Cubism as Revolutionary Realism: John Berger and G.

David E. James Cubism as Revolutionary Realism: John Berger and G. Of all the theoretical issues thrown up by the great moments of modernist formal innovation, none has been more recurrently problematical than the difficulty of deciding their political significance. Marxists have typically found them either useless or regressive, the great exception being the art produced in the Soviet Union in the few years immediately following the revolution. Consequently this moment has come down to us as uniquely privileged, a moment where revolutionary form discovered itself in revolutionary content. Whatever their arguments with one another, Mayakovsky and Brik, Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, remain a reproach to modernism for its seeming sacrifice of content to formal innovation , as well as to realism which, especially in the USSR, retreated to nineteenth century formal models. The fact that their moment was also unique in being the only post-revolutionary moment known to twentieth century Europe— and hence the only moment when art could be revolutionary by being affirmative rather than critical of social institutions —may not mitigate the severity of the reproach, but it does at least suggest the possibility that other moments in modern art history may continue to have significance for us. Although John Berger recognizes the unique significance of post-revolutionary Russian art, the qualitites that define it are for him first present in cubism, his reading of which is central to his entire critical theory. This paper attempts a survey of that theory and a reading of one of his novels, G., in light of it.1 I For Berger, cubism was not simply one among the many styles of modernism; rather it was a particular "way of seeing," a position assumed by consciousness in respect to history which then manifested itself in a style of painting.2 In this it represented both an opportunity and a responsibility allowed by a specfic moment, one of political, social and economic change so profound as to constitute a categorical rupture in history comparable to the Renaissance. Berger isolates three levels in this development: the changes in the material world; the "philosophic meaning " of these changes; and the latter's effect on the painting produced by Braque and Picasso between 1907 and 1914, and by Gris and Léger somewhat later. His summary of the material developments that matured in this period are uncontroversial (the founding of modern sciences, electricity , developments in communications and transportation, etc.) and the only item to distinguish his list is its inclusion of an "interlocking 93james world system of imperialism [and] opposed to it, a socialist international" (p. 136). Transforming the way in which life was lived, these developments also transformed consciousness, creating an optimism about human potential that would ultimately take the form of political revolution: "For the first time the world as a totality, ceased to be an abstraction and became realizable" (p. 137). This completed the secularization of the world that had been progressing through the ninteenth century (Man "took over the territory in space and time where God had been presumed to exist" [p. 138]), and it changed the relationship between the individual and the world: "a man was part of the world and indivisible from it. In an entirely original sense, which remains at the basis of modern consciousness, a man was the world which he inherited " (pp. 138-39). This state of being-in-the-world, which Berger defines in existential terms as the internalization of all problems of religion and morality,3 produced in its public the "socialist movements in Europe [which] were convinced that they were on the eve of revolution and that the revolution would spread to become a world revolution" (p. 140). In order to define cubism as a style and to demonstrate the relation between it and these revolutionary premonitions, Berger proposes a schema of the history of art in which it has performed different functions in different periods. In the Renaissance, for example, the "metaphoric model" of art was the mirror and in the Romantic period it was the personal account. For cubism, the model is the diagram, "a visible, symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures" (p. 150). Such a diagram does not necessarily...