Picasso Braque Movies

When Picasso and Braque Went to the Movies By Randy Kennedy




"IT was Picasso doing the noninterview interview, decades before Warhol came along to elevate it to an art form. In 1911 a writer for Paris-Journal was asking Picasso about the radically new kind of painting people were calling Cubism, the lightning bolt that had shot forth from his studio and that of his friend Georges Braque. Picasso claimed never to have heard of such a thing. “Il n’y a pas de Cubisme,” he said blithely, and then excused himself to go feed his pet monkey.

In part because its creators said so little about it during their lifetime, guarding it like a kind of state secret, Cubism has generated a library’s worth of scholarship, probably more than any other artistic innovation in the last century. The general picture that has emerged is one of Cubism bubbling up out of a thick Parisian stew of symbolist poetry, Cézanne, cafe society, African masks, absinthe and a fascination with all things mechanical and modern, mostly airplanes and automatons.



But while almost every aspect of these two artists’ live has been scrutinized — their friends, lovers, favorite drugs, hangouts, hat sizes and nicknames (Picasso called Braque Wilbourg, after Wilbur Wright) — one mutual fascination has been largely overlooked: Both men were crazy about the movies.



They were also coming of age artistically in the city of the Lumière brothers, where the modern moviegoing experience had just been born, starting in cafes and cabarets and then moving into theaters, packed with people still in disbelief as they watched a two-dimensional picture plane leap to life. “The cinema was not simply in its earliest infancy,” wrote the critic André Salmon, one of Picasso’s friends and fellow moviegoers. “It was wailing.”



For more than 20 years the New York art dealer Arne Glimcher had carried around a theory, more gut feeling than scholarly conjecture, that Picasso and Braque had been seduced by that siren song of the early cinema, and that Cubism, with its fractured surfaces and multiple perspectives, owed much more to the movies than anyone had noticed.



Five years ago Mr. Glimcher finally decided to do something about his hunch." (more here).