Original subtitles

it was the turn of the 20th century and

the disciplines of art and film were

about to converge in a way that would

change our perception of the world

forever if still photography had already

had a profound effect on mid 19th

century artists especially MANET what

influence would Motion Pictures have on

the next generation by 1893 Edison's

Kinetoscope was an international

sensation but only one person at a time

could view this miniature world of

movement

Edison's ultimate objective was to do

for the eye what his photograph had done

for the ear but in 1895 there would be

the Lumiere brothers in Paris advancing

Edison's technology and introducing the

cinematograph projecting motion pictures

it was one of a range of remarkable new

technologies including aviation that

promised the annihilation of time and

space as it was known

[Music]

we tend to think of cubism more in terms

of geometry and structure the truth is

that it is a technological art it's

involved with what we've come to know is

the Industrial Revolution and we've

forgotten the revolution part of it it

really was a revolution in how people

thought of themselves not just in terms

of technology but how technology changed

people themselves their whole view of

their world and of their relation to it

and Picasso and Braque were born into

this world

[Music]

Picasso comes from a family of painters

his father was a teacher of drawing at

the academy in Madrid at a certain point

he took his brushes and gave them to his

son surrendering the tradition to him

brach also came from a family in which

there were painters his family business

was the decoration business in Lahab but

his father was an amateur fine art

painter in his spare time and encouraged

his son to follow in the family business

but also to paint in his spare time and

finally Brock made the choice to be a

painter rather than a decorator there's

a certain way that in the arts generally

how to portray emotion basically through

still media like painting or drawing or

sculpture had always been an issue

photography when it appeared in the 19th

century had to be very still because it

had a very long exposure time but

starting around the 1880s and into the

1890s still photography began to become

instantaneous photography

you could see something with the

photograph but you can't see with your

naked eye and the idea that if you could

get instantaneous exposures you could

make motion pictures began to occur to

people like my bridge and moire but

immediately people thought well if you

can do that you could also not just

analyze motion but synthesize it

recreate it really record a moment

[Music]

when Casso was 15 years old he saw his

first films it was 1896 barcelona he

went to a screening in a place called

the salad of polio

there was one film in particular that

struck him and it was the charge of the

17th French curacy X and Picasso was

sharing his first studio with his friend

pilaris he went back to that studio and

made of painting that drew on that

charge of these French soldiers but

combined it with a painting source by

Maria Fortuna and he became an instant

scene in file and he and his friends

went to the cinema over and over again

in the program that because I saw there

were 12 or 13 films and the apparatus

could be seen in the room so one could

see how this mechanism operated right

from the beginning one could see what

the film looked like one could hear the

clicking and the whirring of the

mechanism turning over and so it had a

kind of animal quality that people

responded to for conservative

estheticians this idea was one of the

things that condemned cinema it could

never be an art form it was simply a

machine film of course is motion

pictures and that's so obvious that I

think we very often don't think about

how extraordinary it had to be or the

audience is seeing them for the first

time not just for the technical novelty

you know but suddenly they're seeing

motion pictures but literally for the

possibility of recording motion itself

you're actually preserving time in its

flight time in its progression and

motion itself particularly of the human

body but also of natural phenomenon

waves the leaves in the trees which

artists had often referred to either in

poetry or in painting but had never

literally captured

film could do that and that is more than

just a normal recording function it is

opening up a whole new way of seeing and

a whole new vision

you

one of the things that I really like

about the experience in the early films

is it it's a lot like when somebody has

a camera for the first time has the

ability to take a picture for the first

time without thinking about it they walk

around and they take a picture of that

oh that's what take a picture of that

you know and I'll take a picture of that

they find something that is just up a

contrast or or just something different

and they take a picture of that and the

same thing you know in some of the early

movies the guy said wow I can take a

picture of that and so you got a bunch

of guys walking around or you got people

doing them very simple basic human kinds

of things that these guys got a chance

to see for the first time and record for

the first time he also got a chance to

relive time in a way that hadn't existed

before and as far as I'm concerned right

a really exciting thing they got a

chance to monkey with it and so that you

can see the first guys who figured out

about how to do some of these things

they said that this is this is so neat I

can speed up time oh gee if I wind the

camera make it go slower I get this

turkey jerky motion that becomes more

hysterical and kind of peculiar and

launches into a kind of another fantasy

realm then some other bright spot

figured out you know since all the film

was double perf in those days I can take

the film and I can make it run upside

down and backwards and I can have time

go backwards I mean can you imagine how

it seems to me remarkable that idea was

I mean remarkable enough to turn me on

like all these years later so I still do

it sometimes with a lot of screens and

overlapping sound

[Music]

from earliest surviving drawings we have

we know that Picasso was intoxicated

with all forms of popular culture around

and this is a lifelong obsession a

lifelong love

he loved the Tarot machia the bullfight

he came from a world awash in visual

signs and visually coded meanings the

most passionate meanings the Eucharist

the symbols of the mass but he also came

from a place in Malaga

where without saying a word you could

glare it but by how you held your fan

you could say meet me on the balcony

it's free and in fact there was a very

elaborately coded language of fans in

fact there were multiple language of

fans and in his cubist works Picasso at

and before as well I mean for years

Picasso includes images of fans but in

some works the body parts actually

become folded like a fan that knows the

ridges under the eye the cheek the

forehead and then and some of the images

which also so deeply evoke the handheld

movie cameras a diaphanous wispy soft

monochrome of the very first cinema

they also evoke the fluttering of the

fan

for centuries there had been tremendous

interest in optics and perspective and

it turns out that these interests were

superseded and teaching at large and yet

you see in this little elementary school

textbooks she was fascinated and kept

nine different points of view he loved

bringing in letters and numbers and

musical notes all issues which would

become so central to cubism and these

only surface when he comes to the

enabling environment of Paris

Picasso first comes to Paris in 1900

he's going to the Exposition Universelle

which is an enormous kind of World's

Fair one of the things that brings him

as he has a small painting in an

exhibition of Spanish art

at the fair the Lumiere brothers had a

huge screen 15 by 27 meters and on it

they projected some of those same films

that because I had seen initially the

other thing that because I would have

seen it the Exposition Universelle was

Loie fuller the American dancer who was

very well known in Paris

Loie fuller was an import from Chicago

actually she'd had a little success in

the United States but she was brought to

Paris in 1893 to be at the folly

brassiere and she introduced this dance

that she had already pioneered in the

United States and gotten some attention

with which he called the serpentine

dance

[Music]

instead of exiting footwork it accented

form in the shape of these enormous

billowing cloths so you've got a dance

that's totally thought about almost as a

work of changing sculpture mobile

sculpture

she had stage assistants bathing her in

constantly changing light a spectacle

that is like nothing that anyone had

ever seen Loie fuller set a patent solo

day solo solo be do boo Tebow me Soho da

itis ago says hijo o TiVo ah voila

enumerable maksakov

generally dances were extremely popular

subject matter for early cinema but the

serpentine dance was undoubtedly the

most popular in every country where

somebody was operating a camera they got

someone often not as skilled was fuller

but who could manipulate the cloth and

could give this kind of spectacle motion

in this new recording but what about the

color there was not yet the possibility

of color cinematography but people came

up with a brilliant solution

which is that they actually would tint

the film itself they were able to give

again that sense of a constant

metamorphosis of color people who are

involved with organizing

the exposition understood that they were

marking a moment of self conscious

transformation and change a moment where

the modern was entering into daily life

and that this involved technology and it

involved art and bridging the two was

the idea of movement many things of the

1900 exposition marked this Fuller and

the Lumiere's

but also the sense of the new art the

sense of the new technology new aspects

of the exposition the moving sidewalk

for instance which circled around the

exhibition

not only were you moving through the

exposition but you had a mobile view of

the exhibitions which as though

everything was in motion

[Music]

but I could never explain about cubist

paintings was that there was a thinness

to the illusion that didn't relate to

the flatness of modernism and there was

a way that the light sources sort of

interrupted the edges of the painting or

the or the way the painting sort of

thinned out at the edges which now I see

in conjunction with film has more to do

with the thinness of a cinematic

projection which is a light projection

and also that there's a kind of

extraneous light source in cubism and

that is almost as though a door had been

opened during a darkroom projection and

sort of splattered an interruption of

light on to the surface and I had never

really thought about it in those terms

before but I was introduced to cubism

much later than I was introduced to film

so a lot of the inspiration in my work

in terms of the look of it has more to

do with sort of the filmic aspects than

it does with the formalist art modernist

concerns anyway what film does is trying

to show you a believable illusion that

you just go into you don't break it down

in terms of its construct what you do is

you see a dramatic moment in which two

people are talking you know there's a

story going on it cetera and in that way

that relates to what I my ambition is in

my world

when I was in my 20s I used to go to the

movies a lot and I'd watch Kurosawa's

film of the Seven Samurai and you see

these guys riding on horses in the rain

and in the mud and you've seen this on a

giant screen you think well how does

painting compete with this and you

realize or I realized that what I liked

about painting is that painting was

still and that the movies were moving

and that was good for the movies but I

like the fact that paintings were static

now that doesn't mean that the

combination or the syntax the dialectic

of what's going on inside of the

painting can't generate something

outside of it that is moving and that's

really what happens the simultaneous

quality I mean when you look at a

painting you get everything immediately

the beginning the middle and the end and

then you get the beginning in the middle

and the end again the process of time

the temporal quality of that is that the

time spent looking when you're watching

a movie you have to wait until it's over

to kind of get the full I guess resolved

object that you're going to digest

afterwards you start looking at these

films in the context of these paintings

and then you start to look at even the

marks on the film marks that have

nothing to do with the images that are

in the film you start to realize that

you're looking at everything and all of

it has meaning and you start dissecting

what you're looking at and that

essentially is what cubism is people

were dissecting how they were seeing so

the reason why there's no color in these

paintings it's because they're sitting

in a movie theater and they're sitting

in the dark and the thing that I've

always loved about going to the movies

is you know you get in the dark and just

as you start to watch the movie there is

this kind of your envelop by this

non-color or the sense of floating

then you can leave your body

[Music]

the first time I really saw some of the

mayonnaise films and new melea's was a

magician in very very early films we saw

a few on television but they were very

badly presented but I saw a few in

history of film class that Tehama Nugent

my teacher gave at Washington Square

College and motion picture department

1960 this film is made up in the case of

mayonnaise you say well it's one angle

usually but something to the nature the

way shoots it and the size of the frame

and also the the tricks that are used

within the frame and so during that time

especially when they started to invent

cinematic language as they were going

along really I mean they had to very

often they thought if they moved the

camera in you know the old story that

the exhibitors were saying people won't

know they won't understand they won't

know that that face belongs to the

person who had just been in a wide shot

but they had to take a chance on it and

try it all of them did I find though

that ultimately you know in an odd way

and this is what's so interesting about

the film itself and that's why I'm

having a difficult time making the

transition to digital I don't understand

the ones in the zeros I understand the

frame I understand the perforations I

could see the celluloid I could taste it

I know it and I see the frame line and

the frame line and perforations become

part of the film for me the nature of

the film there's something that happens

psychologically with those perforations

and those frames are going through the

interlock motor on being a projector and

ultimately you know does the film exist

at all it doesn't it exists only in your

mind

by these images that are being projected

and light being refracted in different

ways and if that light changes by the

way you can see the same film in two

different projection systems or two

different projection situations and it's

a different movie

so it's such an ephemeral art form that

it's always surprising and unique yes

for me the Lumiere films some people say

well it's just a shot of a train coming

into a station that angle has to be

chosen you had to make a creative choice

as to where to place that camera so that

it stays with you 100 a hundred fifty

years later it still has impact but the

maze is like and the early Edison films

especially the Frankenstein give me an

impression of them

feeling them when I was young when I

went to see films when I could escape

into a film from wherever I was and go

up there in the screen and live in the

film if I connected with it but really

what you're living unless it's a very

hardcore straight narrative picture

you're living a dream

if photographing the dreams and I think

it's a very interesting thing how you

can actually have a machine create

something which is very complex to

describe in language literary language

it's imagery it's how you create

something that has an ephemeral nature

that is an impression with this

equipment which is very very physical

you know now in the departed and the

last page of the script after one of the

main characters is killed the writer

William Monahan wrote a phrase and then

a strange thing happens a rat comes out

okay when I went to shoot it the

translation the rat was fairly easy to

put in the frame we had a trained rat

the image of the man who was shot that's

fairly easy I had a sense of where the

camera was gonna be I knew what I wanted

to do but the problem was the phrase and

then a strange thing happened how do you

convey that on film it has to be through

the angle that you're using it has to be

through a lens you use a lens a very

physical very concrete element it has to

be the lighting and has tonight were

creating these strange things they were

making these strange things happen on

film they were already dealing with this

problem that I got caught up short with

in a year ago on film on the set and in

the editing room I tried many different

ways to create that quote strange thing

happening but haze did it

[Music]

Loie forms the link from film to

painting for Picasso she is what puts

the Demoiselles d'Avignon into movement

with the motion of the drapes the

demoiselle are usually thought of as

modeled on iberian statues they're

thought of as static in fact the

Demoiselles d'Avignon

is not static this is a case of arrested

motion

there were also films of the strongman

Eugen Sando Sando had been photographed

by Muybridge he was then filmed by

Edison his act to avoid a whole act he

too became a link for Picasso to his

paintings of nineteen seven nineteen

eight and here we have to revert also to

milk yes

one of Melges favorite tricks was to cut

apart bodies and rearranging them two

dimensional forms suddenly transform

into three-dimensional forms and that

happens in the day Marcel Divino the day

Moselle is

Picasso's break out picture it's his

declaration of his taking over the

mastery of art it's intentional it was

meant to provoke and in fact when brock

came to see it for the first time he was

provoked bite he found it very

unpleasant people found the painting

very very unpleasant one of the things

that's so unsettling about the picture

is that it's mediating between stasis

and movement it's the negotiation

between the interests of painting and

this new apparatus that's taken over

vision this is an apparatus that can go

backwards and forwards in time it can do

anything and Braque and Picasso are in

competition with history and they want

to take over this painting is

additionally described in terms of

seasons bathers and indeed saison was a

great presence on the scene and was the

impetus for Picasso to begin this

painting the other painting that Picasso

has in view and is in competition with

is mayonnaise - a nurse or lab so that

there's the history of art embedded in

this painting but it's rerun it's being

filmed through this deus ex machina the

cinematograph which is now intervening

and allowing Braque and Picasso to

repeat to restructure vision according

to modern principles

the rise of the cinema as a popular

entertainment form is really quite

extraordinary when it was born I'm gonna

arrive in culture it was first

integrated into the entertainment

landscape it was already existing which

was the Catholic Kosair for example in

entertainments form of live performance

of singing joke-telling live acts called

the review but it was also very quickly

incorporated into the circuses which was

if you want to think about it was the

first tradition of distribution

we see the cinema also entering into

spaces like the department store the

doof IL department store was a central

place where people could before 1983 see

some of the earliest films by nineteen

oh six or seven cinemas actually

replacing live acts and what we see too

is a sort of crisis in the culture of

the catechol sir a crisis that's

basically being felt by the actors and

performers who are realizing that the

cinema is replacing them going to the

cinema during this period is very much a

neighborhood affair

we've got cinemas that are cropping up

in every single neighborhood in Paris a

kind of explosion in number of cinema

houses and so by 1913 we have a

completely independent cinema culture

when Picasso and Braque went to the

movies they were going into this theater

that was a very mixed space for classes

for men and women this is a new spatial

environment

this was an unknown environment a bit

body bit risque a space where people

could be a bit freer of social

constraints this is a culture of people

who are discovering the cinema as a

social event as something that's also

become an intellectual aesthetic topic

because by 1913 - we have also a

narrative tradition which is finally

articulating itself for the first time

in a very full way we have the artists

discovering the first serial films but

Louie fahadh and the Phantom a series

that became extremely important to the

avant-garde because it represented a

kind of fantastic Korean underworld it

represented the cinemas links with

popular literature

and we have the first indications of a

real silica culture when we have Mexico

and Epling they're creating a fan club

called the Friends of fan Tomas

well I mean the idea that they create

this society to honor this criminal who

is also a master of disguises and of

course Picasso all his life was

fascinated with disguises he was

fascinated with explicitly naming

something and then renaming it and then

renaming it again turned out virtually

everyone in picasso circle renamed

themselves rebaptised themselves

recreated themselves in every imaginable

way

[Music]

[Music]

my affair with Picasso began when I was

about 18 or 19 in high school and I made

a couple of cubist drawings and then

mailed them to Rutgers and I got a

scholarship so I owe him big you know

when I see what because it's doing

especially around the time of nineteen

or nine or something

she looks like an anatomist you know a

doctor of anatomy who opens up his brain

there's all this gray and brown matter

it's as if this segment shows oh there's

an apple there this segment has a nipple

and then simply by assembling them did

you get the painting these figures tend

to be single figures whereas before he

was two people talking to each other and

it's almost as if he's talking to them

it's if there's just him Picasso or

Brock and then there's the figure that

he's building and there's nothing else

so the communication is very direct open

and densely mysterious there's a huge

amount of caricature involved now

caricature was a big deal in 19th

century France they maybe other

countries too but with him it's both

graphic caricature as well as character

that existed in early films as well as

later films

I see his port is having expressions

that are characteristic but also sort of

drowned in mood a certain kind of mood

and it's not French mood we know he

comes from Spain so this is dark Spanish

element whereas caricature itself tends

to be just funny and a little bit good

task but because of area this other

thing which is it's a real feeling it's

like a real smell real texture

in 1907 it was Apollinaire who

introduced prague to Picasso and it's

interesting to know that it was a poet

who introduced the two painters they

early on Apollinaire was named by

picasso nap after PBC because who lived

in the bottle of wine and there were

many hordes who visited him Brock was

more introvert he liked to play music

but instead at home he was not

interested to create a coterie around

him with because oh it just happened

Brock had been very much interested in

the vault the wild beasts but had moved

on by being interested so much in his

own to a more formal simplification of

landscape those paintings he offered to

be part of the salon and the paintings

were refused Kahnweiler dealer said I

will show your landscapes and he has a

planarian to write the introduction his

compositions have the harmony in

plenitude we were waiting for

he no longer owes anything to his

surroundings Georges Braque knows no

rest and every one of his paintings

commemorates an effort that no one

before has yet attempted it was later on

that Brock said to Dora for yay

the balls had come to a similar form of

vocabulary and after that we began to

work nearly as one man we were two

mountain climbers held together by a

rope SATA and the tipper come luck all

day on one tiny knot one painting would

be finished as because I said unless

Fogg had seen it and not one painting of

Prague would be finished

unless because I had seen it Brock said

they spoke with each other nearly in

code he says if you would listen to our

talks

you wouldn't understand it it was only

understandable for the two of us and in

retrospect we have nothing to say it all

went into our paintings as a sculptor I

of course love those paintings to me

they are very sculptural Brock is more

painfully he keeps a small pubes more

open there is more possibility to fill

in the ambiguity with because of its

heart and faceted and no transition and

it's so daring to me

you

[Music]

and you do this you know just

conversation that poets and artists

would have well so-and-so did this can

this be done in this medium and I think

that exchange was a very fruitful for

the poets and the artists it got them to

think about language friendly the notion

of just juxtaposing one being against

another without the kind of narrative

continuity that had become to be

expected and discursive 19th century

poetry and I think the artist got a huge

amount because they were listening to

these poets talked about like what's

what about this what about that let's go

to the movie let's go see your film

that's wonderful about the film's I

think is that they're hokey and real at

the same time and I think that the hope

enos of the stage set and the realness

of these people moving through space is

something they saw through that I think

instantly that they didn't see it as a

fiction I mean they started as a fiction

in which real things were moved around

you see how the Machine operates how the

magician plays the trick and somehow in

film I feel like the magician reveals

himself or herself in some way

physically the stage set somehow

everything seems fake and real at the

same time and I think that's something

that didn't exist previously in quite

the same way and I think that's

something that the Cubist Scott

you

[Music]

which is transformed which is one of the

key aspects of film I think it's related

to Cuba's imagery because of the

conceptual foundation of cubism I think

the closest relationship early film with

cubism is at the conceptual level it is

the idea the idea of a simple object

transforming uniting with a human

subject and then the literal aspect of

just simply a phone the fold of the

paper a fold of a shape also the simple

camera tilt up tilt down or go off

screen to another location very very

simple devices that make the point to

tell something very simple but to tell

in a complex way also the fact that the

accordion a musical instruments were

important to the Cubist's Brock himself

being an accordion is whether or not

they saw this film the fact that it is

the subject of an early film and also

this is the sense of destroying

tradition when early films were first

shown they were not highly accepted by

upper middle class and either were not

considered a legitimate art and there is

the reference i think undoubtedly to the

men a painting this clash of the vulgar

popular with the classical I mean in

many ways the film does take traditional

art forms and makes a little pun of it

that would be something very appealing

to the Cubist

cinema was always very first because

it's hard very much part of his life and

I think one of the effects that he he

took consciously took was the close-up

and Sumatra Picasso's work is to do with

gigantism he rarely wanted to make the

image as big as possible he had all

kinds of different ways of doing this

largely by cutting the head off short

and cramming the figure in for instance

of the Prague self-portrait is so

crammed in and is so big that eyes are

so enormous it looks exactly like

self-portrait an early movie there were

lots of stories about going to the

movies I mean but just before 1914 and

honored the war his great friend Sarah

Farah seems to be a great friend once

because they would pinched her his

girlfriend here at not good but Saoirse

around the Baroness judging and kept as

it were a box a special box in Lille at

their local movie house and people could

drift in and out I mean hip friends of

his and they all had a sort of card they

could go in and sit there for a bit and

he preferred I think unpretentious films

I don't think he was all too keen on

what we might call art films he loved

slapstick comedies he was a great

admirer of Chaplin

and of course he adored cowboy movies

and Braque and Picasso they loved seeing

each other as cowboys oxes and this was

all sort of part of the game of life I

mean it was the way that film at that

time was Scott encroaching on life and

make taking up a greater part in

people's lives and the references to

film in general conversation as well as

in his work

for all their closeness Picasso and

Braque I mean they were closer than any

two other painters of 20th century they

were competitive and I lived for many

years in France with Douglas Cooper who

had the greatest collection private

collection of cubist painting drawings

sculpture everything else and one of the

most treasured things in this collection

was the first puppy a collie ever done

the one that bracketed behind Picasso's

back in September 1912 and Picasso is to

come and come to the house quite a lot

because if we were near bullfighting

country and after bullfights we'd give

it dinner and he'd come and go round the

paintings with him and one day he looked

again on again rather ferociously at the

the brat collage which we know that the

papers in the collage Brock had found in

a wallpaper shop in Avignon and so

Picasso said you know I think on my way

back I'll get stopped at the wallpaper

shop and buy some more of that paper and

show Brock how I'd I would have done it

[Music]

Cubism doesn't have a manifesto and part

of its intensity part of the reason why

it remains interesting to us is that it

doesn't have a manifesto that it's a

series of openings out on to new kinds

of experience on to new kinds of art

we've learned over the years to read

those headlines in Cuba's pictures not

just as arbitrary choices but as

meaningful choices our future is in the

air quite literally as part of the

sloganeering of the painting we can talk

about cubism in flight in a very

meaningful way cubism and the Wright

brothers cubism and the idea of Aviation

sense their love for flight in their

nicknaming each other Orville and Wilbur

and we learned over the years to

understand the Cubist jokes modulae

taking up a popular song was an

arbitrary and involved actually being

open to popular music in the movies a

very powerful model up just how much

distortion changes a viewpoint changes

of ideas back and forth between titles

and images all of those things suddenly

give you a new model of what a work of

art can be and I think that it's that

sense of a new rhythm for painting that

you feel very strongly in collage and I

think that the deepest resemblances

between what Picasso and Braque were

doing what the first filmmakers we're

doing comes in that sense of permissions

given old restrictions removed

possibilities opened

I very much liked at the Palio shesha a

rather nice movie that depicted the

adventure easy I don't seem to Marcel I

need to teach because who really dare i

or don't I well take courage and Trust

in the grace of God now finding us

agility cinemas path a touched us very

much

it is the unfortunate adventure with the

pints postage stamps postcards with

style playing cards we candelabra

letting the man who projects a film

today plays the role that the Joker did

in the Georges Braque knows no rest and

every one of his Picasso studies an

object like a surgeon dissect the

cadaver the most philosophical the most

abstract of all cubist art critics most

movies why not and if you read his work

he frames it in terms of conti frames it

in terms of abstraction to a degree that

not only would you never know the cinema

had ever been invented It was as though

Cuba's pictures didn't exist as physical

objects as pure abstraction and yet it

turned out he was the first sustained

film critic he loved the cinema now this

at first was such a complete aberration

because cubism depended absolutely on a

belief that you had to distance art from

the mesas that you rejected nature it's

tainted materialism the fact that it was

just a bourgeois empty form of artistic

practice and so most Cuba's critics

hated cinema because they hated

photography because it was pneumatic at

reproduce nature and so they were

consistent they were intellectually pure

in the sense but there were a few who

allowed themselves to love cinema

because the chasm seemed so profound it

was as though there was a sort of loose

world that they could love and then

there was art with a capital A

then he could go slumming with gusto in

the cinema and in fact ray now talks

about how the cinemas were dark and

people would be feeling each other up

and smooching and drinking and smoking

and he talked about his raucous raunchy

disjunctions that are such kindred

spirits to cubism but he obviously was

completely oblivious that he was

responding to a similar Sensibility and

there's even more I mean the first

extended discussion of cinema was back I

made a good mom who was a great

symbolist and and he talks about how he

was responding to in a split second you

could be in this country in that country

and a second later you've moved from a

desert to the ocean and in the

archetypal definition in 1912 by Glenn

messenger in effect they characterized

cubism and cinematic terms and didn't

realize it so it's a really fascinating

sense that within the culture there were

all kinds of convergences and yet many

people simply weren't aware because they

were so programmed that there was as

apocalyptic break between cinema and art

with a capital A

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one of the things I love about these

paintings is how the how the color has

just been sucked out of it it's almost

like taking a color television and

turning the color down maybe I'm not

sure what they were thinking but in my

case I just didn't want to depend on

color I didn't want to depend on color

to carry the painting I wanted the

structure and the information to be you

know something that to depend upon the

kind of entertainment value of color

that is it if you don't like anything

else you're looking at at least you're

looking at some beautiful color and and

and I think also there is in limitation

an ability to focus on the other issues

because you've gotten color out of there

can you still make a painting that's

interesting the thing that I recognize

the most and felt a kind of personal

urgency with was the extreme

artificiality of cubism it was not about

space it was not about atmosphere was

not about the way we see things in

nature it's highly compressed

insistently flat you are always aware

that you're looking at distribution of

colored dirt on a flat surface and then

emerging out of that in a fractured and

totally unrealistic way pieces of

imagery that begin to coalesce in your

mind and that whole notion of making an

image is something that I've been

involved with in a different way I want

the viewer always to be aware of the

fact that it is as artificial as it is

real and it's the tension between the

artificiality and the reality that makes

the difference you know style is

embedded in process that's where the

rubber meets the road in painting you

have the thought process of the artist

and and that's

that's a contemporary experience for you

it's like you're watching it happen in

front of your very eyes

you can deconstruct it and then

construct it back again and in that

process it's yours it's your experience

one of the things it's extremely

important to think about it's not only

the way that this new modern

technological constantly changing

environment with something that Braque

and Picasso were responding to but that

their their paintings

capture it I'm not talking about a

literal reproduction but the fact that

the paintings operate like films if you

look at them statically I don't think

they work but if you look at them as

progressing as moving as creating their

own interplay between the various

elements and facets suddenly all that

breaking up into individual elements and

variations makes sense now would they

have done that if film had never existed

it's possible but the important thing is

film did exist and film was something

that they were seizing upon as both

something they could learn from and to

put it bluntly something they could

teach something too

one of the things that I think makes

cubism in the simplest sense such a

beautiful moment in the history not just

of Western art but a history of the

Western imagination is its ability to

make us feel deeply the promise of the

new that the possibilities that are

right there in front of us in flight in

the newspaper in the caricature journal

in the movies that those things aren't a

threat to high culture those things

aren't things that mark the end of

artistic originality but that they can

be incredibly powerful stimulants

incredibly powerful resources for art

for painting for the oldest of forms to

go on in to renew itself

cubism has always been more seen in the

light of Picasso than of Brock and I

feel that that early period was a period

where they hardly could be disentangle

the question I asked myself was how is

it possible when two artists worked so

intensely together that is only possible

for a short period of time that can

never continue forever and I know it

because I work together with Klaus

Oldenburg and we have moments where it

is very hard for us to work together

there is a will to do it but there is

something else and that something else

is so beautifully expressed in this idea

of two mountain climbers because you

don't have a rope holding you while you

are scaling a mountain when there is no

danger and you feel that danger there's

always danger between these two and one

waits till the other has gone to Paris

in order to do something that will be a

challenge and then the first world war

broke the spell it was over

what happens afterwards is something

that can never put together that moment

of excitement that these two artists had

and as because who said it was our

individual characters that had to

express themselves because there were no

more discoveries to be made Picasso and

Braque paintings of 1907 to 1914 are the

documents that tell the story of what

these two adventurers made of this

phenomenon what they took with them as a

catalytic agent to tear down the

conventions of representation cubism was

not a style it was a revolution that

instigated a profoundly radical change

of artistic form in fact a radical

change in vision itself

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