SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

134
Saga-Book of the Viking Society
old. This may have sprung from his subconscious, like
Joyce's Ulysses, but it was no formless mass but the
toughest composition in painting which the world had
seen up to that time: cubist painting. About the
memorable origin of cubism I shall quote Maurice Grosser
(p. 129) :
The Impressionists had not been particularly interested in
composition. But. . Cezanne needed a more dramatic device,
a more intense sort of pictorial organisation. He systematically
increased the size of distant objects and diminished the nearby
ones, to fit the knowledge of our motor senses. Most important,
he abandoned the usual classical perspective which depends on
the convention of one fixed unmoving eye. Thus Cezanne can
almost be said to be the Father of Modern Art. As early as
1909 Braque and Picasso had begun to imitate, explore and
further conventionalize Cezanne's conventions of drawing and
perspective. These painters were already interested in
stylistic analysis as can be seen from their pictures of 1906-07
that imitate the mannerisms of Negro sculpture. But these
African pictures have little of the real style, unity and beauty
that later cubist pictures possess. It was through Cezanne
that men became interested in solving the problem of
composition by methods of analysis and abstraction.
'Composition', however, is perhaps too simple a word for what
these painters were doing. To speak more exactly, their
subject matter was art itself, - how pictures are built. Their
aim was to isolate the essential qualities of character and of
structure in a picture which makes it a work of art. What is it,
independent of the idea a picture communicates, regardless of
the story it tells, purely through the balance of its lines and
masses, through its shapes abstracted from any meaning, what
makes the picture interesting to look at and makes us continue
to find it interesting? What is it that makes a simple dolphin
inscribed on a bronze discus as moving to us and as memorable
as the most beautiful face? This, essentially, is the problem of
composition.
Most certainly the early cubist still-lifes of Picasso and
Braque cannot be regarded very seriously as attempts to depict
multiple perspective in their half-legible objects - the folded
newspaper, the bottle, the goblet, the guitar, the pipe and the
package of Virginia tobacco on a table top. They are rather
the use of these conventional objects for the purpose of making
pictures whose subject matter is the analysis of composition.
Here I venture to say, by way of comparison, that one
could hardly find in the realm of word-composition