Picasso, Braque y el Cine.

ART & DESIGN

Abrir en el browser Art / When Picasso and Braque Went to the Movies By RANDY KENNEDY Published: April 15, 2007

PaceWildenstein "Female Nude" (1910) by Picasso.

IT was Picasso doing the noninterview interview, decades before Warhol came along to elevate it to an art form. In 1911 a writer for Paris-Journal was asking Picasso about the radically new kind of painting people were calling Cubism, the lightning bolt that had shot forth from his studio and that of his friend Georges Braque. Picasso claimed never to have heard of such a thing. "Il n'y a pas de Cubisme," he said blithely, and then excused himself to go feed his pet monkey. In part because its creators said so little about it during their lifetime, guarding it like a kind of state secret, Cubism has generated a library's worth of scholarship, probably more than any other artistic innovation in the last century. The general picture that has emerged is one of Cubism bubbling up out of a thick Parisian stew of symbolist poetry, Cézanne, cafe society, African masks, absinthe and a fascination with all things mechanical and modern, mostly airplanes and automatons. But while almost every aspect of these two artists' live has been scrutinized — their friends, lovers, favorite drugs, hangouts, hat sizes and nicknames (Picasso called Braque Wilbourg, after Wilbur Wright) — one mutual fascination has been largely overlooked: Both men were crazy about the movies.

PaceWildenstein "Fruit Dish, Ace of Clubs" (1931) by Braque.

They were also coming of age artistically in the city of the Lumière brothers, where the modern moviegoing experience had just been born, starting in cafes and cabarets and then moving into theaters, packed with people still in disbelief as they watched a two-dimensional picture plane leap to life. "The cinema was not simply in its earliest infancy," wrote the critic André Salmon, one of Picasso's friends and fellow moviegoers. "It was wailing." For more than 20 years the New York art dealer Arne Glimcher had carried around a theory, more gut feeling than scholarly conjecture, that Picasso and Braque had been seduced by that siren song of the early cinema, and that Cubism, with its fractured surfaces and multiple perspectives, owed much more to the movies than anyone had noticed. Five years ago Mr. Glimcher finally decided to do something about his hunch. He enlisted Bernice Rose, a longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art and now director of Mr. Glimcher's gallery, PaceWildenstein, to undertake the daunting academic work of trying to find traces of the silver screen hiding among the endless histories, archives, criticism and art of the early Cubist years. The result of that work, which opens Friday at the gallery's East 57th Street location, is "Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism," an exhibition that Mr. Glimcher calls one of the most ambitious in the gallery's 47-year history.

An advertisement for the cinematograph, an early movie projector.

The gallery has gathered more than 40 paintings, collages and other works — none for sale, Mr. Glimcher said — from private collections and from museums around the world, including the Georges Pompidou Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. (To get one Picasso he wanted from a museum in Prague, Mr. Glimcher even parted temporarily with a 1951 Jackson Pollock he owns, swapping the paintings for the length of the show.) Besides paintings, the exhibition has rounded up rare examples of early cinema's deus ex machina, the cinematograph: a whirring hand-cranked camera and projector of the kind that Picasso and Braque would have seen, not yet ensconced in a booth but out among the seats, acting as a powerful mechanized metaphor for the artist, absorbing the world through its eye and beaming it back out again. A part of the exhibition space will also be transformed into a simulacrum of an old Belle Époque movie house, where dozens of short movies from the medium's first years will flicker again, this time through the magic of digital projection. For Mr. Glimcher the show is about personal obsessions in more ways than one. Beginning in the early 1980s — after he had a small film role in his friend Robert Benton's "Still of the Night" as an auction bidder (bidding on paintings he himself had lent for the scene) — Mr. Glimcher became, as he said in a recent interview, "completely bitten by the movie thing."

Fractional gift of Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller. © 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Pablo Picasso. (Spanish, 1881-1973). The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro. Horta de Ebro, summer 1909. Oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 20 1/8" (61.5 x 51.1 cm).

He began producing movies, including "Legal Eagles" and "Gorillas in the Mist," and the ratio of his time spent selling art to that of thinking about, talking about and working on movies shifted drastically. In 1992, at the age of 53, he made his directorial debut with "The Mambo Kings," from the novel by Oscar Hijuelos, and he is now at work on three new movie projects. So he sees the exhibition as an ideal union of his two worlds, a match made in creative heaven somewhere between Paris and Hollywood. "I think I have an unusual inside track on this," he said, sitting in his Midtown office surrounded by paintings and movie posters. But instinct is one thing and facts are another, and determining the degree to which Picasso and Braque may have united the worlds of the movies and Cubism was not an easy job. Over the course of more than two and a half years of concentrated work, it became a kind of international detective assignment for Ms. Rose, a case in which she knew from the beginning that most of the evidence would be circumstantial. For one thing, reports of Picasso's and Braque's early moviegoing come from secondhand accounts. Their correspondence, what survives of it, does not mention the cinema and is maddeningly elliptical about their years of intense collaboration. "They reveal nothing of the painters' intimate dialogue on art, none of those words that Braque said 'no one will ever be able to understand,' " wrote William Rubin, the historian and curator who mounted the monumental show "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989.

But John Richardson, Picasso's biographer, recounts that Picasso saw his first film in Barcelona before he had seen his first Cézanne, probably in 1896, when he was 15. The first painting Picasso made in a studio, "The Bayonet Charge," now lost, was probably inspired in part by a scene in one of the shorts he saw, "The Cavalry Charge." Friends like Salmon and the early film writer and critic Maurice Raynal also wrote of their frequent trips with "la bande à Picasso," which included the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, to the movie screens scattered through Montmartre and other neighborhoods beginning around 1908, when Picasso and Braque became close, and cinema was exploding. Everyone seemed to be bitten by the bug; in 1909 Dublin's first movie house was established by a little-known writer named James Joyce.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Georges Braque © 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Georges Braque, Violin and Palette (Violon et palette), autumn 1909. Oil on canvas, 36 1/8 x 16 7/8 inches.

The things Picasso's gang watched were much less like what we think of as movies than like an early, sprocketed vision of the Internet: wildly diverse, usually short scenes of pratfalls, magic tricks, bawdy dancers, cowboys, menageries, exotic locales, airplane stunts and hallucinatory special-effects experiments. Trying to figure how these things might have influenced, or been transformed by, Picasso and Braque, Ms. Rose first began searching in Cubist writings. Early critics tended to ignore or dismiss any connection, largely because they saw cinema as a straightforwardly mimetic medium, far removed from the revolutionary break in painting — in seeing, really — that Picasso and Braque had created. In a recent interview in her Chelsea office, which she transformed into what she calls her "war room," its walls plastered with hundreds of images for the show, Ms. Rose described how she followed scant threads of information from footnote to footnote, "tracking it back bit by bit to really try to get at the references."

Kunstmuseum Basel Romilly 80 Le Portugais (The Emigrant) Ceret [and Paris], autumn 1911-early 1912 Oil on canvas 46 x 32 in. (117 x 81 cm.) DESC PHOTO6

Josep Palau i Fabre, a Catalan scholar of Picasso, mentioned the influence of cinema, citing the French critic Jean Cassou. The historian Rudi Blesh and the collector Harriet Janis also speculated briefly on connections in their 1962 book about collage. They wondered specifically whether Picasso's pasting of a scrap of paper bearing the commercially printed words "au Louvre" upside down on a 1908 drawing might have been a kind of movie joke, referring to the stationary word-slides that were used in theaters between films, to lead audiences in singing — and in laughing when the slides were accidentally projected upside down. The most extensive consideration of movies and Cubism was made by Natasha Staller in 2001, in her book "A Sum of Destructions: Picasso's Cultures and the Creation of Cubism," in which she found specific correspondences between some of Picasso's work and the images and techniques in the films of Georges Méliès, the French moviemaker and special-effects pioneer. "Picasso appropriated Méliès's techniques of jarring multiple perspectives, fragmented bodies and body parts, a comic self-conscious dialogue between apparent art and apparent reality," Ms. Staller wrote. From the beginning of her research, Ms. Rose said, she found herself turning more often to film experts than to art scholars. She sought them out in Ann Arbor, Mich., and in Rochester, where the George Eastman House has a world-class early film collection. She went to Bologna and to Pordenone, a small city north of Venice, to spend time with early film aficionados and watch movies. She enlisted a film scholar in Paris, Jennifer Wild, to map out the now long-gone movie houses and cafe cinemas that Picasso and Braque would have visited; and Tom Gunning, a film expert and professor at the University of Chicago, to write for the catalog.

Pushkin Museum, Moscow Pablo Picasso House in a Garden (House and Trees) 1908

The links they found between Cubism and cinema were rarely voilà moments, the kind that popped out of paintings unbidden. "It's not about iconography," Ms. Rose often repeats, but more about yet another layer of ideas imbedded in the busy, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink (and sometimes the kitchen sink too) ethos of Cubism. But there were also those times when it felt as if veils had fallen miraculously from the paintings, and Ms. Rose said she believes she has found distinct visual clues never before noticed by scholars. Especially in Picasso's work, she began to see elements of the cinematograph itself buried in portraits and still life: a crank handle doubling as a woman's nose in a 1910 painting from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, her head and body echoing elements of the machine's lens and film-collecting box and legs, among many other things. "He seems to have decided that she could be not just the operator but the camera projector as well," she said of Picasso. And she recalled taking this discovery excitedly to Mr. Glimcher. "I said: 'Look at this. I'm seeing cameras.' " she recalled. "And he said, 'Of course you're seeing cameras.' " Sometimes, she admitted, she worried that she might just be willing herself to see things, both in the paintings and in the films that she had stared at for so long. "I woke up at 3 o'clock one morning last week, thinking 'I'm crazy,' " she said. But she is reasonably sure that when people begin to look at the paintings as closely as she has, they will see what she sees too and understand that Picasso and Braque were not simply absorbing the movies but competing with them, creating modernity even as they were valiantly defending painting from its threat. "Painting always wanted to suggest movement, and suddenly here was movement," Ms. Rose said. "This was totally amazing for everybody. And for them painting was the most important thing in the world. So they had to capture this movement for painting."

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times The art dealer Arne Glimcher and Bernice Rose. The curator of the show "Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism."

Copyright by the New York Times 2007