Plato and Cubism

JoanGilles

Book Ten of Plato’s Republic contains what Croce calls “the most solemn and celebrated rigoristic negation of art which has ever been made” (Catherine Rau, Art and Society--a Reinterpretation of Plato, p. 38). Although subsequent critics have taken Book Ten less literally, or have interpreted it as Plato’s reaction only to the new trends in the art of his day, the Republic nonetheless is highly critical of representational art. Whether or not one subscribes to Plato’s placement of art within the educational and practical framework of society, his observations about the nature of art accurately describe much of Western painting. I am concerned here not with Plato’s ideas of the social aspect of art, but with the application of his analysis to the Cubist movement of the early twentieth century.

Book Ten stresses four points: 1) art imitates appearance, and is thus removed both from reality and from truth; 2) art is deceitful and confuses the senses; 3) the painter copies appearance in ignorance of reality, and does not understand the function of the objects he represents; 4) this type of representation appeals to the irrational in man. Several of these ideas are true for much Western painting, but only in the Cubists do we discover painting that deviates on all four counts from Platonic standards. Because neither Braque nor Picasso, the leaders of the movement, documented their ideas in writing until after Cubism had ended, it is primarily through their work that we trace their concepts.

Analytic cubism, the first stage of the movement that lasted from approximtely 1909 to 1912, could be described as an attempt to “represent the forms of objects that heir positions in space” (H. B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 255). The paintings in this phase clearly have their origins in nature. Picasso’ Whilhelm Uhde (1910) depicts a clear portrait, and perhaps even a good likeness of a man, despite the fact that his body and head have been fragmented into small, semi-regular planes. These planes allow the subject to be viewed simultaneously from several angles, but--and this is more important--insist on being accepted as entities in their own right, and not just as a means of description. From the beginning Cubism shows a tendency to be concerned with more than the simple imitation of nature.

In the Cubist paintings of late 1910-11, most references to nature are no longer overt: in Braque’s The Portuguese of 1911, one can barely discern the shape of the guitarist in the café, let alone confuse the depicted musician with a real one. In The Portuguese Braque introduces stenciled letters and numbers into the Cubist vocabulary. The presence of these letters reasserts the dominance of the picture-surface itself, and emphasizes the nature of the canvas as a two-dimensional object. Braque makes the relation of art to reality conceptual, not mimetic:

Confronted with these various alphabetical, numberical and musical symbols, one realizes that the arcs and planes that surround them are also to be as symbols, and that they are no more to be considered the visual counterparts of reality than a word is to be considered identical with the thing to which it refers. (Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth Century Art, p. 66)

Cubist works created after about 1912 are concerned not so much with the fragmentation of form as with the construction of new forms that use Cubist elements of design. At this stage of Cubism Picasso first introduces non-painting materials into painting. In his Still Life with Chair Caning of 1912, he includes a strip of oilcloth that serves indirectly to question the very nature of art. Still Life is further outstanding in that Picasso has substituted an oval canvas for the traditional rectangle. This emphasizes the presence of the painting as an “object” itself, and shatters the metaphor of the canvas as a window on the world. It is clear that Cubism had reached a stage in which it was almost entirely self-referential.

Even this cursory examination of Cubism reveals its clear deviation from Platonic notions of art. Cubists are not concerned with recreating or imitating the appearance of form, but with analyzing it into its intrinsic parts, or with constructing forms of their own, using Cubist facets. For the Cubists, the painting is itself a physical reality, not simply an imitation of nature, and in this sense it represents an attempt to establish some concept of “paintingness,” the idea of which Plato did not, and perhaps could not, achieve.

The paintings that result from such Cubist preoccupations are, by Platonic standards, non-deceptive: if they were held up at a distance, no one would be deceived about their nature. In fact, the viewer unfamiliar with Cubist painting may find it difficult to distinguish any elements whatever that are recognizable. Cubists, unlike the “ignorant” artists whom Plato describes in the Republic, concern themselves with painting as a theme. They are really painters creating paintings which are about painting, and which insist on being recognized as paintings.

Cubism, unlike the art which Plato describes, which confuses the senses and appeals to the irrational in man, arouses an intellectual response in the viewer. It involves fragmentation of forms that must be reassembled by the viewer into recognizable elements. These paintings invite speculation on the relation between reality and illusion in art, and they appeal not to the senses, but to the mind. The Cubist movement represents a true deviation from Plato’s theories on the nature of art; it is neither deceptive nor imitative, neither ignorant nor sensual.