Mediterranean Cubisms: Decoration, Classicism, Picasso and Professionalism

‘A working countryside is hardly ever a landscape’, Raymond Williams observed fifty years ago in his book The Country and the City; for to perceive it as such is to have both the leisure and the distance from it, to aestheticize it. This essay argues that, similarly, art practices have too often been understood ‘from the outside in’: that in Cubist representations of the Mediterranean, the picturesque quality of the Riviera insinuated itself—indeed that that the influence of the decorative was so far- reaching in the inter- World War years that it co- opted avant-gardism itself, and that the Riviera was one of its vehicles for doing so

Radical art and the formation of the avant-garde

The book, which I am in the process of writing (for a deadline of the end of 2018) presents a comparative history of the dynamics of the emergence and consolidation of an artistic avant-garde formation in the decades before the First World War, first in Paris (then the acknowledged centre of modern art) and subsequently in London (one of its 'peripheral' cities in this respect). It offers a new theoretical framework for understanding the cultural and social role and significance of this avant-garde, the relation between artistic and other cultural avant-gardes, as well as between politico-economic and cultural hegemonies. It also offers a new methodology, grounded in historical materialism, for the analysis of the avant-gardes, as a model for further studies in this field

The transnational hierarchies and networks of the artistic avant-garde ca. 1885-1915

‘Avant-garde’ is a concept, and ‘the avant-garde’ has a history, which have both functioned as among the primary means not only of disseminating the cultural paradigm of ‘modernism’, of determining its qualities and assessing its achievements, but also of producing the asymmetries of cultural power with which this book is concerned. Yet for most of its existence the historiography of modern art has sorely lacked analysis of the concept or the history of one of its key terms, that of ‘the avant-garde’. This chapter offers such an analysis. It discusses the avant-garde as a (socio-cultural) formation, and assesses the changing relations between the nodes of the network that this process had established by the start of the first world war. The first part analyses the character and dynamic of this with reference to the emergence and consolidation of the Parisian artistic avant-garde, and suggests how the factors that made Paris the ‘artistic centre of the West’ also contributed to this being the first such formation to appear in Europe. The second part explores the relations between the avant-garde of Paris, as the central site of modernist art practice, and that of London as one ‘peripheral,’ satellite of it, in the decade before 1914, and assesses the character of this peripherality. The third part explores the role of cubist painting, its assimilation as the lingua franca of modernism by avant-garde artists across Europe in the five years from 1910, and its role in first consolidating, and then initiating the dismantling of, the ‘centre-periphery’ character of the pan-European avant-garde network as a whole

Cubisme et cubismes

The essay draws on the author’s specialist expertise in the history and theories of the full spectrum of positions adopted by artists within the movement, and on current research into the structure and character of the Parisian avant-garde, as this formation became consolidated in the pre-First World War decade, to a considerable extent as a consequence of the activities and influence of the Cubist movement. The essay’s research question is ‘what was the spread of Cubism’s concerns, and how did the several orientations within it differ, and why?’. Its answers are based partly on research for the author’s PhD (Courtauld Institute, 1985) and published since, in three books and numerous articles, and partly on his new and current research and writing on the emergence and professional consolidation of the Parisian artistic avant-garde. The research for all of this was largely library- and archive-based, in libraries in Paris, New York and London. It is intended that the essay will further the overarching objective of the exhibition, which is to provoke a revised understanding of Cubism in Paris, challenging the predominance of a now-outdated and too-exclusive focus on ‘gallery’ Cubism (the Cubism of Picasso, Braque, and other artists of the ‘stable’ of gallerist Kahnweiler) with a presentation of the many different ideas that the ‘salon’ Cubist wing of the movement presented, in the work, among others, of Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Léger, Duchamp, Gleizes and Metzinger. Beyond this, it breaks important new ground in its characterisation of the avant-garde as an ‘alternative profession’ that challenged the liberal-bourgeois professionalism of the artistic mainstream