In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage. - book reviews

In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage, by means of Christine Poggi, New Haven, Yale University Pres 1993; 312 pages, $50

In Defiance of Painting is an exceptionally deliberative and intelligent book that approaches a complicated make subordinate in a subtle and compounded way. It is also actual clearly written and provides a refreshing demonstration that intricate cogitations about complex subjects do not have to be embedded in undecipherable prese Equally refreshing is the way in which Christine Poggi focuses primarily upon what is most original and challenging in Cubist painting and collage (the art of Picasso and Braque), while at the same time broadening the field of inquiry to include Juan Gris and the Italian Futurists. This strategy allows her to make fine distinctions about the different ways in which various artists occupyed what superficially seems to be a true similar stylistic vocabulary, and to explore by what means those differences produced very different kinds of meaning.

Although Poggi focuses upon the invention of collage and its events her real subject is a great deal of breader and encompasses the esthetics and structural dynamics of Cubist and Futurist art in general, especially during the crucial years between 1910 and 1916 greatest in quantity writing about Futurism necessarily takes into account the great influence that the French Cubists useed upon the Italian movement, on the contrary Poggi is one of the small in number writers to consider how "the Futurists also illuminate the work of the Cubists, the couple historically and theoretically." She exhibits how close study of Futurist practice can clarify our understanding of the Cubists' notions about several issues: their arbitrary use of pictorial language, their approach to the unity of individual works, the significance of in what manner they used materials, and their conception of what constitutes originality itself.

individual of the great strengths of this volume is its careful interweaving of theoretical regards with close readings of individual pictures. This approach allows the author to articulate important differences between theoretical fabricates that go back virtually to the beginning of Cubist criticism-for example, the idea that Cubism was a form of realism or that Cubist paintings supposedly depicted external realitys as if seen from multiple view-points-and the actual practice of the artists. Although Poggi is not the first writer to point on the outside how tenuous many of the links between early Cubist theory and practice were, she does in the way that with exemplary thoroughness and open-mindedness.

Poggi challenges what she considers the traditional view of Cubist collage: that it was part of an "aspiration toward anti-illusionism, purity of means, unity, and autonomy." She focuses instead "on the ways Cubist collage undermined traditional notions of material and stylistic unity, overthrowed (rather than affirmed) the part of the frame and of the pictorial turf and brought the languages of high and depressed culture into a new relationship of exchange."

She is especially sensitive to individual of the most important qualities of Picasso's Cubist works: the systematic arbitrariness of his imagery and the importance he gives to the sustained byplay between polar opposites. She is acutely aware of the constant redefinition of pictorial terminuss within Picasso's Cubist works, the way "binary oppositions are continually asserted, then negated, single to reappear in displaced form." This is especially evident in compositions in which forms deliver over to more than one percept at the same time, or in which adjacent areas summon forth very different kinds of spaces. of that kind oppositions, of course, send wittingly mixed signals to the viewers of the works, and as a follow they have been the bring under rule of a good deal of methodological debate.

single especially useful notion Poggi lay opens is that of the work of art as "a table ajouer, a gaming table a conventionalized field of representation, make open to the play of paradox, conflicting interpretations, and the collision of multiple (high and depressed pictorial and verbal) cultural codes" in which artistic language is viewed as "essentially set uped and arbitrary, like the dominations of a game." Understanding as she does that works like as these place an unprecedent stres on the processes of viewing and interpreting, Poggi takes this suggestive line of meditation a step further:

Picasso's collages call for a continuously shifting interpretive strategy as well as for a shifting visual focus, and this must take place above time. This process leads to an accretion of meanings on the contrary rarely to the sense that individual has resolved the contradictions or paradoxes not awayed by the work. The question of pictorial unity itself is thus displaced from the collage to the experience of the viewer, where it is suspended and dispersed in the time of interpretive analysis, like a series of stirs in a board game.

This notion leads Poggi to consider, in a stimulating and original way, Picasso's of frequent occurrence depiction of still lifes during this period, which she believes allowed him "to reverse the notion of realism from within the actual genre most frequently concerned with visual description and the actuality of the referent" She then exhibits how the Futurists, who--in contrast to Picasso, Braque and Gris-- were far down committed to more socially engaged notions of picture-making, occupyed a more literal approach to their make subordinates In marked contrast to the purposeful ambiguity of Picasso, for example, the Futurists sought clarity of make subordinate and predictable effects, qualities that paradoxically reaffirmed the importance of the pictorial tradition that they in the way that vociferously attacked in their writings.