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55 5 little cubes When Picasso met Georges Braque, they shared some things in common, even though Picasso was classically trained, and Braque trained as an “art worker” in decorative arts and methods. New to them both was the “primitive” look, being seen around Paris in African statuary, or in artifacts from Oceania and ancient Spain. Neither Picasso nor Braque ever met the reclusive Cézanne, who had died in 1906, but his works, now on public display, dazzled them both, as did his now-published idea that nature was made up of the “cylinder, sphere, and cone.” The critics were associating Picasso and Braque as well. This began with Braque’s slight at the 1908 Salon d’Automne, when Matisse, on the jury, rejected a set of Braque’s muted earth-toned landscapes (and, meanwhile, accepted three mediocre paintings by the young Marcel Duchamp ). Of Braque, Matisse said the blockish elements looked like “little cubes.” Kahnweiler saw the rejection as an opportunity. He quickly pulled together a gallery show of Braque’s works, which again evoked the term “cubes,” and by spring, at the 1909 Salon des Indépendants, the term “bizarre cubes” also appeared in print.1 After this, Braque mostly turned his back on the salons, and now he had Kahnweiler in common with Picasso. They had become the vanguard of “gallery Cubism,” a rival to the gathering network of Parisian painters who, having discovered Cubists ideas, began to display their geometrical works at the salons, a trend that would be called “salon Cubism.”2 In the first round of inventing Cubism, Picasso and Braque worked separately. They spent their 1908 summers painting landscapes in two different parts of France. Braque went south, back to L’Estaque, where he painted trees, mountains, roads, and buildings as if facets on a diamond. Picasso left for a far less romantic clime, north to the flat little river town of La Rue-des-Bois. Surprisingly, they both came back to Paris with very similar-looking paintings: simple geometrical landscapes, both in muted ochers and greens. Picasso used so much green that this has been called, somewhat whimsically, his “green” period. 56 || picasso and the chess player After 1908, the influence between Picasso and Braque began to go both ways. When in Paris, they met and talked almost daily. Evenings they would sample the galleries. When they left Paris for summer-to-fall breaks, they exchanged letters or postcards about their exploits. Picasso usually retreated to rented spaces or hotels in the Pyrenees along France’s border with Spain, while Braque often headed back to his home territory, Le Havre, on the northwest coast of France. Traveling with Fernande to Barcelona and then Horta in the Pyrenees, Picasso lunged into Cubism. Holed up in a Barcelona hotel, where Fernande was sick, Picasso did some of his first drastically fractured Cubist drawings: “I understood how far I would be able to go,” he said later in life, a development that Kahnweiler would speak of as the Cubist technique to “shatter the enclosed form.”3 As Picasso drew and painted that summer of 1909, he also continued a strategic practice, aided by Fernande , of writing letters to his dealer and collectors to build anticipation for his next round of works. The sale of Picasso’s works in France, Russia, and Germany had been relatively brisk, and they soon would be noticed in America as well.4 So on return to Paris from Horta, he and Fernande upgraded their living situation . They left Montmartre’s rickety Bateau-Lavoir and moved down the hill, finding a large apartment-studio on the Boulevard Clichy, a wide and busy street. Being on the top floor, they had a view of gardens and trees, and inside Fernande watched Picasso work: He worked in a large, airy studio, which no one could enter without permission, where nothing could be touched and where, as usual, the chaos . . . had to be treated with respect. . . . Picasso ate his meals in a dining-room furnished with old mahogany furniture, where he was served by a maid in a white apron. . . . He slept in a peaceful room, on a low bed with heavy, square, brass ends.5 The apartment soon became a scene of hospitality. As many painters were now holding “soirees” on some evening of the week, Picasso tried it also (though he very soon after quit the practice). On September 15, 1909, he held an open house to show his Horta landscapes...

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