The Flattening of “Collage”

Transcription

The Flattening of “Collage”*
LISA FLORMAN
In his influential article “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,”
Tom Crow took the courageous step of citing—favorably—several critical essays
written by Clement Greenberg. Crow wanted to remind us that, in its earliest
theoretical formulations, including those advanced by Greenberg himself,
modernist art was seen as thoroughly bound up with the rise of capitalism and the
culture industry that attended it.1 It was, of course, to the early, overtly Marxist
Greenberg (the author of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and “Towards a Newer
Laocoon”) that Crow directed our attention; he had substantially less enthusiasm
for the arguably more dogmatic, formalist critic who, two decades later, wrote
“Collage.”2 That Greenberg, Crow rightly pointed out, had become so intent on
denying any overlap between the products of mass culture and modernist art
that he refused to acknowledge the obviously commercial nature of the collage
elements—the labels, the scraps of newspaper, and wallpaper—that Picasso and
Braque had actually pasted into their papiers collés. Crow seemed to feel that,
whatever the insights of “Collage,” they were outweighed by such oversights,
and within the course of a few paragraphs he had effectively written the essay
off as irredeemably flawed.
If I find myself less willing or able to dismiss “Collage,” it is not because I
think the formalist, Kantian Greenberg is more compelling than his Marxist
predecessor. In truth, I am far less interested in either the formalist or the Marxist
alone than I am in (to borrow Stephen Melville’s phrasing) the Hegelian who
*
This essay benefited from its presentation to the seminar in modern art jointly sponsored by the
History of Art Department and the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. I would like to
thank Brigid Doherty for extending the invitation to deliver the paper there. I would also like to thank
Harry Cooper for his generous and careful reading of the text; even those few suggestions that I did
not ultimately take helped me to clarify the finer points of the argument that I was trying to make. A
more general debt of gratitude is owed to Stephen Melville, who, early on, showed me what it might
mean to actually read Greenberg thoughtfully and with care.
1.
Tom Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” in Modern Art in the Common
Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 3–37.
2.
Greenberg, “Collage” (1959), in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 70–83.
OCTOBER 102, Fall 2002, pp. 59–86. © 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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OCTOBER
emerges out of the rubbing of Kant against Marx in Greenberg’s writings.3 I
would even go so far as to suggest that Greenberg has been a powerful presence
within art history precisely because, like Hegel, he offers us a model, albeit
imperfect, of how “art” and “history” might be thought together, and of how
their conjunction can be seen to articulate a single field: art history as distinct
from history tout court or, perhaps more urgently at present, from either visual
or cultural studies.4
All of this is by way of saying that if in what follows I engage in a close reading
of “Collage” (a text that Crow describes as one of Greenberg’s “most complete
statements of formal method”5), it is not so much to explicate the essay’s formalism
as to draw from it an understanding of the grounds on which art might properly
be said to have a history—its history, if not fully separate from, neither fully
subsumable into, a history of culture more broadly or generally conceived. I also
hope to show that that understanding can be turned back upon the text itself, and
used to rectify some of its more evident shortcomings. Even the omissions pointed
out by Crow can be addressed, I believe, by rigorously applying the logic that
Greenberg developed in the first half of the essay but failed to carry through.6
I am getting ahead of myself, however. Before we can even begin our close
reading, we need to clarify precisely which text it is that we intend to read.
“Collage” has all too often been taken as a straightforward revision of “The PastedPaper Revolution,” an essay that Greenberg wrote a year earlier, and that appeared
in the September 1958 issue of ARTNews.7 The differences between the two texts
3.
Melville, “Posit ionalit y, Object ivit y, Judgment ,” in Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context
(Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1996), p. 78. Of course, it remains to be seen what kind of a
Hegelian Greenberg actually is.
4.
Crow’s essay, it seems to me, largely blurs these distinctions—not only through its explicit
appeal to cultural studies (primarily the work of Phil Cohen, Stuart Hall, and Tony Jefferson), but also
through its implication that the autonomy of art, on which rests whatever claim art history may have to
occupying a distinct field, actually originates elsewhere. Crow writes, for example, that “the formal
autonomy achieved in early modernist painting should be understood as a mediated synthesis of
possibilities derived from both the failures of existing artistic technique and a repertoire of potentially
oppositional practices discovered in the world outside” (p. 29). Similarly, although Crow begins by
regarding the avant-garde as a resistant subculture like those studied by Hall and Jefferson, he closes
his argument with the suggestion that it in practice only borrows from such groups. Thus: “In their
selective appropriation from fringe mass culture, advanced artists search out areas of social practice
that retain some vivid life in an increasingly administered and rationalized society” (p. 35).
5.
Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture,” p. 8.
6.
In this ambition to turn what I take to be the strongest arguments within “Collage” back upon
that text itself, I feel a bit of the same hesitation expressed by T. J. Clark when he admitted that he was
“genuinely uncertain as to whether [he was] diverging from Greenberg’s argument or explaining it
more fully.” In my case, there is undoubtedly some truth to both claims—though I trace my ambivalence
to “Collage” itself, which seems to lay out two distinct and even contradictory models of how modernism
works. For Clark’s analysis, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” see Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and
After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 47–63.
7.
Reprinted in Clement Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago:
1993), vol. 4, pp. 61–66. “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” is in turn something of a reworking of a review
of The Museum of Modern Art’s Collage exhibition that Greenberg wrote a decade earlier and published
in The Nation 27 (November 1948).
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have, as a result, been frequently elided.8 But “Collage” is more than twice as long
as its predecessor, and, although much of the additional material can be passed
off as simply providing greater detail to the existing argument, the essay also
includes two subjects nowhere raised in “The Pasted-Paper Revolution”—Picasso’s
and Braque’s cultivation of the sculptural aspects of Cubism, and the later (that is,
post–1915) paintings of Juan Gris—that significantly alter the argument’s overall
shape. To the extent that Greenberg’s desire to incorporate these subjects into
his narrative seems likely to have been what occasioned the rewriting, it might
be worth our while to examine them briefly before taking up a properly sequential
reading of the text. We will see as we proceed that the two subjects are closely, if
negatively, related in the unfolding narrative of “Collage.” For our purposes,
though, it probably makes sense to disentangle them momentarily and attend
first to Greenberg’s discussion of the paintings by Gris, which serves as a sort of
coda to the essay as a whole.9
While Gris’s work had been mentioned in “The Pasted-Paper Revolution,” the
emphasis there was, understandably, on his papiers collés, and Greenberg’s judgment
was largely negative; Gris’s collages were held to “lack the immediacy of presence of
Picasso’s and Braque’s.”10 In “Collage,” although essentially the same charge is
repeated, Greenberg follows it with praise for Gris’s later paintings, again, specifically
those done in 1915 and the several years following. Greenberg claims that the paintings effectively recapitulate and clarify the most important achievements of Picasso’s
8.
The situation is not helped by the fact that “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” was included in
Greenberg’s Collected Essays and Criticism, while “Collage” was not. Even if that editorial decision was
taken in view of the still ready availability of Art and Culture, it is likely to discourage any direct
comparison of the two texts, and so to reinforce the impression that the differences between them
are relatively minor.
9.
It might seem that by beginning, as I do, at the end of “Collage,” I am willfully flouting the
order of the argument as it is actually presented, and thereby altering it in some fundamental way. I
would counter, however, that one of the things that characterizes “Collage” (and makes it more than a
little Hegelian) is that no part of it is fully explicable in isolation. Everything is to be understood in the
context of the whole, with the rather awkward qualification that that whole in turn depends entirely on
the individual moments comprising it. The strategy that I have adopted here—to start at the
conclusion, leap to the beginning, and then work my way forward to the end—is designed to simulate,
as efficiently as possible, the multiple readings that in fact led up to the interpretation I will offer.
10.
“The Pasted-Paper Revolution” (as in note 1), p. 65. It has become customary among art historians, especially those concerned with Cubism, to distinguish between the more general category of
“collage” and the subset “papier collé.” The latter term is usually reserved for works whose elements are
limited, as the name implies, to pieces of pasted paper (often with pencil or charcoal drawing overtop),
whereas collages may include a wider array of materials—everything from rope and fabric to pieces of
metal or wood. (As a result, collage appears to open out more readily onto practices perhaps best
described as sculptural, whereas papier collé seems to maintain a much closer attachment to the field
of painting.) Because Greenberg does not distinguish between the two terms, and in fact never
employs the phrase “papier collé,” I have used them more or less interchangeably here. Nevertheless,
as Harry Cooper pointed out to me, the change of title—from “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” to
“Collage”— suggests that Greenberg did in fact recognize a distinction between the two practices. It
may even be that we should read the switch to “Collage” as an indication of Greenberg’s growing sense
that, in the end, collage would prove the more “revolutionary” of the two, or at least the more pervasive
and so the more historically consequential.
Juan Gris. Still Life.
1916. © 1998 The
Detroit Institute of Arts.
and Braque’s earlier papiers collés. He points in particular to Gris’s “sonorous”
blacks—to the way that they initially constitute themselves as shapes (rather than shadows) and so establish an ambiguous relation to both adjacent shapes and the plane of
the picture as a whole. In Greenberg’s eyes, the brilliance of a work like Gris’s 1916
Still Life lies in the fact that it demonstrates, “perhaps more clearly than anything by
Picasso or Braque, something which is of the highest importance to Cubism and to
the collage’s effect upon it: namely, the liquidation of sculptural shading.” In such
works, Greenberg adds, “the decorative is transcended and transfigured.”11
The essay leaves little doubt that these twinned accomplishments—the
liquidation of sculptural shading and the transcending of the decorative—are
central to Greenberg’s assessment of Gris’s paintings, just as they are to his estimation
of Cubist collage. From the essay’s opening sentence, it is also made clear that that
estimation is considerable: “Collage was a major turning point in the evolution of
Cubism,” we are told, “and therefore a major turning point in the whole evolution of
11.
“Collage,” pp. 81–82.
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modernist art.”12 What remains unexplained in “Collage” itself is why the history of
modernist art should have pivoted upon a dual rejection of sculptural shading and
the sort of decorativeness that Gris’s paintings are likewise seen to have overcome.
In order to flesh out the logic underlying this particular view of modernism, we
will need to take a brief detour through a couple of other essays by Greenberg,
including what is surely his most programmatic (and controversial) statement on
the subject, “Modernist Painting.”
As Crow and others have accurately pointed out, Greenberg’s interest in
modernism was fueled from the start by a deep anxiety over the fate and identity
of art. In his earliest essays, he cast the argument in explicitly Marxist terms:
capitalism’s inexorable commodification posed a serious threat to cultural
standards and values, and only the radical experiences afforded by avant-garde art
offered any real hope of saving painting, for example, from being turned into a
form of “relatively trivial interior decoration.”13 In his later writings Greenberg’s
terms are rather less political, but he continues to hold modernism responsible
for “the whole of what is truly alive in our culture.”14 Its resistance to the deadening
effects of contemporary society is staged, he argues, not through any direct critique
of either those effects or their cause, but rather through the processes of “selfcriticism”: “I identify modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation,
of the self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant.” In “Modernist
Painting,” Greenberg argues that such self-criticism is used not to subvert the
“self” in question, but to entrench it more firmly; and he warns that activities
unable to avail themselves of this sort of self-critique are those most likely to
disappear, “to be assimilated to entertainment pure and simple.”15 The arts, he
explained, having recognized their vulnerability, discovered that they “could save
themselves from this leveling down only by demonstrating that the kind of
experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from
any other kind of activity.” Each art, however, had to perform this demonstration on
its own behalf:
The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects
of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed
12.
Ibid., p. 70.
13.
“Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Partisan Review ( July–August 1940); reprinted in Greenberg’s
Collected Essays, vol. 1, p. 24. It is, I think, a bit difficult to know how serious a threat to art capitalism
actually poses. No doubt there are many who feel that Greenberg’s anxiety in this regard is misplaced—
either because they hold art to be inviolable or because, on the contrary, they celebrate its involvement
with commodity culture. I myself, however, am inclined to agree with Stephen Melville when he writes,
in a discussion of Greenberg’s modernism, that the “fear we attribute to the world of art is not bizarre;
it is based on the way things of culture increasingly do appear to die, to cease to count, in our world:
not with a bang, but a whimper. It is, among other things, fear of Muzak” (Melville, Philosophy Beside
Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983], p. 8). Also
see Melville’s entry on Greenberg in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998) vol. 2, pp. 335–38.
14.
Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Collected Essays, vol. 4, p. 85.
15.
Ibid., p. 86.
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from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be
rendered “pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards
of quality as well as of its independence.16
We would perhaps do well to take note of the quotation marks that appear in this
passage around the words “pure” and “purity.” They seem to indicate a certain
ambivalence on Greenberg’s part, a dissatisfaction, even, at having had to resort to
these terms.17 If we disregard the scare quotes, and so assume that the language of
purity precisely captures what Greenberg had in mind, we will feel ourselves
invited to imagine the history of modernist art as a progressive paring away of the
inessential, so as to reveal in the end the final truth or essence of each art. Greenberg
himself unfortunately appears to have accepted this invitation at a number of places
within “Modernist Painting,” perhaps most infamously in his discussion of the
“ineluctable flatness” of painting’s material support. “Because flatness was the only
condition painting shared with no other art,” Greenberg concluded, “Modernist
painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.”18
It is an unhappy fact of the reception of Greenberg’s criticism that this
reductive account of modern art’s relation to medium has become the accepted
reading of “Modernist Painting,” and is held, moreover, to be exemplary of
Greenberg’s writings on these matters as a whole. Such a reading has nourished
the belief that Greenberg was committed to little more than painting’s assertion
of its literal surface, a commitment that is easily and rightly written off as
superficial.19 Whether or not “Modernist Painting” can actually sustain such an
interpretation, “Collage” clearly cannot. In fact, one of my hopes for the present
16.
Ibid.
17.
For a reading of “Modernist Painting” that does take those quotation marks fully into account,
see Stephen Melville’s Philosophy Beside Itself, p. 4ff. Of particular relevance to the argument I hope to
make here is the following passage, from page 7, in which Melville draws out the implications of
accepting the idea that art might, in fact, be something capable of “assimilation to entertainment pure
and simple”:
We want, then, to say that it is an essential possibility of art that it can mistake itself in a
certain way. In so doing, we rule out any radically aestheticist position from the beginning,
and this means that we are going to be able to use notions like purity only if they are
somehow bracketed; we have in effect already built an impurity into our notion of art in
a way that cannot be overcome. At the same time, because we have begun from an effort
to take a certain kind of threat seriously, we are forced to speak of something like
“purity” as a central project for or aspiration of art. And with this double handling of
“purity,” we have installed a dialectical motor capable of generating a real history operating
in something other than logico-aesthetic space—a space organized by a desire to continue
the enterprise of art and not a desire to offer “theoretical demonstrations.”
18.
“Modernist Painting,” p. 87.
19.
See, for example, Christine Poggi, “‘The Pasted-Paper Revolution’ Revisited,” in The Encyclopedia of
Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 1, p. 392. Although Poggi concedes that
Greenberg was “an astute observer of the relational, ever-shifting value of surface and volume in Cubist
works,” she finds both “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” and “Collage” to be marred by Greenberg’s
“continued [assumption] that the pictorial ground was an a priori fact whose integrity must be affirmed.”
65
essay is that it will encourage a reversal of the usual priority of things, so that
“Modernist Painting” will begin to be read through the corrective lens of
“Collage.” The reversal would allow us to see the appeals to medium-specificity in
“Modernist Painting” as something other than a narrow essentialism, and the selfcriticism that the essay claims to be definitive of modernist art as quite distinct
from the self-reference for which it is generally mistaken.
Indeed, the idea that Greenberg holds to an exclusively purist conception of
the arts is readily given the lie by his insistence in “Collage” on the sculptural
dimensions of Cubism. Picasso and Braque are credited there with having produced
in their early pasted-paper works “the illusion of forms in bas-relief,” and, before
that, of having been “crucially concerned, in and through their [paintings], with
obtaining sculptural results by strictly nonsculptural means.”20 These observations
play an important role in what, I will argue, is the essay’s clear demonstration that
Greenberg’s history of modernist art is, far from being a simple linear progression
to an essence, in fact fully dialectical. We will want to look carefully over the
course of the remainder of this essay at the exact nature of that dialectic. For the
time being, though, it may be enough to remark how, in the history of modernist
(which is to say, medium-specific) art recounted in “Collage,” the medium of
painting draws at certain (self-)critical moments on the resources of sculpture—
as it does no less on those of papier collé.
“Collage” also makes plain the absurdity of the notion that modernist painting
was oriented solely toward the revelation of the “ineluctable flatness” of its material
support. We can see easily enough for ourselves that, had it only been a matter of
that, there would have been little to distinguish a modernist painting from, say,
the wallpaper against which it hung, and so little guarding against the medium’s
degeneration into “relatively trivial interior decoration.” “Collage” is very clear on
this point. Literal flatness is a condition that modernist painting had to acknowledge,
but to which it refused to be fully reconciled: “Painting had to spell out, rather
than pretend to deny, the physical fact that it was flat, even though at the same
time, it had to overcome this proclaimed flatness as an aesthetic fact” were it to
become a successful painting. 21 The “sculptural” and the “decorative” that
Greenberg takes up later in his discussion of Gris can thus be seen as names for
20.
“Collage,” pp. 75 and 71. In fact a similar point is made in “Modernist Painting,” though it has
been almost entirely overshadowed by those passages that seem to contradict it. The relevant sentences
are these, from page 89:
It was, once again, in the name of the sculptural, with its shading and modeling, that
Cézanne, and the Cubists after him, reacted against Impressionism, as David had reacted
against Fragonard. But once more, just as David’s and Ingres’s reaction had culminated,
paradoxically, in a kind of painting even less sculptural than before, so the Cubist
counter-revolution eventuated in a kind of painting flatter than anything in Western art
since before Giotto and Cimabue—so flat indeed that it could hardly contain recognizable images.
21.
“Collage,” p. 71; italics added.
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painting’s tendency to forget one or another of these “facts” about its own field.22
(In this light, the “decorative” connotes both the ineluctable physical flatness of
the canvas, and the limit point at which painting passes over into the extra-aesthetic
or merely decorative, the category, that is, of non-art.)
Having arrived at this understanding of its terms, we are perhaps finally ready
to begin working our way sequentially through “Collage.” Greenberg’s exclusive
concern at the beginning of the text is with the early Cubist paintings of Picasso and
Braque. He suggests that those works took the particular forms they did as a result
of the effort to find a balance between flattened facet-planes that would emphasize
the surface and a modeling that would disrupt it, without, however, producing
anything that could quite be mistaken for sculptural form. “The main problem at
this juncture,” Greenberg wrote, in reference to the paintings of 1910 and 1911,
“became to keep the ‘inside’ of the picture—its content—from fusing with the
‘outside’—its literal surface. Depicted flatness—that is, the facet-planes—had to be
kept separate enough from literal flatness to permit a minimal illusion of threedimensional space to survive between the two.”23 Braque had already tried to
address this problem with what Greenberg described as “expedients,” the “token”
means of the tack-with-a-cast-shadow used in the 1910 Still Life with Violin and Pitcher,
or the tassels-and-studs that appeared in several other works. By producing a
momentary conflation of the rearmost of the painting’s depicted planes and the
physical plane of the picture itself, these tacks and studs created a “trompe-l’oeil
suggestion of deep space on top of Cubist flatness, between the depicted planes and
the spectator’s eye.” 24 Unfortunately, the effect was never more than local:
“Plastically, spatially, neither the tack nor the tassel-and-stud acts upon the picture;
each suggests illusion without making it really present.”25
If ultimately somewhat less than adequate, the token hardware of these early
paintings nonetheless seems to have brought Picasso and Braque to a crucial
realization: namely, that there might be a way to overcome literal or physical
flatness by, paradoxically, bringing it to the fore. “Collage” lays out the complexity
of the gambit in some detail:
If the actuality of the surface—its real, physical flatness—could be
indicated explicitly enough in certain places, it would be distinguished
and separated from everything else the surface contained. Once the
literal nature of the support was advertised, whatever upon it was not
intended literally would be set off and enhanced in its non-literalness. Or
to put it still another way: depicted flatness would inhabit at least the
22.
The “sculptural,” that is, amounts to a forgetting or a denial of the physical fact that a painting
is flat, whereas the “decorative” would denote the opposite tendency—a disregard for what Greenberg
calls the “aesthetic fact” that that flatness (the canvas’s mere or mundane physicality) must somehow
be overcome in order for the painting actually to be judged a painting.
23.
Ibid., pp. 71–72.
24.
Ibid., p. 72.
25.
Ibid.
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semblance of a three-dimensional space as long as the brute, undepicted
flatness of the literal surface was pointed to as being still flatter.26
Thus, for example, the printed or stenciled letters and numbers that, in 1911,
Picasso and Braque began introducing into their compositions; the point was to
draw attention through these inscriptions to the literal surface of the painting, so
that everything less obviously adhering to that surface would appear to recede in
depth as a result of the comparison. When used in combination with the token
tassel-and-stud, as in Braque’s The Portuguese, the simulated typography was able to
yield an even more dramatic effect. Appearing to change places in depth with the
tassel-and-stud, the stenciling of The Portuguese draws the physical surface itself
momentarily into the illusion: the surface “seems pulled back into depth along
with the stenciling,” with the result that its presence is, for a brief instant at least,
effectively canceled or negated.27
26.
27.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 74.
Georges Braque. The Portuguese.
1911. © Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy
Giraudon/Art Resource, New York.
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The only problem was that familiarity appeared to weaken the effect. By
1912 Picasso and Braque had begun selectively adding sand and other foreign
materials to their pigments, in the hope that, by emphasizing and bringing to the
fore still larger areas of the actual surface, the desired illusion might be prolonged.
In the end, however, this strategy, too, proved insufficient. And, of course, it was
bound to; insofar as the intention was to overcome (and not merely to deny) the
literal flatness of painting’s material support, the effort was doomed to failure
from the start. Again, according to “Collage,” it is precisely this nonreconciliation
to flatness—to, we might say, the unavoidable conditions of its own existence—
that characterized Cubism, and presumably modernist painting more generally. It
is also what generated for it a history. Faced with the impossible demand to
simultaneously spell out and overcome its literal flatness, Cubist painting was
driven to ever more extreme measures; its history appears, as a result, as a
succession of retrospective, dialectical responses to its inability to free itself from
its own extra-aesthetic contingencies.
Alternatively, we might say: the history of Cubism was propelled by a negative
dialectic. This phrasing has the advantage of pointing up the extent to which, in
the first part of the essay at least, Greenberg’s logic runs parallel to that of
Adorno, for whom art and its history were likewise the products of nonreconciliation.28 Adorno’s term “negative dialectics” was clearly intended to invoke Hegel,
and to suggest an opposition to the dialectic of Hegelian philosophy. But because
that opposition is itself dialectical, there is a strong sense in which Adorno’s project
also demands to be seen as continuous with Hegel’s own.29 The point of contention
for Adorno is that moment posited by Hegel, the moment of absolute knowing, in
which dialectical history is at last brought to an end. At this point, according to
Adorno, all of history’s driving oppositions—between subject and object, Spirit
and Nature—are made to resolve themselves, without remainder and to the benefit
of Spirit, in the monumental unity of the Hegelian system as a whole. Adorno’s
ambition was to prize the negative, dialectical core of Hegelian thought free from
that system and its conciliatory, undialectical conclusion. Significantly, however,
Adorno refused to dismiss Hegel’s conception of a totalizing system as merely an
idealistic construct (although he did adamantly deny its claims to truth). Rather,
28.
Although similarities between Greenberg’s criticism and the views of Adorno have been frequently
remarked, the most sustained comparison to date of their writings, by Peter Osborne, has instead
underlined dissimilarities. Osborne’s presentation of Greenberg, however, is largely based on a simplified
reading of “Modernist Painting,” with the result that Greenberg’s notion of autonomy is reduced to
“the idea of specifically aesthetic ‘values’” that are aligned to “the formal properties of the physical
medium.” Thus, for Osborne, “the idea of autonomy becomes inextricably linked within Greenberg’s
work to that of self-referentiality.” As I hope I have already made clear, my ambition for the present
essay is that it will dispel precisely these associations, so that we might begin to understand Greenberg’s
“self-criticism” as something other than self-referentiality. See Peter Osborne, “Aesthetic Autonomy
and the Crisis of Theory: Greenberg, Adorno, and the Problem of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts,”
New Formations 9 (Winter 1989), pp. 31–50.
29.
See, in particular, Theodore W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
69
he saw that system as having been concretely realized in the twentieth century
under the forces of advanced capitalism:
Satanically, the world as grasped by the Hegelian system has only
now, a hundred and fifty years later, proved itself to be a system in
the literal sense, namely that of a radically societalized society. . . . A
world integrated through “production,” through the exchange relationship, depends in all its moments on the social conditions of production,
and in this sense actually realizes the primacy of the whole over its
parts; in this regard the desperate impotence of every single individual
now verifies Hegel’s extravagant conception of the system.30
According to Adorno, modern, autonomous art—art, that is, committed to
an exploration of its own formal means—allows us at least a momentary glimpse
of freedom from this oppressive social reality. Such work is not easily folded into
the machinery of the culture industry, and as a result is increasingly alienated
from society at large. But that alienation does nothing to lessen the work’s social
significance; on the contrary, it creates the distance necessary for effective social
critique. Art is social, Adorno argued,
primarily because it stands opposed to society. Now this opposition art
can mount only when it has become autonomous. By congealing into
an entity unto itself—rather than obeying existing social norms and
thus proving itself to be “socially useful”—art criticizes society just by
being there.31
As a recent commentator on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory put it, “Autonomous art,
hence, is social and historical not because it is externally determined by society,
although it is that, but also because . . . it strives to stage the conflict between itself
and its determinations.”32 Its autonomy arises precisely as a result of its demonstra30.
Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, p. 27. Although it lacks the reference to Hegel, the following
passage, from Greenberg’s “The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture” (1947;
Collected Writings, vol. 2, p. 163), makes much the same claim:
There is also the fact that a society as completely capitalized and industrialized as our
American own, seeks relentlessly to organize every possible field of activity and consumption in the direction of profit, regardless of whatever immunity from commercialization
any particular activity may have once enjoyed.
It is this kind of rationalization that has made life more and more boring and tasteless in
our country, particularly since 1940, flattening and emptying all those vessels which are
supposed to nourish us daily.
31.
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christian Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984),
p. 321. Except where noted, all other quotations from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory will be taken from
Robert Hullot-Kentor’s more recent (and generally better) translation of the text.
32.
Gregg M. Horowitz, “Art History and Autonomy,” in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1997),
pp. 263–64.
70
OCTOBER
tion that those determinations do not in fact determine—or, rather, that they only
underdetermine—its appearance. Autonomous work attempts to show that all
potential constraints on its freedom, whether these inhere in cultural institutions,
received conventions, or the very materials out of which the work itself is made,
are not in actuality constraining; only in this way can the art object resist being
assimilated to preformed categories of understanding. But, obviously, the constraints
are also required to make their appearance in the work, as it is there that they must
be confronted and negated. Every autonomous work is bound as a result to show
what does not bind it, and in this way necessarily reveals its inability to escape
entirely from the world it aims to transcend.33 Modern, autonomous art has a
history, on this view, because it fails to be free and yet remains unreconciled to
that failure. Thus, in Adorno’s account, “production develops as if the new work
wanted to recover what the earlier work, in becoming concretized and therefore,
as ever, limiting itself, had had to renounce.”34
This, as we have seen, is very much the way that early Cubism proceeded in
the history of it recounted by “Collage.”35 Through the inclusion, first, of letters
and numbers and, later, of sand and other materials that would lend it visible
texture, the Cubist paintings of 1911 and 1912 called forth the literal surface of
the canvas specifically as a means to its negation. If the ultimate impossibility of
that task meant that every work was bound to a certain (ontological, rather than
aesthetic) failure, it did nothing to discourage the production of new works
33.
In his excellent essay “Art History and Autonomy,” pp. 273–74, Gregg Horowitz explicitly raises
the question of what autonomous art looks like, and offers the following pertinent response:
The traditional answer in the post-Kantian tradition of philosophical aesthetics is that it
looks like freedom, an answer that has led to the idealist valorizations of aesthetic
autonomy in Schiller and the young Nietzsche, Clement Greenberg at his worst, and
Clive Bell at his best. However, . . . the proper answer is that autonomous art looks like
the failure of freedom.
It must be said, however, that the work could not conceivably appear in any other way. “The
totally objectivated artwork would congeal into a mere thing,” Adorno wrote; however, “if it altogether
evaded objectification it would regress to an impotently powerless subjective impulse [something without
substance or visibility] and so flounder in the empirical world” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert
Hullot-Kentor [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], p. 175).
34.
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 209.
35.
It seems relevant here to note that Adorno invokes Picasso’s Cubism at a number of points within
his Aesthetic Theory. Perhaps most directly related to the concerns of the present essay are the comments on
p. 256, which discuss the papiers collés in relation to the presumed opposition between autonomous
and social art. (“This dichotomization is false,” Adorno argues, “because it presents the two dynamically
related elements as simple alternatives.”) Cubism is held up as the example of autonomy while,
perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Surrealism is made to stand for a social art: “But cubism itself revolted,
in terms of its actual content [Inhalt; here Adorno seems to be referring specifically to the appropriated
materials of collage], against the bourgeois idea of a gaplessly pure immanence of artworks.
Conversely, important surrealists such as Max Ernst and André Masson, who refused to collude with
the market and initially protested against the sphere of art itself, gradually turned toward formal
principles, and Masson largely abandoned representation, as the idea of shock, which dissipates
quickly in thematic material, was transformed into a technique of painting.”
Braque. Fruit Dish and
Glass. 1912. © Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New
York/ADAGP, Paris.
One would be hard-pressed, it seems to me, to arrive at a description
much better than this. It manages to convey not only the complexity of the
visual experience afforded by Braque’s Fruit Dish, but also, in the quickening
pace of its narrative, something of the excitement that a viewer in the grip of
that experience is likely to feel. Just here, however, in Greenberg’s evident
(and understandable) enthusiasm for the papiers collés, we begin to detect a
subtle shift in “Collage,” away from the negative-dialectical argument with
which the essay began toward something much more fully and affirmatively
Hegelian. By the end of the essay, in fact, we will be asked to believe that the
papiers collés managed to achieve, at last, what earlier works had not: “the
seamless fusion of the decorative with the plastic,”39 which is to say, the overcoming or “sublation” of the opposition between literal and depicted flatnesses
that, until this moment, had been presented as the driving tension behind the
39.
Ibid., p. 81
Braque. Fruit Dish and
Glass. 1912. © Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New
York/ADAGP, Paris.
One would be hard-pressed, it seems to me, to arrive at a description
much better than this. It manages to convey not only the complexity of the
visual experience afforded by Braque’s Fruit Dish, but also, in the quickening
pace of its narrative, something of the excitement that a viewer in the grip of
that experience is likely to feel. Just here, however, in Greenberg’s evident
(and understandable) enthusiasm for the papiers collés, we begin to detect a
subtle shift in “Collage,” away from the negative-dialectical argument with
which the essay began toward something much more fully and affirmatively
Hegelian. By the end of the essay, in fact, we will be asked to believe that the
papiers collés managed to achieve, at last, what earlier works had not: “the
seamless fusion of the decorative with the plastic,”39 which is to say, the overcoming or “sublation” of the opposition between literal and depicted flatnesses
that, until this moment, had been presented as the driving tension behind the
39.
Ibid., p. 81
73
development of Cubist painting. The key to this reconciliation, Greenberg
suggests, lies with papier collé’s potential for optical illusion. Of the works of
1912, he writes:
Flatness may now monopolize everything, but it is a flatness become so
ambiguous and expanded as to turn into illusion itself—at least an
optical illusion if not, properly speaking, a pictorial one. Depicted,
Cubist flatness is now almost completely assimilated to the literal,
undepicted kind, but at the same time it reacts upon and largely
transforms the undepicted kind—and it does so, moreover, without
depriving the latter of its literalness; rather, it underpins and reinforces
that literalness, re-creates it.40
There is a distinctly triumphalist tone to these passages, roughly of the
sort that, in quest epics, typically marks the narrative climax. Here, as with
those other epics, it also tends to encourage a backward glance, a brief retracing
of the circuitous path leading to this point. From a retrospective vantage, however,
the route suddenly appears very different than it had on the outbound journey,
when the way forward seemed much more purely ad hoc, a matter of chance
and opportunity. Now the contours of “Collage” appear to have resolved themselves into a neatly ascending (Hegelian) spiral, whose line of development we
might easily imagine Greenberg articulating as follows: In the first turn of
events, Picasso and Braque coupled a quasi-Impressionist, decorative flatness
with the sort of sculptural shading that had traditionally been the hallmark of
pictorial illusion; the result was the depicted flatness of high Analytic Cubism
(the paintings of, roughly, 1910 to 1912). In the next round, the continuity of
that depicted flatness was tied to its literal counterpart—and the outcome this
time was an optical illusionism that constantly seemed to displace the surface
and remake it elsewhere.41
It would be left to the later papiers collés and, following them, to Gris’s
paintings, only to liquidate the vestiges of sculptural shading that still clung to
Braque’s Fruit Dish. In this way it could be made evident that the optical illusion of
the collages might be produced without the aid of any pictorial illusion whatsoever—
that the physical surface could be displaced and re-created out of shapes that were
unimpeachably flat. Again, in the case of Gris’s paintings, it was, Greenberg
argued, the prominence of their blacks that effected the desired result.
40.
Ibid., p. 77. The corresponding passage in “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” is perhaps a little
more direct in its presentation of the matter. With the papiers collés, we are told, “pictorial illusion
begins to give way to what could be more properly called optical illusion” (Greenberg, Collected Essays
and Criticism, vol. 4, p. 64).
41.
It might be said that Greenberg’s opticality functions here (and in other texts) much like absolute
knowing does for Hegel. Certainly one interpretation of absolute knowing—the one held, for instance,
by Adorno—is that it represents the moment when subjectivity, having at last assimilated all otherness,
brings an end to dialectical history.
74
OCTOBER
The clearly and simply contoured solid black shapes on which Gris
relied so much in these paintings represent fossilized shadows and
fossilized patches of shading. All the value gradations are summed up
in a single, ultimate value of flat, opaque black—a black that becomes
a color as sonorous and pure as any spectrum color and that confers
upon the silhouettes it fills an even greater weight than is possessed by
the lighter-hued forms which these silhouettes are supposed to shade.42
In writing these sentences Greenberg presumably had in view something like
the black chevron just right of center in the lower half of Gris’s Still Life; it does
indeed appear to take off as an independent shape, advancing in front of even the
lighter-colored “newspaper” (the bluish rectangle partially inscribed “Le Journal”),
which, on a different level, it serves as shadow. Here again, as Greenberg said of the
earlier papiers collés, “every part and plane of the picture keeps changing place
with every other part and plane; and it is as if the only stable relation left among
the different parts of the picture is the ambivalent and ambiguous one each has
with the surface.” Because that ambiguity arises now within a painting devoid of
sculptural modeling—and so upon a surface that would otherwise seem merely
patterned and two-dimensional—Greenberg also claims that Gris’s work has
successfully “transcended” the decorative: “transcended and transfigured” it into
the “monumental unity” of the painting as a whole.43
Plainly, with this declaration of a “monumental unity,” the reworking of
the essay’s initial, negative dialectic into a more fully Hegelian doctrine of
affirmation and reconciliation is complete. Greenberg’s prose is seamless
enough that, on a first reading, the labor of that reworking is not readily apparent.
If, however, we can manage to resist succumbing to the rhetorical elegance of
his argument, and so keep our eyes fixed squarely on the works in question, we
are eventually bound to notice certain features of those works that were simply
papered over in the later sections of “Collage.” Even Greenberg himself engaged
in this sort of revision, with the footnote he added to the essay in 1972. There he
admitted that Picasso and Braque had not abandoned sculptural shading soon
after the invention of papier collé, as “Collage” had originally reported (and as
the structure of its narrative seemed to demand): in fact, “Picasso and Braque
continued to use discrete shading off and on well into 1914, and in Picasso’s case
even longer.”44
A similar repression seems to have been involved in Greenberg’s analysis of
Gris’s paintings. Anyone at all familiar with those works is likely to be given pause
by the essay’s complete disregard of their “pointillist” passages, which are at least
as prominent a feature as are the opaque blacks. They might even be seen to produce
42.
Ibid., p. 82.
43.
Ibid., p. 83. Specifically, Greenberg says, “And here, at last, the decorative is transcended and
transfigured, as it had already been in Picasso’s, Braque’s and Léger’s art, in a monumental unity.”
44.
Ibid., p. 82.
Pablo Picasso. Pipe and Sheet Music. 1914. © 2002
Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
a similar effect. They might be seen, that is, not as fossilized shading, perhaps, but
as reified luminosity (something akin to Seurat’s Neo-Impressionism made even
more patterned and systematic), whose frank two-dimensionality nonetheless
refuses to adhere to the literal surface—or even to a single, consistent plane in
depth.45 If Greenberg passed over these passages in silence, it was perhaps because
they raised the specter of a decorativeness beyond all possibility of redemption or
transcendence. To the extent that they pointedly recall the stippled wallpaper
that, in 1914, Picasso pasted into several of his papiers collés, they allude to
precisely the sort of “relatively trivial interior decoration” whose proliferation,
according to Greenberg, had first set modernism in motion.46
45.
Note, for example, the neck of the bottle in Gris’s Still Life : Its silhouette is articulated on the
left by a field of green dots against a yellow ground, in the middle by an undifferentiated green, and at
right by blue stippling on a green field. Even though it is the same green hue in all three cases—and
even though, if we make ourselves focus exclusively on it, its continuity from one field to the next is
plainly evident—each area, in fact, appears to separate itself from the others as an independent shape
and to advance slightly forward of them, or else recede a little in depth. There is with these stippled
areas, in other words, the same kind of spatial oscillation and ambiguity that Greenberg detailed in his
account of the paintings’ “sonorous” blacks.
46.
There are seven works in all that use this stippled wallpaper. For illustrations, see Pierre Daix
and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years 1907–1916, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (Boston: New York
Graphic Society, 1979), pp. 681, 683, 685, 686, 689, 793, and 799.
Salon bourgeois, La Maison Cubiste. Salon d’Automne,
Paris. 1912. Archives André Mare, Paris.
Wallpaper in general was a standard element of Picasso’s collages, and it was so
from the very beginning: for example, an ocher-and-yellow floral pattern appears
prominently in what is probably his first papier collé, Guitar and Wineglass, from
November of 1912. It is a striking fact—surely more than merely coincidental—that
the artist’s insertion of such explicitly decorative elements into his Cubist collages
followed almost immediately upon the very public insertion of Cubism into an
explicitly decorative context. I am thinking of the Maison Cubiste, the suite of rooms
modeling the interior of a bourgeois home that was part of the 1912 Salon
d’Automne.47 Displaying furniture and wallpaper patterns by a group of young
designers led by André Mare, the Maison also showcased the paintings of Fernand
Léger, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and many of the other so-called Salon Cubists.
The participation of Gleizes and Metzinger seems particularly difficult to explain,
given that they had argued in Du Cubisme—published while the Salon d’Automne
was still open and receiving visitors—that their work was the very antithesis of
decoration.48 It appears to have been the absence of any discernible Cubist influence
upon the furnishings of Mare and his cohort that allowed Gleizes and Metzinger to
rationalize their involvement with the project. The antidecorative diatribe of Du
Cubisme was aimed specifically at the Art Nouveau belief that a painting should
47.
The Salon of that year ran from October 1 until November 8.
48.
“Many consider that decorative preoccupations must govern the spirit of the new painters.
Undoubtedly they are ignorant of the most obvious signs which make decorative work the antithesis of
the picture” (Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme [Paris: Figuière, 1912], translated in
Robert Herbert, Modern Artists on Art [New York: Prentice-Hall, 1964], p. 5).
77
harmonize with its surroundings. And Art Nouveau—or rather, a popularized, massproduced version of it—was being widely marketed in the newly opened ateliers of
the French department stores.49 If Au Printemps’s showrooms seemed to foretell a
future in which paintings would take their place within a coordinated decorative
ensemble (each work designed to harmonize with the furniture, and playing up
some of its subtler hues), the more or less traditional décor of the Maison Cubiste
could be seen to serve, on the contrary, as an offsetting frame, reinforcing the
painting’s autonomy and integrity. For his part, Mare hoped that an alliance with
Cubist painters and sculptors would give his designs a certain cachet, and sharply
differentiate them from the mass-produced commodities marketed to the public
through the department stores’ displays. But, of course, the whole enterprise was
open to multiple interpretations. Even if it was intended to underline the integrity
of the Cubist paintings hanging there, and to emphasize the qualitative differences
between the artisanal tradition represented by Mare and the mass production of
the department stores, the very resemblance of the Maison Cubiste to Au
Printemps’s ateliers d’art threatened to scramble those distinctions. In many ways, it
simply concretized the threat of art’s assimilation to interior decoration.
Complicating the situation further was the fact that many avant-garde artists—
from the Nabis to the Fauves, and including, on occasion, Cubists such as Gris
himself 50—openly embraced the characterization of their work as “decorative.” Years
after the fact, Matisse all but conceded that their unqualified acceptance of the term
had been naive—or worse, actually complicitous with the marketing strategies of the
French department stores:
Finally, after the rediscovery of the emotional and decorative properties
of line and color by modern artists, we have seen our department
stores invaded by materials, decorated in medleys of color, without
moderation, without meaning. . . . These odd medleys of color and
these lines were very irritating to those who knew what was going on
and to the artists who had to employ these different means for the
development of their form.
Finally all the eccentricities of commercial art were accepted (an extraordinary thing); the public was very flexible and the salesman would
take them in by saying, when showing the goods: “This is modern.”51
49.
For a discussion of the Maison Cubiste within the history of the French decorative arts, see
David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998),
pp. 169–79; and Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1991), pp. 79–102.
50.
In 1921 Gris informed Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler that, the dealer’s protests to the contrary, his
work was in fact accurately characterized as “decorative.” “Clearly it is decoration,” Gris wrote. “One
need not be afraid of words when one knows what they signify, but all painting has always been
decoration.” Cited in Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of
Collage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 123.
51.
“Matisse’s Radio Interview: First Broadcast, 1942,” cited in Poggi, In Defiance of Painting, p. 140.
78
OCTOBER
As for Picasso, neither he nor Braque ever took up Matisse’s praise of the
“decorative,” and, according to Kahnweiler, both were openly contemptuous of
paintings made “to ‘adorn’ the wall.” From as early as 1907, Kahnweiler says, Picasso
“perceived the danger of lowering his art to the level of ornament.”52 And yet, in the
months and years immediately following the run of the Maison Cubiste, the artist
regularly incorporated wallpaper fragments within his papiers collés. What’s more, in
the case of the 1914 series, those fragments were ones that clearly pointed up the
difficulty of distinguishing modernist art (certainly of the Neo-Impressionist variety)
from “relatively trivial interior decoration.”53 In this context it seems crucial to note
that the wallpapers of that series sometimes served—as they do in Pipe and Sheet
Music—to duplicate the frame.54 Frames have traditionally provided the visible
marker of a work’s autonomy, clearly demarcating the boundary between that work
and everything else outside. But the frame’s own status is, for precisely that reason,
ambiguous and contradictory. At once external to the painting and essential to its
appearance as a thing apart, the frame both obviously belongs to the work and, just
as evidently, doesn’t.55 Picasso’s wallpaper-framed collages seem to be making an
analogous claim regarding the boundary—the all-important (in)distinction, as it
were—between modern art and the merely decorative. And they encourage us to see
his earlier wallpaper works in very much the same vein.
In Greenberg’s history of Cubism, the invention of collage had marked an
epochal moment, the moment, as he said, when the decorative surface of the
work was at long last “transcended and transfigured,” dissolved into the purely
subjective space of optical illusion. Of course, that history was dependent upon
the repression of the commodified, mass-produced nature of many of the elements
of Cubist collage. Unlike the collages themselves, Greenberg refused to admit
even the potential presence of the literally and commercially decorative within
the field of modern art. Our own attention to the specific materials of those
collages now suggests a slightly different history, one in which the invention of
papier collé is, however, no less epochal. Through its invention, we might say,
the threat of the decorative—the possibility that modern painting might in fact
be assimilated to decoration (or entertainment) pure and simple—was, at long
last, openly acknowledged.56
52.
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, The Rise of Cubism (1916), trans. Henry Aronson (New York:
Wittenborn, 1949), p. 7; cited in Rosalind Krauss, The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1998), p. 181.
53.
Tellingly, in the spring of 1914, just at the time that Picasso began working on this series, a serialized essay by André Mare appeared in Montjoie!, which advocated a return to primitive woodblock printing
methods for wallpaper, and blamed modern mechanical techniques for a decline in the present quality of
production. See Mare, “Le Papier peint,” Montjoie!, nos. 4, 5, and 6 (April, May, and June 1914).
54.
There are a total of four collages from the spring of 1914 that employ wallpaper frames (Daix 683,
684, 685, and 787). Two of these—Pipe and Musical Score and Glass and Bottle of Bass—feature the stippled
wallpaper pattern.
55.
On the status of the frame and its implications for the autonomy of art, see Jacques Derrida, The
Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),
especially section II, “The Parergon,” 37ff.
56.
On the notion, and the structure, of acknowledgment, see Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and
79
I hasten to add that it was not, for all that, openly accepted. Just as earlier
Cubist paintings had foregrounded their literal surface in a determined effort to
negate it, so Picasso’s wallpaper collages seem to advertise their imbrication with
the merely decorative precisely so that they might make crucial differences
apparent.57 On this view, the project of the papiers collés is continuous with that
of earlier, Analytic Cubism, except that, where those earlier works had taken it
upon themselves to acknowledge (and negate) the physical fact of their material
surface, the papiers collés also acknowledge the social fact of painting’s equivocal
position in relation to the culture industry of late capitalism. They amount to the
recognition that, if art does in fact cease to exist or to matter in this world, it will
be less because it has reified into a mere object than because it has capitulated to a
voracious subjectivity, seeking pleasure, demanding entertainment.
We might compare Picasso’s use of wallpaper in this regard with his equally
frequent employment of newspaper in the papiers collés. As Krauss has shown,
newspaper was a material under considerable tension in the avant-garde world of
1912.58 It had been roundly condemned by Stéphane Mallarmé, whose Symbolist
aesthetic and views on the autonomy of art clearly held a strong attraction for
Picasso.59 Angered by the newspapers’ increasing commodification of literature—
including their ser ializat ion of novels commissioned explicit ly for that
purpose—Mallarmé went on the offensive. He argued that, even apart from the
quality of the writing it presented, the newspaper was vastly inferior to the book,
in that its pages confronted the viewer with column after column of monotonous
gray type. Furthermore, its composition was driven, he said, by hierarchies of
power (which determined what would appear on the front page, what on the last);
and, worst of all, it sacrificed the sensuous fold of the book to the unrelieved
flatness of the open newsprint page.60
Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,
1976), pp. 238–66.
57.
In saying this, I am largely agreeing with Christine Poggi, who has argued that Picasso’s and
Braque’s papiers collés represent a “complex and paradoxical relation to mass culture,” in that they
suggest simultaneously “a denial of the precious, fine art status of traditional works of art as well as an
attempt to subvert the seemingly inevitable process by which art becomes a commodity in the modern
world” (In Defiance of Painting, p. 128). To phrase things in terms of “denial,” however, sounds a distinctly
false note for me; it might be better to say that the papiers collés effectively recognize that the distinctness
(or “purity”) art was once able to take for granted is no longer tenable. It is what each work must
demonstrate for itself, even as it acknowledges its entanglements with the extra-aesthetic. I would also
argue that Picasso’s and Braque’s papiers collés are not identical in this regard (see note 66 below).
58.
Krauss, “The Motivations of the Sign,” Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992), pp. 261–86. See also Poggi, In Defiance of Painting, p.
141ff.
59.
On the relation between Picasso and Mallarmé, see David Cottington, “Cubism, Aestheticism,
Modernism,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, pp. 58–72.
60.
Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le Livre, instrument spirituel,” in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Éditions
Gallimard, 1945), pp. 378–82. See also Christine Poggi, “Mallarmé, Picasso, and the Newspaper as
Commodity,” in The Yale Journal of Criticism 1, no. 1 (1987), pp. 133–51; and her revision of that
argument in her book In Defiance of Painting.
80
OCTOBER
In the newspapers’ corner, by contrast, was Picasso’s friend Guillaume
Apollinaire, who admired the papers for their ability to speak in a plurality of
voices, and who, in his own heteroglossic poem “Zone,” embraced nearly all of
commercially printed popular culture:
You read the handbills, catalogues, posters that sing out loud and clear—
That’s the morning’s poetry, and for prose there are the newspapers,
There are tabloids lurid with police reports,
Portraits of the great and a thousand assorted stories.61
The newspapers of Picasso’s papiers collés cannot be said to adhere to
either of these positions. As Krauss has shown, they are not of a piece with
Apollinaire’s unqualified acceptance, yet their very appearance within the collages
places them at some remove from Mallarmé’s conviction that the newspaper
could not possibly serve as a vehicle for genuine aesthetic experience. Rather,
Picasso employed newspaper, but in such a way as to negate its most pernicious
effects. The fragments within his collages are made to embody precisely “those
precious aesthetic possibilities that Mallarmé had insisted were the exclusive
prerogative of the book: the capacity to figure forth the fold as that metaphysical
‘turning’ of the page that opens the work of art onto the abyss or chasm of
meaning; and the ability to transmute the gray drone of the marks on the
page” into signifiers for light, transparency, and depth.62 That we are dealing
with a determinate negation, and not some final sublation or transcendence, is
made all too apparent by those scholars who, ignoring Cubism’s dialectical
impulse, persist in reading the columns of type as if those passages were nothing
more or other than the newspaper from and against which the work of art actually
took shape.63
Understanding how the newspaper fragments function within Picasso’s
papiers collés—and how that functioning ought to discourage us from reading
the text or attributing its views to Picasso—should by no means prevent us, however,
from recognizing the potential social and political significance of the works
themselves. As Adorno argued, such significance is won specifically through the
work’s autonomy, which is to say, its overt display of nonreconciliation.64
61.
Cited in, and translated by, Krauss, “ The Mot ivat ions of the Sign,” p. 277. Guillaume
Apollinaire’s “Zone” seems like an explicit riposte to Mallarmé’s assertion that “le vers est partout dans
la langue où il y a rythme, partout, excepté dans les affiches et à la quatrième page les journaux,”
Oeuvres completes (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945), p. 867.
62.
Krauss, “Motivations of the Sign,” pp. 281–82.
63.
The most concerted effort in this regard is to be found in Patricia Leighten, Re-Ordering the
Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp.
121–42. See also Y ve-Alain Bois’s “The Semiology of Cubism,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed.
Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p. 203, where he aptly characterizes the
“recourse to newspaper [as] a Mallarméan (or formalist) answer to Mallarmé’s disdain: even this product
of modern industry can be deautomatized, deinstrumentalized, opacified, ‘poeticized.’”
64.
It is worth noting that David Cottington has recently sanctioned a similar argument for the
political significance of Mallarmé’s work, holding that Mallarmé’s prose poems constituted a “counter-
81
Whether art becomes politically relevant or indifferent—an idle play or
decorative frill of the system—depends on the extent to which art’s
constructions and montages are at the same time de-montages, i.e.,
dismantlements that appropriate elements of reality by destroying
them, thus freely shaping them into something else. The unity of the
social criterion of art with the aesthetic one hinges on whether art is
able to supercede empirical reality while at the same time concretizing
its relation to that superceded reality. Art that succeeds in doing this has a
prerogative: it may dismiss the question posed by political practitioners as
to what it is up to and what its “message” is.65
What makes Adorno’s comments so thoroughly apposite to the present
context is not simply their explanat ion of the ant agonist ic relat ionship
between autonomous art and existent social formations, nor even their suggestion that the appropriate structural model for that relationship is to be found
in collage or montage.66 The relevance of his comments lies also in their implication that the “decorative” names but a “frill” or extension of the “system”—which
is to say, work that is either a product of the culture industry or ready fodder
for it.
“If decoration can be said to be the specter that haunts modernist painting,
then part of the latter’s formal mission is to find ways of using the decorative
against itself.”67 This time the words are Clement Greenberg’s, and, although they
were not written specifically as commentary on the development of Cubism and
the advent of papier collé, they manage to ser ve nicely in that capacit y
nonetheless. In fact, they seem particularly apt to an understanding of Picasso’s
wallpaper collages, which not only acknowledge the specter of the decorative, but
confront that decorativeness in one of its most insidious forms: as the bland
discourse,” which turned the “language of dominant discourse against itself.” Ironically, however,
Cottington—who has also sanctioned and amply documented an understanding of Picasso’s Cubism in
relation to the aestheticism of Mallarmé—is unable to see the artist’s papiers collés as performing a
similar negation. Instead he argues that their “pretensions to counter-discourse are compromised” by
their “complicity” with “the aesthetic hierarchies of dominant culture.” This, it seems to me, is
symptomatic of the fact that Cottington persistently identifies references to the “popular” in Picasso’s
art with the working classes (rather than with commodity culture), and refuses to consider aesthetic
experience as anything other than the purview of an economic elite. See Cottington, Cubism in the
Shadow of War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), especially pp. 137–43.
65.
For this passage, I have used the Lenhardt translation of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 362. The corresponding passage appears in the Hullot-Kentor
translation on pp. 255–56.
66.
Elsewhere in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno specifically states that the “act from which all montage
derives” was Picasso’s use of newspaper in his papiers collés. See the Hullot-Kentor translation, p. 258.
67.
Clement Greenberg, “Milton Avery” (1958), in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p.
200. It is, I think, worth noting that, whereas “Modernist Painting” had emphasized the need for
painting to distinguish itself principally from the sculptural and the literary—that is, from “any and
every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art”—here those
concerns clearly take a backseat to the threat of the decorative. And what this suggests in turn is that
82
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prettiness of bourgeois interior decor.68 That these collages are also “de-collages,”
turning the decorative against itself, is readily seen, for example, in Guitar and
Wineglass. Around the periphery of that work the wallpaper represents nothing
other than wallpaper itself: a flat, continuous background against which the still
life elements of the composition are arrayed. But the section just beneath the
sound hole of the guitar seems drawn forward (precisely by its relation to that
overlaid “hole”), where it is reconstituted as the guitar’s surface and so made to
reside, at least momentarily, on a completely different plane in depth. It is, of
course, only a tentative move, an opening salvo. Yet still it seems right to declare:
la bataille s’est engagé[e].
Over the next eighteen months Picasso’s means would become progressively
more sophisticated, as he discovered ever new ways to dissolve the wallpaper’s
opacity or displace its surface in depth. In Pipe and Sheet Music, for example, from
the spring of 1914, the stippled mauve wallpaper lends itself to at least three
contradictory interpretations, each one suggesting a radically different spatial
configuration for the elements of the picture as a whole. Like so many other
Cubist still lifes, this one sets up and exploits what Christine Poggi has described
as a willful confusion between table and tableau.69 The brown rectangle at the
center of the composition asks to be read, in one light, as a tabletop—freed from
both gravity and perspective, but nonetheless supporting the pipe and the pages
laid beneath it, and casting a heavy shadow on the floor. In another light, however,
that rectangle appears simply as the vertical plane of the picture proper; in this
reading the mauve wallpaper reverts back from its earlier designation as the
shadowy surround of the table (the space of traditional easel painting), and
becomes again simply wallpaper, or at least the matte surface on which the small
collaged still life is mounted. And still there is a third possibility. Long ago
Kahnweiler made the suggestion—more recently elaborated by Krauss—that the
work is also capable of producing the illusion that it is not a picture frame that we
are looking into, but rather the ornate frame of a mirror.70 At such moments the
wallpaper continues to designate a flat, opaque surface, but it is now a surface displaced to the far side of the room—the wall behind our backs—with the result that
the work acquires an almost Meninas-like spatial complexity.
modernist painting was always driven by its dialectical opposition to decoration, but—because that
threat was too dire—the accompanying anxiety was constantly displaced onto the safer encroachments
of literature and sculpture. In this way it became possible to reconstrue the prospect of painting’s
failure as still a failure within the realm of the aesthetic, and so to imagine that successful paintings yet
remained completely sealed off from the insidiousness of “decoration.” On such matters as they
pertain to Michael Fried’s notion of “theatricality,” see Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself, pp. 9–10.
68.
It seems to me a striking fact that Picasso’s use of patterned wallpaper is much more extensive
than Braque’s. Braque’s preference was for faux bois papers that raised questions of representation and
similitude, but carried few of the social and aesthetic implications of Picasso’s chosen materials.
69.
See Poggi, “Frames of Reference: Table and Tableau in Picasso’s Collages and Constructions,” in
In Defiance of Painting, pp. 58–89.
70.
See Krauss, The Picasso Papers, p. 161ff.
Picasso. Guitar and Wine Glass. 1912.
© 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Collection of the McNay Art Museum, Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay.
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It seems important here to insist that, although optical illusion plays a role
in this experience of the collage, and so also in the negation of the wallpaper’s
unambiguous planarity, illusion per se does not appear to be the main goal of the
work. It is but one of the means employed to undo the certainties of the
wallpaper—to turn its consistently repetitive surface into a kind of arbitrary sign,
which, because of that arbitrariness, lends itself to various conflicting readings, as
a sort of multidimensional “pun.” We might describe Picasso’s papiers collés in
general as working to negate not just the literal flatness of the materials they
employ, but also the banality of those materials. In the case of the wallpaper collages
the material in question is superficial, ingratiating, monotonous: the kind of
surface whose only function is to please, and which asks for nothing more than
our inattention. If we find Picasso’s collages compelling, it will be because of the
way that they are able to make those materials over, by contrast, into works of
surprising depth and difficulty. And, of course, “by contrast” should be emphasized
here, since the process is driven by a dialectic of negation. In fact, Adorno’s
account of art’s negative- dialect ical relat ion to societ y at large is perhaps
nowhere better seen than in Picasso’s wallpaper collages. The unrelieved repetitiveness of the wallpaper patterning offers an experience that is a perfect
example of perceptions conforming to preestablished categories of understanding.
As the designs themselves affect no change in the pattern of our thought, they
are nothing more than “idle play,” a “decorative frill of the system.” But Picasso’s
collages—the successful ones, at least—by demonstrating their nonreconciliation
to the ineluctable flatness and banality of the wallpapers are able to achieve
some measure of autonomy. They seem to cut themselves out from the prefabricated
world, the world as it already exists, and to which, in some sense, they are obviously
still attached.71
If this is not, ultimately, the argument that Greenberg made for Picasso’s
papiers collés, it remains the case that it is an argument we are unlikely to have
been able to formulate without him. Greenberg’s “Collage” opens with a clear
articulation of the negative-dialectical workings of Cubism—albeit without
71.
In her recent book The Picasso Papers, Rosalind Krauss discusses several of Picasso’s wallpaper
collages in terms that have substantial overlap with my analysis of those works here; indeed Krauss’s text
has informed my understanding of the papiers collés considerably. Her insistence that the relation
between modern art and the decorative be seen as dialectical is an idea that I have obviously taken very
much to heart. But her suggestion that we understand that dialectic on the model of “reaction formation”—and that Pipe and Sheet Music represents one of the earliest manifestations of that condition
in Picasso’s art—does not seem quite adequate either to registering the pervasiveness of the decorative’s
threat, or to imagining what a “healthy” response to it might be. (If every appearance of decoration in
Picasso’s work is to be diagnosed as a case of reaction formation, we would have little choice but to believe
that his best course would have been a more thorough repression.) I prefer to think of the papiers collés
under the model of acknowledgment: the collages openly acknowledging the presence of the decorative in
order that its worst qualities and consequences might be negated. Of course, this still leaves open the
possibility that the attempted negation will be unsuccessful and that the work in question, despite any and
all intentions to the contrary, will appear merely and simply decorative. In those cases, I concede, the
model of reaction formation has a certain applicability.
85
couching the discussion in precisely those terms. (In general Greenberg tends to
avoid theoretical terminology in favor of descriptive language that, in its best
moment s, is closely aligned to the mater ial specificit ies of the works in
question.72) The one theoretical or philosophical term that Greenberg does use,
and insist upon, is “self-criticism.” He both identifies artistic modernism with “a
self-critical tendency” and warns that activities unable to avail themselves of
such self-criticism are those most likely to be assimilated to entertainment pure
and simple. Phrased in this way—and in view of our discussion of the negative
dialectic at work in “Collage”—Greenberg’s modernist “self-criticism” appears
closely related to what Adorno referred to as art’s autonomy, its manifestly
oppositional relation to society at large. Self-criticism might be regarded, then,
as yet another name for that dialectical process through which art continues to
make and preserve a place for itself in the modern world. It is self-critical only to
the extent that the works involved genuinely place themselves at stake and hold
themselves in that condition: assuming neither art’s inviolability nor, of course,
its simple nonexistence.73 And those works will be successful in turn only to the
extent that they are able to distinguish themselves from other kinds of objects of
cultural production—to the extent that they make some critical difference
visible. That art cannot, in the end, completely escape its resemblance to and
imbrication with those other cultural products also condemns it, as we have
seen, to a certain failure. But it is just this failure that generates a history for
art—which means that works can only be produced or understood in relation to
that history, and to the particular concrete works within it that make a claim on
us as art.
For me at least, much of what makes Picasso’s papiers collés so compelling
is their difficult, dialectical relation to the earlier history of Cubism as that history is
articulated by Greenberg in his essay on collage. And while it may be true that
that essay misses the full significance of the papiers collés through its refusal to
engage with the particularities of the materials they employ, it is also true that
art history stands open to a similar accusation in regard to “Collage.” The specificity
of its argument, its nuance, has been repeatedly disregarded in favor of generalities
and preconceptions. Admittedly, Greenberg himself, especially in “Modernist
72.
In its worst moments, Greenberg’s writing becomes disconnected from the works he is purportedly
describing and settles into generalities and preconceptions. The discussion of the papiers collés in the
latter half of “Collage” might be taken as a case in point. By totally failing to register the nature of the
materials employed, so that it might emphasize instead their dissolve into optical illusion, Greenberg’s
essay very much follows the form of the Hegelian dialectic; this, as Adorno complained, inevitably
collapsed the distinction between subject and object at the expense of the latter. If Adorno’s negative
dialectic was meant to correct for the “too-ready and too-complete erasure of the object” in Hegel’s
philosophy, then the present essay might be said to attempt a similar recuperation of the materiality of
the papiers collés in “Collage.” On the relation of subject and object in Adorno’s aesthetic theory, see
Tom Huhn, “Kant, Adorno, and the Social Opacity of the Aesthetic,” in Huhn and Zuidervaart, The
Semblance of Subjectivity, pp. 237–57.
73.
This is a paraphrase of Stephen Melville’s description of “radical self-criticism”; see Melville,
Philosophy Beside Itself, p. 16.
86
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Painting,” is guilty of this same charge—so that perhaps the primary lesson to
be drawn is about the sheer difficulty of keeping generalities and preconceptions
at bay.74 Adorno once wrote that progress (by which he meant simply the way
forward to something new, for the intellectual or critic, no less than for the
artist) was “nothing else but persistently grasping the material at the most
advanced level of its historical dialectic.”75 Again, it might be said that this is precisely
what Greenberg failed to do in his discussion of Picasso’s papiers collés. Yet what
strikes me as the much more interesting fact is that, when those papiers collés are
placed alongside “Collage,” the two, in effect, grasp one another, revealing the
historical dialectic at work—at the most advanced level—in their respective material.
My own paper has largely been an effort to articulate that phenomenon—and so to
explain in the process the nature of my own particular attachment to “Collage.”
74.
In fact it seems to me that the dialectical struggle narrated in “Collage,” against an apparently
inexorable flattening, has an “unhappy” correlate in the relation of the three closely related essays,
“The Pasted-Paper Revolution” (1958), “Collage” (1959), and “Modernist Painting” (1960). The
greater depth of the argument of “Collage” (a depth won through the recognition of how literal
flatness might be turned dialectically against itself) is largely drained away in “Modernist Painting”;
and that loss is at least in part the result of Greenberg’s succumbing to the illusion of transcendence
that had first been raised in “Collage.”
75.
Adorno, “Reaktion and Fortschritt,” (1930), Moments Musicaux: Neugedruckte Aufsätze, 1928 bis
1962 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), pp. 153–54; cited and translated by Susan Buck-Morss,
The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York:
Free Press, 1977), p. 50.

The Flattening of “Collage”

Transcription

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