to suggest how it may be read in terms of the BraquelPicasso dialectic. Dante/Telescope House z^ '"" (fig. 3) attempts to find some equivocal balance between readings of three - dimensional figure versus two-dimensional field, poetic form versus intellectual content, symbolist window versus plastic struc- ture, and metaphor versus metonym. In the spirit of the Russian formalists, my work centers on the double problem of move/moving and strange - making - defamiliarization
- which, in a nutshell, involves bringing architecture into a sphere of new perception through devices and techniques applied to materials. I amconcerned both with architecture's identity as an abstract plastic art and with its ancient, original iconographic and ontological functions as text and observa -
Fig. 3
tory. At the heart of this inquiry is the connection between architecture and painting, literature, and astronomy. The primary architectural event ofDante/Telescope House Z'"" is the garden facade, which includes what I call the Dante Monolith and Diptych Column. The Monolith is structural (in the engineering sense, that is). The fiee-standing Diptych Column is not. The primary h c t i o n of both is to support an idea. Seen through the lens of the Picasso collage, the dominant reading is an architecture of figure and symbol, an architecture that is simultaneously sculptural object (totemic construction) as well as intellectual proposition. The steel beam-the "Telescope"-in the Monolith is sighted on the North Star, a device of orientation as well as a device of memory (it recalls architecture's original connection to astronomy; for example, the first architects were astronomer priests). The word " DANTE," which is written across the Monolith, employs a principal device of Synthetic Cubism, thus signifying the connection between architecture and painting (and between Cubism and literary formalism). It also recalls architecture's ancient, original connection to writing, or literature (i.e., the idea of the building of a book, and the book as building). According to this reading of my project, which relates to lessons of Picasso's oval eyeltable collage, objecthood and symbolic content are dominant. The construction is metaphorical. It is associative. It is a process that "manifests itself in similarity " (Hawkes 78). The Mono- lith is "like" a book. The steel beam is "like" a telescope. Seen through the Braque lens, the same project can be understood to be primarily a metonymic, self- referential assertion about painting, boundaries, framing, two- dimen- sional plastic structure, and windows. On one level, in opposition to the facticity of the Monolith's literal incisions, cuts, and windows, the painting of its surface attempts to achieve a reading of phenomenal transparency, drawing on themes of the plan. This act declares the primacy of surface. It supports a reading of the Monolith's primary identity as plane versus three - dimensional object. On another level, the principal elements of diptych Renaissance Annunciation paintings are in place: insideloutside, lewright, and vertical/horizontal opposition (the Telescope functions as the iconic diagonal and symbol of heavenly light). Braque's instruction causes us to see that the Monolith and Diptych Column not only have mental and visual independence (not only can they be read as individual elements of sculpture or construction), but they are also co - dependent elements of an abstract, two - dimensional plastic structure. They function as fragments of a larger visual and mental organization. They define not only their own local- ized rectilinear boundaries but also the peripherallasym- metrical conditions of a contingent, open - ended visual field. The void between them and the world outside their bound - aries is no less important than the space they occupy. They define a localized diptych, and they also define one edge of a larger horizontal visual field that extends to include the existing house. Thus the project can be seen to be fundamen- tally as much about control of an equivocal visual field, and
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WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED
Bois, Yve - Alain. Painting as Model. Cambridge: The MIT Press,
Golding, John. Cubism: A HistoryandAnalysis 1907-1914.3rded. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
Greenberg, Clement. " Collage. " In Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood. eds. Art in Theory 1900- 1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Cambridge: Blackwell Pub- lishers, 1992. Kepes, Gyorgy. Language of Vision. Chicago: Paul Theobald,
- Reprint. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. Krauss, Rosalind E. " Grids." In The Originaliiy of the Avant- Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985. Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture. Trans. by Frederick Etchells. London: John Rodker, 193 1. Reprint. New York: Dover Publications, 1986. Linder, Mark. "From Pictorial Impropriety to Seaeming Difference. " ANY 718 (1994): 24 - 27. Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1978. Rowe, Colin, and Robert Slutzky. "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal. " In Rowe, Colin. The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1976. Schapiro, Meyer. "On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image -Signs. " In Theory and Philoso- phy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society. New York: George Braziller, 1994. Schumacher, Thomas. "Deep Space. " Architectural Review (Janu - ary 1979): 37 - 42. (^) Fig. 4
