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Nature morte, 1926

FICHA TÉCNICA
Nature morte, 1926
Oil on canvas, 49 x 81 cm

In 1926, the date of this painting, many believed that Cubism had ended.Picasso had declared this himself in 1917. One year later Ozenfant and Le Corbusier would write a text titled Après le cubisme (“After Cubism”), making it known that the cubist cycle had ended, leading to a decorative style, with the emergence of a new way of doing things – Purism.Douglas Cooper, in his views on the Cubist Movement, considers the late phase as finished in 1921, far from the assumptions of the abundant period of the years before the Great War.Nonetheless, there are many examples of cubist works or cubist-influenced works that are able to prolong the life of the movement and which explain the later evolution of Cubism, its transforming itself and developing new assumptions.One of these transformations was, in a sense, a certain modern classicism.Juan Gris has been considered as representative of the front line of Cubist Classicism, but Jean Cassou stated the same about Louis Marcoussis, who, he said, had “achieved the main objective of Cubism and that of what is agreed to be French Classicism”. This opinion about Marcoussis contrasts to Cooper’s opinion of the same artist, whose art he considers as decorative after 1920.Nature Morte, together with paintings by Manuel Ángeles Ortiz and Joaquín Torres-García, is one of the most recent pieces in the exhibit, corresponding to a serene and balanced Cubism with complicated technique. It is a good example of Marcoussis’ work and in terms of late Synthetic Cubism, complements what was already seen in the Flechtheim portrait of 1914, also part of the Telefónica Collection.

In some senses, Nature morte confirms Cooper’s assertions, since it was ordered specifically to cover the fireplace panel in the home of M. A. Lefèvre in Paris. Regardless, this “decorative” dimension of its origin does not devalue the piece, which is characterised by a clearly structured composition, rich colour and most importantly, a successful treatment of light and texture. Marcoussis painted slowly, bringing about what he saw as an irrefutable finishing quality.In his complete study of this Polish artist, Jean Lafranchis tells of how he destroyed the paintings that he was not satisfied with, those which he did not consider as successful pieces, but as unresolved sketches and studies of no interest. This painting shows a conscientious treatment that leaves nothing to chance, defining shapes and completing outlines and surfaces.

In 1926 Marcoussis had already been living in Paris for many years, after moving there in 1903.His contact with the Polish community had not been very close, but he did move in the most progressive circles, such as the Académie Polonaise of Pankiewick, and the Société des artistes polonais à Paris, for whom he exhibited in 1913.He had attended the Acádemie Julian and copied paintings of the Louvre. In 1910, through his compatriot Apollinaire, he came into contact with the cubist vanguard of Braque, Picasso and Gris, as well as Max Jacob, Salmon, and Éluard.These three poets would be subjects of one of Marcoussis’ most famous portraits, Les trois Poètes, of 1929.His relationship with poetry would be a constant and be evident not only in his bonds of friendship and collaboration with book illustrations, but also in his own poetic talent in painting, one which is considered by Jean Cassou (author of the first monographic on Marcoussis in 1930) as being one of his greatest contributions (“a unique and delicate poetic quality”). In 1926 Marcoussis sent work to various exhibits: the Salon des Indépendants, the Contemporary French Art Exhibit in Vienna, Antwerp, New York, and to the Parisian Salon des Tuilleries. He and his wife, the Polish painter Alice Halicka, spent the summer of that year between Toulon and St. Tropez, producing a good number of his still lifes. Many of these have recurring marine motifs, such as shells, spears and fish.

The painting we are commenting on here does not contain these elements, but it does have objects whose presence is consistent in cubist painting: a bottle, a musical instrument and a fruit bowl on a table. The composition is immersed in a cubic space delimited partially by large dark confluent planes, and in other parts, by other planes of intense blue, a colour repeated in the centre of the composition as a chromatic echo. Although the background is not open, it brings to mind the windows that appeared in his still lifes of 1922 and 1925 in which the painter used icons proper to modern painting: a still life in front of a window open to scenery. Marcoussis limits the referential element and prefers to establish a simple geometric scene.The fruit bowl, the side of the in-laid wood on the instrument and the bottle make up a sequence of oval shapes.This repetition of certain variants of shape and size adds a circular, organic visual rhythm to this still life inscribed in a system of rectangular planes.Marcoussis used the poetic concept of «artistic rhythm” to define the playful interchange between the composition’s shapes.

The fruit is cut in half, a technique Marcoussis acquires from Braque, one which seeks to show the object both inside and out.This vision (proper to the cubist aesthetic) has more to do with the concept of what things are like than with any visual perception of them, which is always limited. The bottle is offered to the viewer in sections and perspectives, showing us the circle of its base.Marcoussis collected diverse objects from a flea market (the Marché aux Puces in Paris), above all, bottles of all shapes and colours. This bottle is a very popular type, with sinuous outline and a base that is sunken inwards.This feature allows the artist to paint one more oval. Bottles interested Marcoussis for various reasons:

“Firstly, my wife and I have always been interested in products of popular art. . . secondly, the light that plays with them, the rainbow highlights, it transforms them”.

This declared preference for light, far from being a mere visual accident, is a central element for Marcoussis’ painting, as well as his engravings, and of course the series of paintings under glass, the fixés sous verre that he did from 1919 to 1928. These are cubist compositions applied to one side of glass in order to be seen from the other, very flat images, applied meticulously, that make use of the transparency of the glass by leaving some parts uncovered. Some of the objects in the fixés are three-dimensional, from using various plates of different sizes placed atop wooden stands.

Marcoussis himself summed up the three basic parameters of his painting: “Colour separated from shapes, visual rhymes, and light”. Light was also a fundamental element in his paintings; but not a naturalist light simulated by an invisible lamp, but rather, lighting from the painting itself, a radiation of colour and its arrangement. According to Marcoussis was “a value-based painter” working more around values than around colours. In Nature morte, the dark, light and intermediate planes are not organised by a conventional source of light. Rather, they are interspersed according to the internal law of the composition itself. Light is freed from being tied to a visual logic and is now distributed artistically. Black, as Gleizes and Metzinger put it, could be brighter than white:

“We do not mechanically apply the sensation of white to the idea of light, or black to the idea of shadow.We admit that a black jewel in matte black can be brighter than a glossy white or pink jewellery case that holds it".

In the back part of the board serving as support for Nature Morte there are half-erased traces of an abandoned composition. This gives us insight into the working style of Marcoussis, who followed an initial schematic drawing that would later be covered totally by paint.The presence of the drawing, which we suppose is also under the final painting we are viewing, is the building structure of the painting from its conception.We know that although Marcoussis tended to do preparatory studies on paper for the fixés, he did not do so for the oil paintings, destroying what he considered to be preliminary trials. The drawing appears three ways: the sketching at the base, other lines on the surface to define the objects, and in another non-linear artistic fashion, resulting from the conjunction of neatly cut out planes of colour. This constructive instinct, perhaps one of the greatest (and in its essence, classic) contributions of Cubism, is as equally as intense as the desire to represent concrete objects with their own morphology. Like Juan Gris, Marcoussis brings truth to Kahnweiler’s words when he said that Cubism had overcome the opposition between representation and construction.

In Nature morte, wood, untreated to hide its veins, is made visible through colour and on the areas not covered by paint.The grey plane that the objects are installed upon is treated with a painting paste that also simulates the textures of wood, providing a tactile relief that helps to attract attention to that part of the painting. Using a comb technique introduced by Braque, Marcoussis creates false grains, opens parallel and wavy grooves similar to raked soil in the impasto of the oil painting which contrast with the smooth surfaces of the other planes.When Braque introduced painted paper imitating wood in 1912, as well as faking this with a comb, he was using two different techniques for representing wood. One was through wallpaper, an industrial simulation of wood; the other was through the paint itself.A third technique was to stick a piece of wood on directly.Marcoussis plays deliberately with the visible surface of real wood, allowing it to participate in the pictorial composition with its own colour and texture. In addition, he adds the fiction of the tabletop created with purely pictorial means.For Marcoussis, texture was an especially important element.His pictorial materials are artistic equivalents, but not imitations of the real materials. C. B.

SIGNATURE

In the lower left corner: "marcoussis", dated on the upper right corner, "1926".

ORIGIN

The M. A. Lefèvre Collection, Paris / Leandro Navarro Gallery, Madrid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lafranchis, J., Marcoussis. Sa vie, son oeuvre, catalogue complet des peintures, fixés sous verre, aquarelles, dessins, gravures. Paris: Les Éditions du Temps, 1961, cat. num. P.75, p. 250, reproduced in black and white.

(1) Cooper, D ., La época cubista , Madrid, Alianza, 1993, p. 21.

(2) Marcoussis , Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, 1964, p. 8.

(3) Cooper, D ., op. cit. , p. 150.

(4) Lafranchis, J ., Marcoussis. Sa vie, son oeuvre, catalogue complet des peintures, fixés sous verre, aquarelles, dessins, gravures , Paris, Les Éditions du Temps, 1961, p. 145.

(5) Autour de Bourdelle. Paris et les artistes polonais , Paris, Musées, 1997.

(6) Cassou, J ., Peintres Nouveaux. Marcoussis , Paris, Gallimard, 1930, p. 8.

(7)Lafranchis, op. cit . p. 110

(8) Ibídem. p. 108

(9) Ibídem. p. 95

(10) Gleizes, A. Y Metzinger, J ., Sobre el Cubismo , Murcia, College of Architects, Yebra Gallery, The Region of Murcia and MOPU, 1986, p. 39.

(11) Kahnweiler, D.-H., El camino hacia el cubismo , Barcelona, Quaderns Crema, 1997, pp. 25-27