Cubist Anachronisms: Ahistoricity, Cryptoformalism, and Business-as-Usual in New York

Abstract

New York's big modernist event in the fall of 1989 was the opening of the exhibition 'Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism' at the Museum of Modern Art, the swan song of retiring Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, William Rubin.1 Now was the culminating moment for Rubin to present his version of the formation of that foundational style of twentieth-century art, when two men heroically 'pioneered' Cubist form. This view of artmaking has long been associated with MoMA, which has stood for an unchanging canon of artists who singlehandedly (or, as in this celebrated case, collaboratively) created the greatest artistic achievements of modern art through personal 'genius' alone. Thus Rubin's narrowing the phenomenon of Cubism to the interaction of two men, despite the scores of artists and critics who participated in and theorized its manifestations, and his rigid focus on the biographies of Picasso and Braque, with little reference to social or historical issues, was thoroughly consonant with the version of modern art that unfolds in the display of MoMA's permanent collection.2 To celebrate this unprecedented two-man Cubist retrospective,3 in November 1989 Rubin assembled 25 Picasso and Braque scholars from France, Germany, England, Russia, and America in a fourday closed-door symposium, the proceedings of which were published last fall as a companion volume to his exhibition catalogue.4 A number of the essays raise issues quite new to Cubism studies, looking at ways Cubist art practices relate to French nationalist politics before the First World War, to issues of gender, to a plurality of cultural meanings and valences.5 Such complex historical considerations have been taken up only recently in this field, both encouraging in itself and appropriate as part of any dialogue on Cubism and its meanings.6 The pluralism of Rubin's concept, however, was largely defeated in the event itself. The discussions accompanying each paper disclose more succinctly than one would have thought possible the restricted terms of discourse at MoMA, its extraordinary deafness to voices in the street and beyond, and the remarkable comfort with which Cubism's procrustean bed can be shared by old-fashioned formalists like Rubin and cryptoformalists like Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. The symposium's closed doors beautifully symbolized the exclusion of art historians of broader expertise than 'Picasso and Braque', not to mention historians of other aspects of Modernism who might have disturbed the focus on Cubism as a dialogue of two.7 The event's reductive discourse elegantly demonstrated how Rubin could nod in the direction of cultural studies even as the discussion proceeded along the well-worn formalist path, albeit with some semiotic twists and turns. This discourse was thoroughly in tune with the sort of event Rubin wanted, if the introduction to his catalogue can be taken as evidence. There Rubin has appropriated and decontextualized the importance of anarchist theory for an understanding of Picasso and his circle,8 by assimilating his cultural politics into an evocation of artistic temperament, a politics of essentialism. Thus in Rubin's introduction Picasso is declared to be 'anarchic by instinct', and his 'subversion of Western art' in the service of