CUBISM

BREUER

The aesthetic movements of the early 20th century were frequently and closely connected with new ideas in architecture. Futurism, the Dutch group De Stijl, the purist manifesto of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia, and Expressionist German painting resonated with the development of modernist ideas and forms in architecture. However, the question of the relationship of Cubist painting and sculpture to architecture is not straightforward. Rather, Cubism was a point of departure, contributing to the development of new concepts in Modern art. 

In 1907 and 1908, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, inspired by the aperspectival, cubic treatment of space in the paintings of Paul Cézanne and by primitive African art, developed a radically new approach to the object in their paintings. When they showed their new paintings at the Salon des Indépendants in 1909, the critic Louis Vauxcelles referred to Braque’s landscapes as “bizarreries cubiques.” Vauxcelles’ remark was immediately adopted in Parisian art circles, giving a name to the new approach: Cubism. Cubism represented a break with the painterly tradition since the Renaissance. The object was not represented in the central perspective but rather was deconstructed into prismatic surfaces, simultaneously representing different perspectives on the canvas. This formal analysis reduced what was depicted to geometric elements, similar to the relationship between words and syntax.

The new approach of Braque and Picasso quickly became a movement, as other artists, each with his own interpretation of Cubist principles, joined in the experiment. Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, the brothers Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and many others went through a shorter or longer Cubist period in their work. Cubism also quickly spread beyond France, influencing art in many countries for some time. The break with classical perspective and the composition of the image independent of observation of nature opened up possibilities for abstract art, futurism, and other movements. These developments took place very quickly between 1909 and 1915 and were accompanied by changes in other art forms, including architecture and its theory, in the years ahead. The new poetics expressed in Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Zone” of 1912 and the first atonal composition by Arnold Schoenberg of 1909 serve as examples for poetry and music.

Architecture, however, remained relatively untouched by Cubist painting and sculpture during this time with only two exceptions, and these were incidents rather than profound stimulation for new architectural developments: the Maison Cubiste project of Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1912) and the work of the group Skupina Výtvarných (Group of the Visual Artists) in Prague.

Duchamp-Villon (1876–1918) was a sculptor who belonged to a group of Cubist artists in Puteaux, outside Paris. For the exhibition of the group’s work at the Salon d’Automne in 1912, Duchamp-Villon and others presented the Maison Cubiste project, a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) complete with furniture and articles of use. For lack of space and organizational problems, only the first story of the model was built in the Grand Palais. This work is known only from pictures of the plaster model and charcoal drawings.

The two-story facade has a traditional, symmetrical arrangement. Cubist principles are visible only in the details; traditional cornice and pillars, as well as the door and window frames, were replaced by broken surfaces and prismatic shapes. These plastic forms are abstract, and the overlap between them is the architectural equivalent of the painterly principle of superimposed planes.

The Maison Cubiste was the attempt of a sculptor to apply the principles of contemporary painting to architecture. By contrast the acceptance of Cubism by the Skupina Výtvarných group in Prague in 1911 was more systematic. Besides several painters and the sculptor Otto Guttfreund (1889–1927), the architects Josef Chochol (1880–1957), Josef Gocár (1880–1945), and Pavel Janák (1882–1956) were cofounders of the group. They were active in architecture, interior design, arts and crafts, and set design and expressed themselves at the level of theory. 

The interest of these architects in the latest developments in painting represented a reaction against the Wagner school’s dominant rationalism and leaning to social engineering. Cubism seemed to offer an opening to a more artistic approach to architecture. In 1910 Janák—himself one of Otto Wagner’s students—published an article in the journal Styl titled “From Modern Architecture to Architecture,” noting that Modern architecture had an exclusively practical orientation and had no interest in questions of space, material, and form.

However, the transposition of the principles of Cubist painting to architecture turned out to be a formidable task because of fundamental differences in the two art forms. In fact the Prague architects only adopted the principle of decomposition, that is, the fragmented representation of the image, and applied it to the design of the facade. The plane of the facade was undermined by slanting, prismatic forms that replaced the traditional, orthogonal composition of the facade. The result was comparable to the detail in the Maison Cubiste. This approach had very little spatial significance, except in a few architectural sketches and installations for exhibitions and in the Kurhaus at Bohdanec (health administration building) (1911–12) by Gocár and the apartment building (1912) on Neklan Street in Prague by Josef Chochol, which demonstrate a spatial application of these principles. However, most of the architects concentrated on facades while their plans remained conventional.

The underlying theory of the Prague group was different from Cubist painting. The main objective was to achieve a plastic unity in the design of the facade through dynamism and movement. They were concerned with movement in an abstract sense, as an expression of the will to form, which subdues matter. These Czech architects saw the Wagner school’s visible honesty in construction and use of material as imposed by matter, materialist, and devoid of spiritual content. Historian Alois Riegl’s formulation of Kunstwollen (the will to art), in contradiction to the function, material, and technique of the artwork, and the theories of Theodor Lipps and Wilhelm Worringer, which were based on the subjective nature of observation and intuition, positioned themselves against the rationalism and materialism of contemporary art theory in the same spirit.

Prague’s architectural Cubism, which became increasingly more formal and decorative after 1914, and even became a sort of national style of the Czechoslovak Republic between 1918 and 1925, in actuality brought forth an Expressionist architecture—at least within the framework of architectural history, in which the notion of Cubist architecture simply does not exist. From the point of view of aesthetic conception and analysis of style, the Prague designs are related to the Amsterdam School and to German Expressionism, with which it is sometimes possible to identify direct, formal similarities. There are also formal similarities with the work of the Moscow group Zhivskulptarch, which attempted the integration of painting, sculpture, and architecture between 1918 and 1920 under the leadership of the Cubist sculptor Boris D.Korolyov. The work of the architects Nikolai A.Ladovsky and Nikolai I.Istselenov from this short period is distinctively Expressionist.

The significance of Cubism in painting to Expressionist architecture amounts to the most definite, direct relationship be tween the two art forms. The causal connection rests formally in the decomposed fragments and prismatic forms of Cubist painting, which led to comparable three-dimensional forms in architecture. A deeper connection may reside in the anticlassical aspect of Cubism, particularly the break with classical perspective since the Renaissance. An anticlassical stance was also characteristic of Expressionism. 

With respect to the relationship between modernist architecture and Cubism, it is interesting that the protagonists of renewal in the 1920s sometimes took positions against Cubism, or at least referred to it with considerable reserve, without identifying with it. The purism of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier may have been a further development following in the wake of Cubism, but their 1918 manifesto “Après le Cubisme” does not evince much appreciation for the movement. The manifesto rejected Cubist principles and called Cubism as a whole an esoteric game of ornamental forms. Instead, there is an emphasis on rational arrangement in the construction of an image, on a sort of standardization of the depicted object, and on the plastic values of the image. The purist manifesto represented a return to the classical tradition; elements of purist painting are significant for the architectural work of Le Corbusier, including the aesthetic concept of a standard and the emphasis on plastic values.

The direct influence of Cubism on modernist architecture is more difficult to identify. Although some authors, such as Sig-fried Giedion, Reyner Banham, and Colin Rowe, see Cubist painting as an important impulse for the work of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, that remains a matter of interpretation. Without a doubt the pathbreaking role of Cubist painting in general led to an analogy with the pathbreaking role of modernist architecture, but this would appear to be more a matter of legitimation than a causal connection. Some aspects, such as the reduction of the object to geometric forms, spatial penetration, and transparency, bear a programmatic relationship to the conception of architecture of the pioneers of architectural modernism, but it is not clear whether these derive from Cubism or whether they were discovered because of Cubism.

Historically speaking, these aspects of architecture cannot be traced back exclusively to Cubism. The reduction of building volumes to geometric forms may as well be connected to Roman church architecture or the work of Enlightenment architects Claude Ledoux and Etienne Boullée. It was no accident that the work of Ledoux and Boullée received attention in 1933, precisely in relation to Le Corbusier. Transparency in architecture had earlier been applied in the iron-and-glass buildings of the engineers of the 19th century, whereas in Cubist painting transparency is more conceptual than visually present. Moreover, penetration and simultaneity in Cubist painting are closer to deconstructivist architecture than to Gropius’s Bauhaus aesthetic. It is also possible to doubt the exemplary nature of the supposed rational construction of the image of analytical Cubism, already seen as not rational enough immediately after World War I.

Another problem that complicates the reception of Cubism in architecture is the confusion between “Cubist” and “cubic.” As early as the 1920s, the word “cubist” was applied by some writers to the new, unornamented architecture that relied on the arrangement of stereometric volumes. The work of Adolf Loos, J.J.P.Oud, Willem M.Dudok, and others has been called Cubist in this fashion, and as such the descriptor seems to be a global designation of form rather than a connection to be French avant-gardism in painting. 

That contradictory pronouncements have been made about Cubism and architecture may be related to the fact that the artistic revolution of Cubism was a symptom, not the cause, of a new experience and interpretation of a changing world. A similar phenomenon took place in other movements, and architecture was one of them.

FURTHER READING

Banham, Reyner, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London: Architectural Press, and New York: Praeger, 1960; see especially chapter “Architecture and the Cubist Tradition”

Barr, Alfred Hamilton, Cubism and Abstract Art, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936

Blau, Eve, and Nancy C.Troy (editors), Architecture and Cubism, Montreal, Quebec: Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997

Burkhardt, François, “Notes on Cubism in Czech Architecture,” Lotus International, 20 (1978)

Golding, John, Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907–1914, London: Faber, and New York: Wittenborn, 1959; 3rd edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, and London: Faber, 1988

Hamilton, George Heard, and William C.Agee, Raymond Duchamp-Villon: 1876–1918, New York: Walker, 1967

Lamarová, Milena, “Cubism and Expressionism in Architecture and Design: The Prague Cubist Group,” Lotus International, 20 (1978)

Margolius, Ivan, Cubism in Architecture and the Applied Arts: Bohemia and France, 1910–1914, Newton Abbot, Devon, and North Pomfret, Vermont: David and Charles, 1979

Ragghianti, Carlo L., “Architettura moderna e cubismo,” Zodiac, 9 (1962)

Švestka, Jiri (editor), 1909–1925: Kubismus in Prag. Malerei, Skulptur, Kunstgewerbe, Architektur, Stuttgart, Germany: Hatje, and Düsseldorf, Germany: Kunstverein, 1991

Vegesack, Alexander von (editor), Tschechischer Kubismus, Architektur und Design: 1910–1925, Weil am Rhein, Germany: Vitra Design Museum, 1991; as Czech Cubism: Architecture, Furniture, and Decorative Arts, 1910–1925, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992

(source:  OTAKAR MÁCEL, http://www.bookrags.com)