Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

COVER ESSAY

2011; Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; Volume: 69; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1227/neu.0b013e3182283425

1524-4040

Michael Salcman,

Aesthetic Perception and Analysis

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973), GUITAR (c.1914) Sometime in the autumn of 1908, when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque (1882-1963) were starting to work side by side in the cold-water flats of Le Bateau-Lavoir in Montmarte, the young Spanish artist spied a painting on the easel of his French comrade and intuitively grasped the visual revolution they were about to hatch. In the 2 years before, Matisse and the Fauves had already freed art from the naturalistic use of color, and Braque, a former member of the Fauves, and Picasso were about to disassemble the traditional structural rules of drawing and painting, the very bones of art. In the previous summer, Braque had been the first to paint a truly Cubist painting, "The Houses At L'Estaque" (Kuntsmuseum, Bern, 1908), in which the buildings looked like little cubes crammed together in a crowded space of muted colors.1 Braque, like Picasso, had been greatly affected by the late paintings of Cézanne seen in the 1907 memorial exhibition that soon followed their hero's death (1906), work that would lead them forward to the point of breaking the usual principles of perspective, rules of depiction that had been in place for almost 500 years, ever since Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), the designer of the Dome of the Cathedral in Florence, and one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance, discovered linear perspective, the mathematical solution by means of which 3-dimensional objects are correctly transferred to a 2-dimensional surface. Using his method, Brunelleschi made the first known paintings based on geometric optical linear perspective (ie, one-point perspective) in 1425. The 2 panels, now lost, pictured the Florentine Baptistery at the base of the Cathedral as reflected in a mirror! Brunelleschi's knowledge of mathematics allowed his art to revolutionize science, perhaps history's most dramatic instance of how art can lead science to new discoveries. Conversely, Cubism was born in a revolutionary zeitgeist created in part by Albert Einstein, a scientist who thought like an artist.2,3 1905 was Einstein's annus mirabilis, the year in which he published 4 papers in the journal Annalen der Physik, any one of which would have earned him undying fame. Even before Einstein's discoveries, artists were reading popular accounts of related concepts and speaking of multidimensional universes in which the yardstick of time had become a mutable thing, a quantity dependent on speed and frame of reference. In 1902, Henri Poincaré, France's greatest engineer and mathematician, and the author of the century's most important essays on science and creativity,4,5 the man who almost beat Einstein to the theory of relativity, wrote a popular book in which he stated "There is no absolute space…There is no absolute time." In 1906, Maurice Princet, a scientific amateur known as "the mathematician of cubism," brought Poincaré's ideas to the attention of Picasso and other artists in his circle of avant-garde friends, including Braque and Duchamp.6 Poincaré was very interested in the problem of simultaneity and non-Euclidean geometry, 2 issues that seem clearly inscribed in almost every Cubist painting. The revolution in modern physics would help condition the revolution in art. This is not to say that the artists in Paris either knew of Einstein or understood any of his ideas in any way that he might recognize as sensible. During the early years of Analytical Cubism, Picasso's portraits and still lives, Braque's interiors and landscapes, created a new world, one that many still find puzzling, chiefly because of the way in which Space is depicted. But the key to understanding Cubism, in my opinion, is the concept of Time, the time it takes to walk around an object or person and see it from multiple perspectives or frames of reference. Cubism is the first movement in art in which Time is directly encoded by giving us these multiple views simultaneously. Rather than thinking that Cubist pictures don't look like the "real" world, Picasso and Braque felt their pictures gave the most complete and accurate view of objects and people ever recorded. In traditional perspective, the angle of view determines the shape of an object; the depicted mouth of a coffee cup can be anything from a straight line to an oval to a circle. In a Cubist painting, the mouth of the coffee cup accords with its physical shape, it is almost always round, as if seen from the top. Picasso and Braque composed their pictures from multiple vantage points by using a series of intersecting planes at shallow angles, jewel-like facets of pale blues and greens, light ochre and grays. These planes slide past one another en passage in a technique developed by Paul Cézanne, Picasso's "god." The sliding planes and lack of perspective create an extremely shallow space so that almost all the objects are up on the surface of the canvas rather than receding away from us. Figure and ground become dissolved. Because some "hot" colors, like reds and oranges, create the illusion of depth by seeming to advance towards us, Picasso and Braque used muted colors in their analytic pictures. In this way, color becomes subservient to structure so that each layer of the geometric analysis is made ever clearer to the observer and the picture might take its place as a unique object within the real world of other objects. Soon after the discovery of Cubism, the 2 artists sought to further anchor their pictures in reality through their invention of collage; as usual, this technique was first used by Braque (his pioneering attitude encapsulated in a nickname, "Wilbourg Braque," Picasso derived in admiration of Wilbur Wright) but soon perfected by Picasso.7 Pasted wallpaper and newsprint, actual bits of chair caning, sheet music, string and paint mixed with sand, and bold lettering from popular journals, in short a multitude of elements from the everyday world, created real planes and textures that were freely interspersed within the shallow space of their painted objects. Paradoxically, the introduction of "real things" helped to further the visual ambiguity and poetry of the pictures. These constructed paintings directly led to the next step, this time an achievement (almost) all Picasso's, the re-invention of sculpture. Until 1912, all 3-dimensional works of art had been made by carving or modeling, cutting into wood and stone, or using the fingers to shape clay or wax, materials that might later be cast in bronze or silver. Sometime between October and December 1912, Picasso cobbled a guitar together from paperboard, paper, string, and painted wire, materials that he cut, folded, threaded, and glued. Picasso's silent instrument resembled no sculpture ever seen before, he had made a 3-dimensional guitar out of the very things he'd been inserting into his paintings; it was, in effect, a 3-dimensional collage constructed without carving or modeling. Picasso was so excited by this first Guitar (1912), now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, that he spent the next 2 years creating one painting or collage after another on the theme of this most classic of Spanish instruments. In a recent show at MoMA of 85 paintings and drawings devoted to this subject (and a few violins), the sheer inventiveness of Picasso has never been made so evident; month by month over a 2-year period you can watch him carry out variations on a theme like a jazz musician riffing on a melody. Picasso adds a line here or there, breaks the image of a violin string over painted faux bois, a strip of papier collé, or a piece of cloth, tacks his violin up with a drawn pin and collaged shadow or holds the entire construction together with real pins. You get dizzy at the speed with which he rings his changes, his enormous productivity, the perceptual tricks and overall quality of the works, their handmade beauty, the rigor of his thinking. Towards the end of this frenzy of experiment, Picasso decided to make something fixed and durable out of his cardboard guitar, something that was not merely an element in a tableau (there are photographs of the paper guitar used as a studio prop as if in a theater set), so he refashioned his original vision in sheet metal and wire and, in the process, created a true sculpture, arguably the most important of the 20th century. To begin with, Guitar (1914) is a constructed object, built from a combination of found materials; though clearly recognizable as sculpture, its fabrication did not involve modeling, carving or casting. It is not a unitary object but consists of parts and its materials are associated with industrial processes, metal pipe, sheet metal and wire, and not with art. In addition, the 2 Guitar sculptures are the first in the Western tradition to emphasize negative space; not only do we see the external surfaces of the guitar but we are also able to inspect its internal construction by looking down the projecting sound hole and into the exploded body of the instrument. This is precisely what Picasso and Braque meant by the heightened or more complete reality Cubism affords objects. Close in structure to its model, Guitar tantalizes us with the possibility of taking it off the wall and actually making music with it; it has a sound hole, a body and wire strings. Further inspection of the sculpture soon reveals the impracticality of ever playing it; the sound hole is not a simple void but a cylinder projecting outward into space, the front and back planes of the guitar's body suggest a volume without containing a sound space, and the wires do not extend the full length of the instrument. Indeed, the strings cross beneath the sound hole and not in front of it, there are no tuning pegs and only one fret. Picasso's friend, the poet André Salmon, reported that visitors to the studio were bewildered by the earlier cardboard version, wondering what it was, whether painting or sculpture, and whether it was hung on the wall or placed on a pedestal. They had failed to notice the horizontal shelf at the bottom of the guitar, an echo of the paper table Picasso had included in the tableau incorporating his cardboard construction. Apparently, Picasso responded, "It's nothing, it's 'la guitare!"8—note his use of the definite article, as if Guitar (1912) were not merely a single representation but a Platonic icon, the very embodiment of the concept of an ideal Spanish guitar. If Picasso had been interested in making a real guitar out of metal it would have looked much more like its model, more like a Readymade bought in a store by Duchamp or a simulacrum of the real thing like a Brillo Box by Warhol. In fact, Picasso's sculpture is a 3-dimensional embodiment of how structural analysis is carried out in a Cubist painting and, therefore, one of the great teaching tools in the history of art. Picasso famously quipped "You'll see, I'm going to hold on to the Guitar; but I shall sell its plan. Everyone will be able to make it himself."7 Note how the front and back planes of the guitar's body are both visible, as they would be in a Cubist painting and as they would be on the workbench during the construction of a real guitar in a luthier's shop. The backside has been slid to our left and the reduplication of the curves of the top plane seen on our right allows Picasso to further emphasize the classic association between the body of a guitar and the body of a woman in Spanish culture. The hollow neck, with its feminine triangle, and everted sound hole, an obviously phallic shape, cast wonderful shadows inside the body of the guitar, many of which would be colored planes or facets in a Cubist painting. Look at the reduplication of the frontal plane on the "shelf" below. If you have the chance to go to MoMA, take the time to look at Guitar from each side, you will see other shadows and planes, the entire construction of the instrument unfolding into your space like the petals of a flower. Picasso's Guitar (c.1914) is a "slow" sculpture, that is to say, a work of art that requires patient and prolonged looking for full appreciation of its secrets and wonders. Sadly, the average work of art in a museum receives less than 30 seconds of viewing time; so brief an encounter will not work with Guitar. We wish we could touch and hold it; it takes some time to know it properly, to feel again the time required to see an actual guitar from every vantage point. The mammalian brain is said to have 5 senses but perhaps a sense of time should be added to this concept in the same way that time became the additional dimension in Einstein's universe. The recent demonstration that the basal ganglia are involved in the analysis of time is not surprising given the disturbances of time perception in patients with Parkinson's Disease, Huntington's Disease and Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.9 Some investigators have referred to this system as "time stamping" the events in our lives. As with other primary sensory modalities, the analysis of time appears to involve the parietal lobes. Preservation of timing by neurons in the visual and auditory systems has been demonstrated and intrinsic clocks (ie, the circadian pacemaker) in the suprachiasmatic nucleus are thought to be a light-associated basis for our diurnal rhythms. In lower animals, the influence of light on pineal neurons (the third eye) is a trigger for a wide variety of seasonal behaviors. And because axonal firing is a frequency code rather than an amplitude code, Time is everywhere in the brain and nowhere specific; unlike touch and sight, time is a sense we construct within ourselves. Einstein demonstrated that time was a malleable property subject to the influence of speed and mass. We feel something of this slippage whenever we cross the International Date Line or do an all-nighter or get older and feel the years passing more quickly. The mutable nature of time inevitably became an important subject in Modern Art. Although the melting clocks in Dali's "Persistence of Memory" (1931) are perhaps the most famous symbols of mutable time, they hardly give the modern viewer the type of correlative sensation experienced by viewing motion pictures, Cubist paintings, or that 20th century time machine, Picasso's Guitar. Michael Salcman, MD Baltimore, Maryland