On the "Multiple Viewpoint" Theory of Early Modern Art

Abstract

We need not vex ourselves over the reasons why certain misunderstandings persist in print despite tireless efforts of the expert to prevent their recurrence. Examples are unending. Consider that whenever a journalist uses the term to mean someone afflicted with a dual personality disorder, editors are inundated with letters from psychologists explaining that the personality of the schizophrenic is split, not in twain but away from reality. These corrections have the same effect as sprinklings of water upon Gibraltar. A less familiar error, perhaps, is one that has been made for over sixty years by detective story writers whose only experience of the criminal world is through books. In Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon (1929), when Sam Spade refers to young, pistol-packing Wilmer as a gunsel, he is using prison argot accurately, if esoterically, to describe the homosexual lover of an older inmate; the readers got it wrong, of course, and so many generations of hard-boiled novelists have used it to mean a gunman that usage has made it so for lexicographers. It's an archaic term and, so, a harmless misinterpretation. But most of us will understand how much mischief has been done by taking evolutionary theory in vain with survival of the fittest misinterpretations of Darwin's theory of natural selection. There's no end to this kind of thing. And, of course, aesthetic theory and art criticism are by no means immune. One prominent example can be found in the peculiarly tenacious conviction that cubist art from Paul Cezanne through Picasso and Braque derived from a hermetic geometry that modifies the visible world in somewhat the same way scientific perspective had given unity to Renaissance vision. It's a rather queer notion, for the supposed analogy lies in the contradictions; thus, where Brunelleschi's space was monocular, his observer fixed in space, and objects projected as measurements among points in a forest of orthogonals, cubistic space is said to have been dependent upon ideally geometric solids which are then fragmented by the shifting viewpoint of a moving observer. If this sounds plausible, it can only be because of its familiarity. It is a perennial cliche of critical writing, yet those who have some special knowledge of cubism reject the description the cliche depends upon, as will be shown in the course of this paper. An endnote will give just a few of some more recent uses of cubism as a literary analogy.' Please understand, however, that I am not implying the writers are wanting in judgment except to the extent that they have employed a false description of a phase of modern art. Consider for the moment just the that some consummate geometry is the basis of cubist form. Until recently, virtually everyone who talked about Cezanne remarked, as did John Canaday, upon his idea that all forms could be reduced to geometrical ones such as cylinders, cubes, spheres, and cones.2 This is an that is not only wrong, but demonstrably wrong. That is, it is not just a matter of opinion but can, in fact, be proven false. After all, this theory of Cezanne's art cannot be applied to actual works without doing violence to common sense. Anyone comparing a still life by, say, Jean Baptiste Chardin with nearly any by the mature Cezanne would surely have to confess that the objects in the former more nearly express the fundamental geometry of solids than does the irregular choppiness typifying the latter. This should be perfectly obvious to anyone. It is to art historian Theodore Reff.3 It is to the foremost au-