back JULIAN STREET

Why I Became A Cubist
Everybody’s Magazine 28 (June 1913)

I wasn’t a Cubist to begin with. Bless your heart, no! Looking back from my present high altitude of Understanding, it is hard for me to realize that but a few brief weeks ago I was wandering about in the Valley of Ignorance, my head full of the most stupid and conventional ideas about Art. Those poor old back-numbers, Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Van Dyck, three hundred years ago, were no more advanced in Art than I was! Like you, I was simply trailing along after the dull, hopeless public: hearing with my ears, tasting with my mouth, smelling with my nose, seeing with my eyes.

I had the utterly old-fashioned idea that portraits should represent people, marines the sea, and landscapes the land. Yes, and—fond fool that I was!—when I saw something with a gilt frame on four sides of it, hanging on a wall, I had the conventional belief that it should be a picture. This was especially true if it happened to be hanging in what we sometimes call a picture-gallery.

What sheep we are! Why, after all, should something in a gilt frame, hanging in a picture-gallery, be a picture? There is no reason at all. It is only arbitrary custom. Long ago some one put a picture in a frame. Others saw it, liked the idea, and did the same. By degrees it became usual to put pictures in frames, and the poor, sodden public began to think that when it saw a picture-frame hanging on the wall, there ought to be a picture in it.

Perhaps you feel that way now? Don’t be ashamed. But try to become an independent thinker—an Individualist. Develop Self. Go after the au-de-là. Try to Understand! Reach On and Up. Reach Over and Under and Around and Through.

But I am running ahead of my story.

1913 cover page with illustration and Gertride Stein pull quote.

 

As I said before, I wasn’t a Cubist when I first went to the International Exhibition of Modern Art. Quite the contrary. I went there through curiosity, just as one goes to an immoral play.

You know how disappointing it is to go a play that you have been informed is shocking, and sit through the first act without being shocked at all? You begin to wish you had your money back.

That is how I felt upon entering the armory in which the Art Exhibition was held. The foyer looked perfectly sane.

“I’m afraid we have been taken in,” I said to the friend who accompanied me.
“This looks like the entrance to any exhibition. Probably the pictures are not shocking at all. They’ve made fools of us.”

		It carries to my eyes sensations equivalent to those which might be wafted to the nose by the combined perfumes of garlic, asafetida, fertilizer, civet cat, and the waste from a fish-oil factory . . .

“I should think so, too,” said he, “if it weren’t for the crowd. There must be something rotten to draw such a mob.”

Somewhat encouraged by his optimism, I moved into the first room.

Ah! I had hardly passed the door when I saw that I was not to be disappointed. There, hanging upon the wall, was a painting the like of which I had never seen before. It was the portrait of a lady: a kind of post-lady, I suppose. I don’t mean by that a post-mistress, but a lady as seen by a Post-Impressionist. She appeared to me to be dying of leprosy, with complications of bubonic plague. One of her eyes was partly open, the other almost lost in a great; disfiguring bruise. The face was livid of cerise, splotched with daubs of green, yellow, and purple. Behind her raged a furious background: wide stripes of yellow, purple, blue, and green. (You see how ignorant I was at the time.)

“Do you find anything good in that?” I asked my companion.

“It has action,” he said. “It jumps out of the frame and smashes you in the eye! An admirable quality in a portrait of a pugilist, perhaps. But this is a portrait of a lady. It——”

The Woman with a Pot of Mustard  Paul Picasso

 

“Ah! Well met, Adolphus!” I heard a voice behind me and turned to find myself face to face with Rose Madder.

Now Rose is a nice girl, but her sense of the esthetic causes her to dress in a peculiar manner. She wears a fillet around her hair, which flops about her ears; also she affects short-waisted, smock-like gowns which do not quite become a girl with so much beam. (My companion remarked afterward that she looked Rubens but dressed Rossetti.) In the Latin Quarter she wore sandals, but I noticed at the Exhibition that she had on shoes. I was relieved at that.

I introduced my companion, and Rose immediately asked how we liked the pictures. I wanted to nudge him; for Rose paints, and her paintings are generally considered odd. But I couldn’t get at him.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “If some one assured me that that portrait of a lady been done on a back fence by an evil-minded child of ten, who had been reared on absinthe, I should not be in the least surprised. To call it a crime in pigment seems to me to be to praise it. It carries to my eyes sensations equivalent to those which might be wafted to the nose by the combined perfumes of garlic, asafetida, fertilizer, civet cat, and the waste from a fish-oil factory; it seems to me——”

“Ah mon vieux,” Rose broke in, addressing me. “Il ne comprend pas! He doesn’t get it.”

“No,” I said. “I’m afraid, to tell the truth, neither of us does.”

“It is beautiful!” she cried. “Beautiful with the New Beauty! You haven’t got to the New Beauty yet, then?”

		Little did I think, gentle reader, as I entered that room, and heard some one refer to it flippantly, as the “Chamber of Horrors,” that I was upon the threshold of Understanding!

“No!” said my companion, with what seemed to me unnecessary bruskness. Then he turned to me with: “I think I must be going now,” and left me there with Rose.

Rose is very intelligent, but I don’t precisely like to be left with her. People stare so. And when she makes gestures with her thumb, in explaining Art, it calls attention to the fact that she wears a ring upon it—a ring with a large green stone.

“I want you to learn to see the New Beauty, Adolphus,” she said, and began waving her thumb at the pictures. The whole thing, she explained, was a matter of arrangement—of moods expressed in lines, shapes, and tones.

A little crowd collected about us

We moved about the first room. Passing over several paintings like the first one, we came upon two canvases which suggested to my then unenlightened mind odd, incoherent embroideries in colored yarn. To me they meant absolutely nothing; but I did not say so, lest Rose explain them with her jeweled thumb, and collect another crowd. One of them was called “Autumn;” the other “Landscape.” Some one has told me since that, through a quite natural mistake, the hanging committee had hung “Autumn” upside down.

Then, suddenly, three paintings by Robert Henri: a bronzed old gipsy woman, a nude woman in arrested motion, and a child. There they hung, all clean, and true, and right-side up with care, giving me the feeling of relief a man might have on coming out of a delirium and opening his eyes upon a wholesome, sunlit world.

Rose looked at the Henri paintings with something like contempt. “There!” she began. “Those things are perfectly Academic. Technically good painting of the old-fashioned kind; but no soul, no imagination: a mere tour de force of brushwork.”

I wished to protest at this, but again feared that we might draw a crowd, and was silent.

At last we came upon a very crowded room. People were staring at the walls with faces amazed, baffled, incredulous, angry, or amused. It was the cabinet particulier of the Futurists and Cubists. Little did I think, gentle reader, as I entered that room, and heard some one refer to it, flippantly, as the “Chamber of Horrors,” that I was upon the threshold of Understanding!

	I heard a young man standing beside us snort, and saw him wink, obviously at his companion, who replied by pointing a finger at his forehead, moving it with a circular motion, and making an insulting buzzing sound.

At first sight, while the blinders of convention are still upon the eyes, the mind refuses to accept the notion that the Futurists and Cubists are serious. One imagines them as a group of wild young students, unable—because of lack of training and ability—to paint in the Academic manner which they profess to scorn. One can even fancy their having met, one night, in Montmartre, around a table well supplied with absinthe, and thereupon determined to perpetrate a mastodonic hoax upon the world.

“Are these men actually capable of—of—” I began.

“Of Academic work?” Rose finished for me. “Most assuredly, mon vieux. One has been a master in a great art school. Most of them have exhibited in leading European cities . . . What you fail to grasp is this: They are not trying to paint pictures. Everything which can be said in pictorial art has been said. We must reach On and Up! And where may we reach but to the Subconscious? These artists paint the subjective instead of the objective. Instead of giving us a mere picture, they convey to Us, who Understand, a mental impression of motion or emotion. Is that clear?”

Several people had edged up to us to eavesdrop, so I said that it was clear.

“I knew you would Understand, Adolphus!” she encouraged. “Now look at that painting called ‘Nude Descending a Stairway.’ Put yourself into a childlike frame of mind and tell me what you see.”

Nude Descending a Stairway  Marcel Duchamp

 

 I looked for a long time, hoping that the eavesdroppers would get tired and go away. But they waited.

“It seems to me,” I said, at last, “to look like the explosion of a shingle factory.”

Rose sighed. “You will look for the pictorial,” she said.

“What should I see?” I asked, feeling rather crestfallen.

“You should see what was in the painter’s subconscious mind,” she said. “He painted that nude several times, in the Academic manner, standing on an individual step of the stair, just as Henri painted his nude stepping out, but in arrested motion. In other words, as the camera catches a moving figure. But this man, Marcel Duchamp, wasn’t satisfied with that. So he determined to paint the effect left upon his mind by seeing the figure run all the way from the top to the bottom of the flight.”

I heard a young man, standing beside us, snort, and saw him wink, obviously, at his companion, who replied by pointing a finger at his forehead, moving it with a circular motion, and making an insulting buzzing sound.

I did not wish to have a row. I detest rows. I wanted to get away. So I said to Rose: “It is as if the figure was coming down so fast that one could not see it.”

“That's it,” she approved. The two young men continued to stand beside us.

		. . .What can be more logical than Cubist art—the art that attempts to place on canvas the impressions of life which pass across the mind as kinemacolor pictures pass across a screen?

“Everything is coming down,” one of them said to the other. “The nude is coming down, the stairs are coming down, the house is coming down, the splintered shingles from the roof are coming down—or is it that the naked party has the shingles?”

I edged away from them, but they followed. Rose stopped me before another painting by Marcel Duchamp. “I shall not give you the name of this one,” she said. “Just tell me what it suggests to you.”

Presently I said: “It looks like some great engines in a pumping-station or a power house.”

“Excellent!” she cried. “You’re beginning to see, Adolphus. The name of that painting,” said Rose, “is ‘King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes.’”

“Swift nudes?” I repeated, rather shocked.

“Yes; fast-moving nude figures.”

“Oh!” I said. “But why am I getting on, then? I said it looked like a power-house, you know.”

“Quite so. Well, what do a king and queen suggest? Don’t they suggest power? And the painting suggests power, too.”

“But what of the nudes?” I asked.

I did not hear her reply, for one of the young men again intruded. He remarked, as if speaking to his companion:

“Said the King to the Nudes: ‘At last I have you in my power-house.’”

Their impudence was becoming so annoying that I was tempted to speak to them sharply. But one of them, in particular, was a big, hairy man, like a pugilist. Besides, they were strangers to me. Why should I speak to total strangers about their manners?

		He paints as a child might have painted in the dawn of art, seeing only the essentials in color and form. You must think of these pictures as having been produced by a recluse in revolt.

Rose was expounding: “One of the striking proofs of our greatness is that the public does not understand us. Did the public ever understand real greatness at first sight? No! Look at Wagner! They called him crazy. Look at Galileo, Columbus, Monet, Debussy, Richard Strauss! All went unappreciated at first. Alas! It is the history of Art!”

“If you want to see some fine examples of Cubism,” she went on, “look at these things on the wall in front of us.” She indicated a canvas that looked to me like a crazy-quilt made up of rectangles and triangles of red, rose, and white, and told me it was the “Dance at the Spring,” by Picabia. “Picabia,” Rose explained, “is a disciple and friend of Bergson, the French philosopher. Of course you’ve read Bergson's philosophy of Instinct and Individualism?”

She seemed so sure I had read Bergson that I nodded. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t, but with some people I hate to confess that I haven’t read certain books.

“Then you know, of course,” she went on, “that Bergson says life is a living stream; he compares our consciousness with the mechanism of a kinematograph. If you accept that, what can be more logical than Cubist art—the art that attempts to place on canvas the impressions of life which pass across the mind as kinemacolor pictures pass across a screen?”

I felt rather dazed. The idea sounded sensible, but somehow I didn’t seem to grasp it. It reminded me of explanations I had heard of certain new religions: explanations which sound coherent, yet which, one feels, have a screw loose somewhere. I did not wish to answer Rose’s argument; I couldn’t answer it.

The Dance at the Spring  Francis Picabia [presented here upside down as in the original article—mouseover to flip the image]

 

“I must really be going,” I said.

“Oh, you must see the paintings by Matisse,” said Rose. “Some of us think him the master of all the modernists.”

We moved into the next room, one wall of which was fairly crawling with the art of Matisse. They were large canvases, in tones almost flat, without shading, like the grotesque posters which come from Germany. In some of them the human figures were “simplified” until they had about the same resemblance to reality as Gelett Burgess’s “goops.”

“Don’t you feel the power of them?” demanded Rose.

		Isn’t an artist who paints crude pictures in a sophisticated era as much of a degenerate as I should be if I gave up my flat and my bath-tub and went to live in a cave?

I didn’t, so I asked evasively: “What does that one mean? The one with the nude man writhing on the ground, with fireworks behind him. He looks so uncomfortable. Perhaps he got hit by a skyrocket stick?”

“That’s not a man!” corrected Rose. “That’s a woman; and those aren’t fireworks—they’re palm trees.”

“Oh, I see. But why is she painted blue?”

Rose actually sounded impatient, as she replied: “What does it matter what color is used so long as Matisse gets his effect? You must understand that he casts out tradition and seeks the elemental. He paints as a child might have painted in the dawn of art, seeing only the essentials in color and form. You must think of these pictures as having been produced by a recluse in revolt.”

“Well,” I said, “I am tired. I think I’ll go. Thank you so much, Rose, for helping me to understand.”

 

A few days later, when my mind was rested, I returned to the exhibition and looked around for Rose, but she was not there. However, I ran into a distinguished painter whom I know. He is a member of the Academy, and consequently wears a silk hat and a pointed beard.

“What do you think of it as an exhibition?” I asked.

“The worst used to advertise the best,” he replied with a wink.

“Don’t the Cubists interest you?”

“Do you want to know how to paint Cubist pictures?” he asked. “I’ll tell you. Smoke a few cubebs and figure out the cube root of Art. Then cover your canvas with vari-colored angular forms. Then decide what you want to call it. Say you want to call it ‘Cuban Landscape’: stick a few palm fronds at the top and a negro’s foot at the bottom. Or if that doesn’t suit, paint out the palm and the foot, replace with a hand, some hair, and a note of music, and call it ‘Portrait of Kubelik.’ Voilà !”

At that moment my friend Wassily Muskoxi came up and spoke to me. My Academic acquaintance took one look at Wassily’s long hair and Windsor tie, and left without an introduction. Wassily is the leading Secessionist of East Orange, New Jersey, and an anarchist of no mean attainments. If any one could be expected to understand the ultra-modernists it is he. He asked me if I was not deeply impressed.

I said that the pictures had affected me; that I had had the new movement explained to me in detail by Rose Madder.

“Oh, Rose Madder!” he said contemptuously. “She doesn’t Understand. I have nothing against Rose personally, but I tell you she is merely skimming the surface of this movement.”

This rather disconcerted me.

		Art is always at its best when decadence has set in!

“To get at the root of the thing,” said Wassily, “you must go to Cezanne, Von Gogh, and Gauguin. They were the first Post-Impressionists. All three were martyrs to Art. They died unrecognized. They created the New Art, struggling, first and foremost, to express themselves. We modernists all trace back to these men. It is from them that we get our sense of balance and form—our expression of Ourselves, above all else.”

To prove this point he took me to some paintings of nude figures, dancing among cows: pictures which, I thought, suggested a patchwork of vari-colored Brussels carpet. Others suggested the artistic efforts of the early Egyptians and Assyrians, or of the weavers of primitive tapestries. Wassily said they were simplified.

“We have discovered,” Wassily explained, “that, contrary to what most people have thought, the ancients did not make primitive pictures because of lack of knowledge, but rather because of a superabundance of it. After the so-called ancient primitives came the decadence of Art—Greek sculpture, with its slavish imitation of the human form; Michelangelo and all that crowd, and so on through a long period including Rembrandt, Velasquez, and all those dubs who are the forerunners of the present race of Academic painters. None of them is any good. It has taken the modernists to find them out and tie a can to them.”

I protested mildly.

“But isn’t it one thing,” I said, “to be crude and primitive because you are living in a crude and primitive age, and another to revert from civilization to primitiveness? Isn’t an artist who paints crude pictures in a sophisticated era as much of a degenerate as I should be if I gave up my flat and my bath-tub and went to live in a cave?”

“You’ve hit it!” cried Wassily.

I was astounded at his enthusiasm. “Hit what?” I asked.

“The key-note of the whole thing!” he exclaimed. “It is degeneracy!”

The Kiss  Constantine Brancusi

 

“Well, then, isn’t the new art wrong?”

“Wrong?” he repeated. “No, indeed! What you have just said about degeneracy proves that it is right! Art is always at its best when decadence has set in!”

My mind was beginning to feel tired again. I bade Wassily good-by and went away to think the matter over.

Upon my next visit to the exhibition I met a doctor whom I knew. He assured me that the new movement was purely pathological. “I have seen paintings by paranoiacs which much resembled these,” he said.

I was turning this over in my mind when I chanced to encounter Philbert McNutt.

Perhaps you don t know Philbert? His father was one of the wealthy Pittsburgh McNutts. He left Philbert so much money that Phil has never had to do anything but think. Of course he paints, too, but you never see his paintings in the Academy, or the windows of Fifth Avenue dealers. I suppose this is because Philbert does not give them a chance.

		You can photograph a train of cars. But can you photograph a train of thought?

When we exchanged greetings I mentioned what my friend the doctor had said.

“Oh, yes,” Philbert replied cheerfully. “Some of the fellows are paranoiacs. I feel sure of two of them. But you know a little dash of paranoia is a very fine thing for Art. Do you grasp the new movement?”

“Well,” I replied. “I would hardly say ‘grasp.’ Grasp is too strong a word.”

“Let me explain.”

“Delighted,” I answered. “Although I have already had it explained to me by Rose Madder and Wassily Muskoxi.”

Philbert shrugged. “What do they know?” he commented. “They’re the merest childish imitators.”

“What then,” I asked him, “is the answer?”

“Listen,” he began. “It is conceded that the nearer the picture is to photographic perfection the farther it is from Art. Isn’t that so? Yes. Well, then, isn’t the picture which is farthest from the photograph the nearest to Art?”

“Perhaps,” I assented. I felt rather confused.

“Of course it is!” said Philbert. “And what is farthest from a photograph? That which can not be photographed at all—the abstract—thoughts, emotions! Just consider: You can photograph a train of cars. But can you photograph a train of thought? You can photograph a train of cars on the way from New York to Chicago, but you can’t photograph the sensations and emotions experienced by the man who makes such a journey.”

“But can you paint them?” I demanded.

“Certainly!” he insisted. “I am now painting such a picture. It will be my masterpiece.”

“Are you a Cubist?” I asked.

“Partially,” said Philbert. “But I am essentially an individualist. I am my own technique—my own school of Art. I might be called a Post-Cubist, perhaps.”

“I didn’t know there were Post-Cubists,” I said.

“There aren’t,” said Philbert. “I’m the first one.”

Whither  J. Mowbrary-Clarke

 

I stood there thinking how wonderful it was that little Philbert McNutt, with whom I had played as a child in the dear old days in Pittsburgh, should stand before me now the founder of a whole school of Art!

“Here,” he said suddenly, leading me to a stand covered with books. “Here is the answer to it all. Read these.” As he spoke he placed several of the books in my hands. “They will tell you more about the New Art than I can.”

I thanked him, took the books, and went away.

		Stein does not go after words—she waits and lets them come to her, and they do.

One was a magazine called “Arts and Decoration.” It contained, among things, an appreciation, by Mabel Dodge, of Gertrude Stein, who writes Cubist. A second was a pamphlet containing a word portrait (in Cubist) of Mabel Dodge, by Gertrude Stein. The third was a copy of a magazine called “Camera Work,” containing articles by Gertrude Stein upon Picasso and Matisse.

I went home, sat down in my room, and read them. And as I read, all the mystery, all the fog which had seemed to me to obscure Modern Art, was swept away upon a gale of words. Miss Stein’s writings are, indeed, the key to Cubism and the allied branches of art. Until I read her, I had wavered; I had failed to grasp the true and deep significance of it all. As Mabel Dodge says: “She is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint.” That is just it!

Let me quote Mrs. Dodge further:

Her habit of working is methodical and deliberate. She always works at night in the silence, and brings all her power to bear upon the banishing of preconceived images. Concentrating upon the impression she has received and which she wishes to transmit, she suspends her selective faculty, waiting for the word or group of words that will perfectly interpret her meaning to rise from her subconsciousness to the surface of her mind.

Then and then only does she bring her reason to bear upon them, examining, weighing and gauging their ability to express her meaning. It is a working proof of the Bergson theory of intuition. She does not go after words—she waits and lets them come to her, and they do.

Decorative Panel in Red  Henri Matisse

 

Consider now Miss Stein. Would that I might print all that she has written of Picasso and Matisse. Let the final paragraph on Matisse serve to show you how the thing was all made clear:

Some were certainly wanting to be doing what this one was doing that is were wanting to be ones clearly expressing something. Some of such of them did not go on in being ones wanting to be doing what this one was doing that is in being ones clearly expressing something. Some went on being ones wanting to be doing what this one was doing that is, being ones clearly expressing something. Certainly this one was one who was a great man. Any one could be certain of this thing. Every one would come to be certain of this thing. This one was one certainly clearly expressing something. Any one could come to be certain of this thing. Every one would come to be certain of this thing. This one was one, some were quite certain, one greatly expressing something being struggling. This one was one, some were quite certain, one not greatly expressing something being struggling.

What could be fairer than that?

Does it not sum up, in words, the painting of Matisse? It does! Does it not wipe from one’s mind at one stroke all doubt as to Matisse and his painting? It does! And you may take my word for it that Miss Stein on Picasso is no less illuminating.

 It was then that I knew I must become a Cubist. I can not paint as yet, but that does not matter. I shall sit in the darkness and wait for paintings to come to me. And in the meantime I shall write Cubist—or should one say Cubic?

Before the Race  Amadeo De Sousa Cardozo

 

Are you converted? Do you need more proof? Then consider this fragment from Miss Stein’s word-portrait of her friend:

The days are wonderful and the nights are wonderful and the life is pleasant.

Bargaining is something and there is not that success. The intention is what if application has that accident results are reappearing. They did not darken. That was not an adulteration.

So much breathing has not the same place when there is that much beginning. So much breathing has not the same place when the ending is lessening. So much breathing has the same place and there must not be so much suggestion. There can be there the habit that there is if there is no need of resting. The absence is not alternative.

Any time is the half of all the noise and there is not that disappointment. There is no distraction. An argument is clear.

Likewise this last paragraph—this summing up:

There is all that there is when there has all there has where there is what there is. That is what is done when there is done what is done and the union is won and the division is the explicit visit. There is not all of any visit.

 

*     *     *     *     *     *

Last night when all was still and dark I went into the great, punctuation-mark-less silence and brought all my power to bear upon the banishing of preconceived images. I concentrated upon the impression I had received from viewing Cubist art and reading Cubist word-painting. I waited . . . waited . . . Then, at last, the words began to come . . . I set them down. . . . When they stopped coming, I went into the light; yes, into the light. And I read. I read. This is what I read:

POST-IMPRESSIONIST POEM

While still I sported knee-length pants
    My people taught me that ‘twas rude
To even steal a sidelong glance
    At casts or paintings of the nude.

Then Futurist and Cubist came,
    And Futurized the nude, till now
No longer need the blush of shame
    Mount up and mantle Comstock’s brow.

And hence it comes that purest prudes
    In chaste Cohoes, austere Oswego,
Need have no fear; for Cubist nudes
    Strip but the Artist’s hard-boiled Ego.

Do you not see how beautiful that is? It is very beautiful. Very beautiful indeed. But not as beautiful as it can be beautiful. For the most beautiful that is beautiful is not the Post-Impressionist beautiful, but the Cubist beautiful. Now, let us treat the poem a little differently:

Cubist Poem

 

It may be that you are not far enough along to appreciate my Cubistry. It may be that I shall have to struggle on for years and years before I am appreciated. But if you feel disposed to scoff, let me remind you, even as they reminded me, when I scoffed, of Galileo, Columbus, Richard Wagner, Monet, and Cezanne. All of them were called demented in their time, just as we Cubists are to-day.

And if those names are not enough of evidence, here are some more. Think of these! Think of de Rougemont, think of the Sterling Debenture Syndicate, think of 520% Miller, Benedict Arnold, Carrie Nation, Jezebel, Darius Green, Captain Kidd, Boss Tweed, Sitting Bull, Elbert Hubbard, Dr. Munyon, Nero, Jack the Ripper, Jesse James, General Weyler, the Borgias, Bill Sikes, Guy Fawkes, Lydia Pinkham, and Dr Cook.