THE MOST DIFFICULT PAINTING IN THE WORLD

PABLO PICASSO, STILL LIFE WITH GLASS AND LEMON, 1910

(Cincinnati Art Museum)

The most difficult painting in the world hangs in an art museum on a hill overlooking Cincinnati, Ohio, a city better-known for racial tension, right-wing hypocrisy and former mayor Jerry Springer than for its few, underappreciated masterpieces of art. I drove to Cincinnati, made my way up the steep, curving road to the top of Mt. Adams and went directly to a gallery at the back of the museum to spend a few hours in front of Picasso’s Still Life with Glass and Lemon. Painted in 1910 during the artist’s summer in the Spanish coastal town of Cadaques, it is the most difficult major work from the so-called ‘hermetic’ phase of Cubism, a movement that produced the most radical and challenging paintings in the history of Western art. The major obstacle to understanding the Cadaques works is basic and immediate: it is almost impossible to recognize many of the objects portrayed. Nor is this difficulty ours alone: John Richardson tells us that with these paintings "even the artist sometimes forgot what a particular image represented."¹

On first encountering the Still Life we notice the beautiful, all-over sparkle of its brushwork. In a style descended from Cézanne, the paint is laid across the canvas in short, more-or-less uniform, horizontal strokes that fit together like the tesserae of an ancient mosaic, providing a sense of solidity and stability. The painting seems as hard and flat as the wall against which it hangs. The table in Picasso’s painting is likewise lifted from Cézanne, but this is Cézanne Picassofied, raised to the tenth power. The subtly broken and strategically tilted tabletops of the older painter’s still lifes are here blatantly ripped apart, shattered, smashed flat against the picture plane. Picasso’s table is so complexly fragmented, in fact, that it’s difficult in places to tell what is tabletop and what might be something else. At the top of the painting things are slightly more readable, because we know from experience that those vertical lines topped by semicircles are the Cubist signs for curtains. Between the curtains and to the right of center is an obscure passage that might (maybe, just maybe) be a view through a window. We may be looking at Cadaques harbor with the sky above and a single large boat in the water, but I also have the feeling that I’m crawling out much too far on a very thin limb. (When you’ve looked at enough Cubist paintings, this kind of uncertainty becomes a pleasure. As we will see, it’s crucial to the Cubist project.) The rest of the painting looks like a jumble of intersecting planes, a construction of lines and paint from which only a few fragmented objects seem to emerge. We stare at it like someone who doesn’t read French confronted with a page of Proust. The individual marks, the letters, are familiar, but the significance of their combinations is beyond our understanding; we cannot read the words.

The first works we can call ‘Cubist’ were painted by Braque in 1908, and for the next six years–modern painting’s heroic age, ending with the outbreak of the First World War–he and Picasso were joined in a competitive collaboration that Braque likened to mountain climbing and Picasso to a marriage. Together they developed new ways of representing objects in space, methods diametrically opposed to those of traditional perspective construction. Cubist objects do not recede into pictorial space toward some implied vanishing point; they approach the viewer, they move forward toward the picture plane and are often flattened against it, as pictorial space itself is flattened. By virtue of this extreme compression, multiple views of the same object can be shown simultaneously. We might see, for example, both a side view and a bottom view of the same flat bottle. The point of all this, according to Braque, was to "convey a full experience of space" and to bring objects "within [the viewer’s] reach"² by representing them in a more complete and direct way than heretofore possible. John Richardson concisely summarizes the goals of the movement: "...everything had to be tactile and palpable, not least space. Palpability made for reality, and it was the real rather than the realistic that Picasso was out to capture. A cup or a jug or a pair of binoculars should not be a copy of the real thing, it need not even look like the real thing; it simply had to be as real as the real thing. And so there would be no more falsehoods; no more three-dimensional simulation..."³ But how can an object be real and palpable when, as in the Cincinnati Still Life, it can’t even be positively identified? I think something else is going on–in this painting and in Cubism generally. Something fundamental to pictorial representation–even more fundamental than perspective–is being altered, and to understand exactly what it is we must first take a brief excursion into semiotics. Before the reader’s eyes glaze over at the mention of this notoriously jargon-ridden field, I should say that Cubism, with its foregrounding of problems of representation, may be one of the few areas of art where the concepts of semiotics actually illuminate the power of a work rather than obscure it.

Semiotics, as every recent Humanities graduate knows, is the study of signs. The basic concepts of semiotics are drawn from linguistics, where the sign consists of a signifier, the word ‘tree,’ for example, and a signified, the generalized concept of a tree in a listener’s or reader’s mind that is activated by this word. The relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary, purely conventional; it only seems natural because, like perspective space, it has been functioning for centuries. Semioticians can easily imagine a world where the signifier ‘tooth’ is connected to the signified concept ‘tree’ and vice versa, a world in which hunters with missing trees stalk through forests of tall teeth. (Semiotics is a most Dali-esque science.) The painted sign–that is, any image we see in a painting–differs crucially from the linguistic sign. Painted signs are icons, signs in which the relationship between signifier and signified is not arbitrary because the signifier resembles the signified. For instance, in Cézanne’s great Still Life with Peppermint Bottle at the Washington National Gallery we know that the form on the left is a bottle–even before we read the title–because it resembles the generalized image of a bottle in our minds. This painted sign so obviously resembles what it represents that we think nothing of identifying it as ‘a bottle’ instead of ‘an area of pigments constructed to resemble a bottle.’ Iconicity is the basis of almost all representation in Western art. From ancient Egyptian tomb paintings to Pompeiian frescoes to the attributes of Medieval saints to Andy Warhol’s portraits of Elvis, we recognize objects in art by their physical resemblance to the concepts of those objects in our minds.

Cubism is an assault on the iconic nature of the painted sign. This is the movement’s most revolutionary aspect and precisely why it is the most revolutionary movement in the history of art. Although Cubism is rightly spoken of as a new way of representing space and objects, it is better understood not as a new representational strategy but as a way of putting enormous pressure on the old one. By flattening the illusory space of traditional perspective, by shattering traditional painting’s illusory forms, by eliminating the dogma of the single point of view, Picasso and Braque apply unprecedented pressure to the fundamental process of signification, the connection between painted signifier and signified. In Cubism’s early Analytic phase, the deformation of the painted object pulls the signifier away from the signified–ultimately, in the Cadaques paintings, to the breaking point. In later Synthetic Cubism, collage techniques allow strips of real wallpaper to represent wallpaper, pieces of newspaper to represent newspapers, and so forth, producing a pressure on signification equal and opposite to that of the earlier phase. Now we can speak of a ‘squeezing’ effect as the signifier collapses into the signified. In both phases, the iconicity that underlies all representational art is radically challenged, and opportunities are created for reflection on the most basic processes of representation and recognition.

In some passages of Still Life with Glass and Lemon, Cubistic deformation breaks the iconic connection and we are left with a complex of unrecognizable planes and arcs. Fortunately, the entire painting is not this impossibly difficult. Near each of the four corners of his fragmented table, Picasso shows us objects that can be easily recognized. They are minimal icons, visual representations reduced to the simplest schematic outlines. Just above the table’s lower right corner we see a drawer knob emerging from the middle of a stack of rectangular planes that must represent the right side of the table rotated 90^o toward the picture plane. Directly above this structure, at the lower right corner of the possible ‘window,’ we see a sharp triangular plane that I read as the back corner of the tabletop with the back leg attached to its point. (The leg tends to fade into the curtains, but it remains visible.) Across the table in the upper left is a more easily identifiable object, a knife with its long blade extending over the table’s edge in a way that both references and mocks the knives in the foregrounds of so many traditional still lifes. Below this, at the lower left corner of the table, we can pick out the conical bowl and diagonal stem of one of Cubism’s ubiquitous pipes. These four objects, along with the table and curtains, are Picasso’s way of framing the work. He eases us into the more challenging passages by giving us something to hold on to, and he simultaneously causes us to consider our own processes of recognition. We can readily see these objects only because their shapes correspond generally to our mental ideas of ‘knob,’ ‘table leg,’ ‘knife’ and ‘pipe.’ It’s iconicity in action. The knob and the bowl of the pipe even appear modeled to us. Simply because their outlines are half filled-in with dark gray paint, we read them as three dimensional forms struck by light and cast into shadow. We have so completely internalized the conventions of pictorial representation that even the most minimal outline to which the paltriest attempt at modeling has been applied is understood as representing a solid object. In these passages Picasso brings before our consciousness the unconscious processes by which we recognize painted signs. We can both read the objects and see how the illusion of an object is achieved, and this may slightly unsettle us. The connection between signifier and signified is still strong, but even here we can detect a premonitory tremor. The foundations of representation are beginning to shake.

When we move left from the knob to the tabletop, Picasso’s semiotic earthquake begins in earnest. What is that large, comma-shaped object at the front edge of the table? After hours of looking, I finally realized that it’s part of the larger form immediately above it, a complexly deconstructed wineglass. The arcs at the bottom of this larger form are partial, fragmented views of the glass’s foot; the sharp vertical line to the right of this is the stem, and this in turn runs into a large, flat, squarish form with a curved top that can be read as the radically flattened bowl of the wineglass. The open fishhook curve signifying the glass’s lip is broken in the middle by a passage of white paint that may be both a moment of pure abstraction and a mockery of the white highlights traditionally applied to such glassware (for contrast, Picasso paints the left edge of the glass in deepest black). Once we have learned to see this form, to relate its various parts to our idea of ‘wineglass,’ we can begin to see the comma shape as a wildly compressed partial view of this same glass. Like the rectangular section of tabletop on which it rests, this fragment of the glass has been ripped out, rotated and tilted up against the picture plane, but just enough legible signifiers remain for us to read the form in context. (Iconicity is so strained in this passage that context is now crucial; without the larger glass nearby, the ‘comma’ would be unidentifiable.) The vertical line, as in the larger form, represents the glass’s stem; the bulbous shape to its left is the foot, and the elongated, curved form to the right is a fragment of the glass’s bowl, here represented in a way that emphasizes the bowl’s curvature as much as the larger flat view emphasizes its mass. Taken together, the two views also tell us why we can see the table’s edge through the comma shape (glass is transparent) and show us that the wineglass, if reconstructed, would stand at the very edge of the table. It balances precariously, like much of this painting, on the brink of a fall into unrecognizable fragments.

To the left of the glass sits the eponymous lemon, immediately recognizable by its spoked wheel-like cross-section, an icon seen so often in still life painting that it has come to represent ‘lemon.’ Unlike the iconic drawer knob, however, the lemon is painted flatly upon the canvas without a hint of modeling; its lower half is compressed into a group of vertical planes that rhyme with the much larger curtains above and with similar shapes under the tabletop (a drapery, perhaps). Synthesizing the flatness of the canvas with a perfectly readable shape, the lemon is the work’s best example of Cubist ‘realism,’ and it also provides an excellent example of Cubistic approaching space, in which objects advance toward, rather than recede from, the viewer. The faceted peel that begins at the lower left side of the lemon at first moves straight down the canvas and then turns dramatically toward us, eventually flattening itself against the picture plane in a triangular shape as large as the entire fruit–a bit of reversed, exaggerated perspective that we process (having internalized traditional rules) as the peel leaping out at us. In direct contrast to the peeled lemons that draw us back into the space of so many seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes, here is a fruit that is seemingly pushed into our hands; we can almost touch it. Picasso achieves here by the most economical of means the major Cubist goal of creating a representation that is as palpable and "as real as the real thing."

Continuing our march to the left, we pass into the work’s most difficult area. As if to contrast with the easily identifiable lemon, the connection between signifier and signified is now stretched to the breaking point. Picasso’s fabulously deformed objects are in danger of leaving iconicity completely behind. What, for instance, is signified by that dark, vertical plane standing on a circular base to the left of the lemon? A drinking glass? Perhaps...But what about the cylinder to its left and the rectangle-arc-triangle form to the left of that? After more than two hours in front of the canvas, I begin to see these three adjoining shapes as various views and versions of the stem and foot of a compote. Like the stem, the bowl of this compote is also seen at least three times from three different points of view. (If I’m reading it correctly, the compote is the most complexly rendered of all the painting’s objects.) Our most legible view of the bowl is a slightly fragmented semicircular profile resting atop the aforementioned dark plane. This bowl is intersected by another view, tilted steeply upward toward the left so that its ‘tip’ touches the blade of the knife. Below and to the left of this is yet another partial view, looking down into the bowl from above. This reading may even solve the mystery of the broken circles above the pipe: they might be schematic puffs of smoke, denoting a pipe in use, or they might represent the fruits in the compote, reduced to their most minimal shapes when seen from directly above.

But what are those shapes above the compote? What do those broken, intersecting planes and lines signify? Is that squarish shape on the back edge of the table at the far left a glass 2/3 full of water or the back of the tabletop turned up 180^o? Or does it represent something else entirely? And since we’re asking unanswerable questions, what are those curious things above the lemon and wineglass? After three hours of intensive study I have more questions than answers, and I’m back where I began, trying to read the signs on the surface. I have run out of easily graspable clues. To compound the difficulty, the extreme flattening of space destroys the distinction between form and emptiness, between spaces with meaning and meaningless places. In this painting (except perhaps near the borders) there is no empty, negative space. All of space is activated, and forms can dissolve into it. This may be what happens in the area above the compote where iconicity seems to vanish. The signifying marks have no readily recognizable connection to anything they might represent. It is as if Picasso has used the knife that presides over this part of the painting to hack away at the lines of signification. And now, finally, the signifier has been set free. If there is still referential meaning in these marks, if they are still signs, they are closer to the arbitrary signs of language than to iconic painted ones. Until Picasso gives the viewer a key to his signs, parts of this painting will remain like a radio broadcast on an unknown frequency: we can’t begin to understand it because we can’t even hear the message.

In the upper part of this painting we enter abstraction, and for Picasso abstraction is white. Abstraction, for him, is meaninglessness, a breakdown in communication, and for a Spanish painter the blacks of Goya and Velasquez can never be meaningless. Abstraction is a dangerous white, like the snow that hides a deadly crevasse on a mountainside. The area just above the compote is the brightest, whitest passage in the entire painting. Here the most basic stuff of painting–short strokes of pigment–extends over the drawn lines, breaks contours, obscures forms, and reduces everything to the basic reality of paint on canvas. In this passage Picasso is as abstract as Pollock or de Kooning or Rothko. He reaches a limit of painting, a point where the iconic sign turns into the linguistic one. And Picasso has no desire to invent a private visual language, to arbitrarily assign to color and form the kind of emotional and spiritual significance granted them by Kandinsky and Mondrian. He hasn’t expended all this energy deconstructing the arbitrary conventions of traditional art only to replace them with new conventions, new and equally arbitrary dogmas. I suspect that Picasso might also have seen the leap into abstraction as a kind of desertion, a shirking of his duties as a painter. There is evidence that he occasionally envisioned the Cubist project–and, perhaps, his collaboration/competition with Braque–as a battle: after Braque made the first Cubist papier collé, Picasso responded with a composition containing a collaged fragment of newspaper with the headline (in French, of course) "The battle is joined." If he had moved into abstraction, Picasso might have seen himself as a general leaving the field. After reaching this artistic land’s end at Cadaques (a town, appropriately, at the edge of the sea), he neither dives into abstraction nor turns back toward tradition’s dry land. He travels onward, but by a different route. Synthetic Cubism, the movement’s next major phase, is not a retreat back to the image; it is an even more complex strategy for pressuring the sign, both pulling signification apart by distorting the image and squeezing it by collaging to the canvas objects that represent themselves. Picasso and Braque will push onward, pressuring but not breaking the iconic sign, for iconicity is like a contract with the viewer, ensuring intelligibility, enabling communication. And communication is, finally, what all Cubist paintings, from first to last, are about. They are records of a struggle to find a more truthful means of representation, monuments to an epic search for a language that does not lie.

NOTES

1. Richardson, Life of Picasso: Painter of Modern Life, 159.

2. Ibid., 97.

3. Ibid., 103.

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