Cubism and Reality: Braque, Picasso, Gris

What was Cubism? How did this strange new way of making paintings and sculptures enable artists so decisively to change the trajectory of ‘Modern Art’? In responding to these questions, distinguished art historian Christopher Green presents a bold new interpretation of the movement and three of its key protagonists. Stemming from a critical re-evaluation of the author’s own first responses to Cubist artworks, as a student of the late artist and critic John Golding, Cubism and Reality challenges the commonly-held view of Cubism as either a retreat from reality into abstraction, or an invitation to convert the real into the ‘surreal’, arguing instead that Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Juan Gris wanted, above all, to find ways of intensifying and expanding painting’s capacity to give viewers more, not less, of their lived experience of the world. Lavishly illustrated and filled with rich new insights and approaches to the artwork that are the product of decades’ worth of research, Green argues that, for the three artists, ‘reality’ was not objectively always there, but was created by their own perceptions, and could be transformed by their imaginations. The artwork becomes not merely a dead material fact, but somewhere into which wishes, lived experiences and memories can enter – ours, over a century later, as well as theirs. Green explores how Cubist artworks ask us to reflect in far-reaching ways on visual art’s relationship to everyday visual experience and questions how it is that we still believe that drawings, paintings and sculptures can represent the world as we see and know it. In doing so Cubism and Reality tackles a fundamental issue that has preoccupied artists, critics and art enthusiasts for over a century, well into our present age: the survival of hand-made representational artworks in the epoch of photography, film and, latterly, digital reproduction.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Note on Translations Introduction: Cubism Now 1. A Last Stand for Painting: Georges Braque and John Golding; Pablo Picasso and Roy Lichtenstein Beginning at the End Numbers With and Against Post-1945 "Modern Art" Picasso’s Painter and his Model Series and Roy Lichtenstein’s “Idiot” Picassos Braque’s Studios and the “Reality of Space” The Distance between Cubism and Modern Art after 1960 2. The Act of Seeing: The Early Cubism of Braque, Picasso and Gris Going beyond Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Analytical Cubism? Learning-by-doing: Braque’s Cubist Beginnings Learning-by-doing: Picasso’s Cubist Beginnings Juan Gris Joins In 3. Learning to See Again: Braque and Picasso Before Collage, 1910-12 Unknown Masterpieces Re-start Failure? Braque, “L’infinition” and an Invitation with Picasso to Wonderland Success? Looking and Seeing Light and the Immaterial 4. Simple Facts? The Arrival of Collage: Gris, Picasso, Braque Juan Gris’s Critique and the Discovery of Collage Braque and Picasso: The First Papiers Collés – Drawing with Papers, Sketching in Air Picasso and Braque: From Drawing to Making New Things Juan Gris: Collage and Interrogative Painting Braque and Picasso: What Can Be for Ever? 5. Postscript: Dada, Classic Realism, Cubism: Francis Picabia versus Picasso Notes Index

About the Author :
Christopher Green is Emeritus Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, UK and is a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author and editor of numerous volumes, including: Cubism and its Enemies (1987) which was the recipient of the Mitchell Prize for 20th Century art; Juan Gris (1993); Art in France, 1900-1940 (2000); Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (2001); Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (2005); Cubism and War: The Crystal in the Flame (2016).

Review :
Gives a downright new interpretation of Cubism, and so intelligently concerns the three major Cubist artists: a truly major contribution. Undoubtedly the best book on Cubism to appear in a generation. Renowned scholar Christopher Green demonstrates how Braque, Picasso and Gris used new geometries and materials to evoke the experience of striving to grasp the forms of bodies, objects, and spaces. Fresh thinking and impeccable scholarship underpin this inspiring reassessment of the Cubism of Braque, Picasso and Gris, as Green brings alive their creative drive and daring through his intense engagement with their most radical works. Christopher Green is one of the great historians of modern art. With characteristic lucidity, Cubism and Reality distils a lifetime’s expertise, causing us to look again, with fresh eyes, at the problem of Cubist painting. A grand retrospective and forward-looking work of scholarship, Green’s probing history of Cubism is shaped by the latest thinking on modernism and its legacy in the visual arts. With impeccably crafted prose he draws out the subtle differences between Braque’s, Picasso’s and Gris’s Cubism, so that we see Cubisms, in the plural, anew.